Garden Styles
庭園の様式
Dictionary entry
- Karesansui Muromachi period– / Style
Japan's dry garden: waterscape and cosmos rendered in raked gravel and stone groupings alone. Ryōan-ji's fifteen stones — composition by subtraction — remain the archetype of designed emptiness cited by minimalism worldwide.
- Kaiyū Strolling Garden Edo period– / Style
The daimyo strolling garden, where scenery is edited into view with every step along the path: pond at center, bridges, hills and teahouses — movement itself as the designed medium, space with a time axis.
- Roji (Tea Garden) 16th century– / Style
The garden that is a path: the approach to the tea room. Stepping stones, the crouching basin and the middle gate tune pace and mind — a mountain hermitage in the city, the time of arrival designed.
- Moss Garden 14th century– / Style
The garden grown by time and humidity, typified by Saihō-ji where a hundred species of moss carpet the ground — surfaces composed only of green gradation, a demonstration of the balance between tending and letting be.
- Shakkei (Borrowed Scenery) 17th century– / Technique
Borrowing scenery: mountains and forests beyond the garden taken into the composition, framed by hedges and trees — the boldest idea of the crop, designing with landscape one cannot own.
- English Landscape Garden 1720s–1800s / Style
The 18th-century English revolution that abandoned geometry to construct nature-seeming scenery: rolling lawns, serpentine lakes, temples in the distance — pictures built out of land itself, the prototype of the public park.
- French Formal Garden 17th century– / Style
The garden Le Nôtre perfected at Versailles: axis, symmetry and perspective, nature disciplined into geometry by shears and water — power made visible as spatial order.
- Italian Renaissance Garden 15th–17th century / Style
The Renaissance garden of terraced slopes, stairs, channels and fountains. The hundred fountains of the Villa d'Este are the engineering art of water, with gravity as the design material.
- Persian Garden 6th century BC– / Style
The origin of the chahar bagh, quartered by crossing water channels: a walled paradise of water and shade built against the desert. It gave the word paradise its meaning and the garden its archetype from Islam to the Mughals.
- Mughal Garden 16th–18th century / Style
The chahar bagh scaled to empire: stepped water channels and white marble pavilions achieving, at Shalimar and the Taj, the full integration of building and garden.
- Chinese Scholar Garden Song dynasty– / Style
The literati garden crystallized in Suzhou: landscape painting built in three dimensions. Taihu stone peaks, lattice windows as picture frames and turning corridors fold infinite scenery into small plots.
- Korean Garden Joseon dynasty– / Style
The Joseon garden, typified by Changdeokgung's rear garden, that moves earth as little as possible: pavilions set into natural valleys and ponds — the other East Asian ideal, design by restraint.
- Cottage Garden 19th century– / Style
The English garden of overflowing mixed planting, stylized from the working kitchen plot. Jekyll's color schemes and Sissinghurst's White Garden raised planned artlessness to an art.
- Topiary Roman era– / 17th century peak / Technique
Plant sculpture: evergreens clipped into geometry and beasts, with decades of growth built into the design — the slowest of all sculptural techniques.
- Hedge Maze 16th century– / Layout
The garden of play, its paths woven from hedges. Since Hampton Court's trapezoid, the tradition of designing being lost as entertainment — a spatial puzzle.
- Naturalistic Planting 1990s– / Style
Planting design modeled on perennial meadow ecologies, led by Piet Oudolf: beauty extended to the dead seed heads of winter, a year-round idea rewriting urban public space from the High Line outward.
- Parterre 17th century– / Layout
The embroidered bed: box hedging stitching arabesques into the ground, designed to be read from the floors above — the ground itself turned into ornament, gardening as graphic design.
- Burle Marx Landscape 1930s–1994 / Style
The inventor of modernist landscape, massing Brazilian tropical plants in color fields like abstract painting. As the Copacabana wave pavement shows, he designed the ground as one graphic.