Garden Styles
Sorted by how much of nature a gardener is willing to control, with clipped symmetry at one end and studied wildness at the other, and small landscapes held in a pot included.
Dictionary entry
- Karesansui Muromachi period– / Style
A Japanese garden that uses no water at all, representing waterscape and cosmos through raked sand and set stones. The fifteen rocks of Ryōan-ji compose by subtraction, and minimalists worldwide still cite them as the archetype for designing emptiness.
- Kaiyū Strolling Garden Edo period– / Style
The daimyo strolling garden edits its scenery so that a new view opens with every step along the path. Bridges, artificial hills and teahouses are set around a central pond until movement itself is the thing designed, spatial design that carries a time axis.
- Roji (Tea Garden) 16th century– / Style
Here the garden is the path to the tea room and nothing else. Stepping stones, the crouching basin and the middle gate set the walker's pace and state of mind, building a mountain retreat inside the city and designing the time it takes to arrive.
- Moss Garden 14th century– / Style
A garden that time and humidity grow, as at Saihō-ji, where more than a hundred species of moss cover the ground. Its surfaces are composed from nothing but shades of green, a demonstration of the Japanese balance between tending a place and leaving it alone.
- Shakkei (Borrowed Scenery) 17th century– / Technique
A technique that pulls the mountain or forest beyond the garden into the composition, framing it with hedges and trees until it belongs there. It is the boldest idea of cropping there is, designing with a landscape no one can own.
- English Landscape Garden 1720s–1800s / Style
An 18th-century English revolution that threw out geometry and built nature-seeming scenery by artifice. Rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and temples scattered across the view shaped the land itself into a picture, and the result became the prototype of the public park.
- French Formal Garden 17th century– / Style
The garden of axis, symmetry and perspective that Le Nôtre perfected at Versailles. Shears and sheets of water discipline nature into geometry, and power becomes 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 moves as little earth as possible, and Changdeokgung's rear garden is its model. Pavilions are simply set into valleys and ponds that were already there, a design that leaves the land alone and offers East Asia's other garden ideal.
- 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 made by clipping evergreens into geometry and animals. Because decades of growth belong to the design, no sculptural technique is slower.
- Hedge Maze 16th century– / Layout
A quarter of a garden where hedge walls are woven into passages and getting lost is itself the designed amusement. The whole figure shows only from above, while anyone standing inside sees walls and forks.
- 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.
- Bonsai Heian period– / Style
Japanese living sculpture that condenses the scenery of an ancient tree into a pot. A stylistic vocabulary of trunk line, branch pads and root spread, together with care handed down over generations, makes time itself the work.
- Ikebana 15th century– / Style
Japan's art of the flower: space composed from plant line and emptiness. From Ikenobō's rikka to free styles, the craft of letting flowers live remains a textbook of asymmetry and negative space.
- Parterre 17th century– / Layout
A flat bed in which clipped box embroiders arabesques into the ground. It was designed to be looked down on from the floors above, turning the ground into ornament and gardening into 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.