Garden History – Chinese Gardens

Back to Thacker and Rogers for more garden history – this time looking at Chinese garden history. Again I’m using Christopher Thacker’s The History of Gardens as my guide, and reading selections from Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’ Landscape Design - A Cultural and Architectural History. Chinese culture and garden history dates back thousands of years, so I will barely scratch the surface in a few blog posts. But Chinese gardening ideas have strongly influenced Japanese and Western gardening, including the San Francisco Bay Area, so I hope to explore significant themes and influences.

I was interested to learn that Chinese garden history shares similar roots with general garden history – the ideas of sacred groves; royal gardens with roots in hunting parks; natural places being attributed with a distinct spirit or energy; and the influences of nature-oriented religions, like Daoism.

This beautiful photograph, taken at the Yuyan Gardens in Shanghai in 2009,
shows the basic elements of the Chinese garden - rocks, water, plants, and structures.
Photo by Jakub Hałun, and used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

I was surprised to learn that despite a large Chinese population in the San Francisco Bay Area, we do not have a public garden that distinctly represents Chinese gardening style (we do have public gardens that represent Japanese gardening style). I did find three important examples on the west coast, all of which are on my list of gardens to visit:

• Overfelt Chinese Cultural Garden in San Jose, California
• Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, California
• Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon