‘Leaping the fence’

 Transitions Between Garden and Landscape in Chinese and European Garden traditions

18-20th April 2008 at Burwalls, University of Bristol

Click here for details of the full programme

Horace Walpole remarked memorably of the English landscape designer William Kent: ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. Yet the desire to establish a relationship between the enclosed and the unfettered  – ‘garden’ and  ‘landscape’ – has been a recurrent aspect of man’s encounters with nature across many cultures and over many different periods of history. Such general categories as ‘nature’, ‘enclosure’ and indeed the ‘garden’ are indeed free-floating concepts which need to be tethered down in accordance with the particular culture and context that may be under discussion.

This symposium focuses on two very different traditions, the Chinese and the European. In both cases, there are social, cultural and poetic factors, as well as purely physical barriers, that define the enclosure of land, and these serve to mediate the contrast between the garden and the wider landscape. Motion through the landscape, whether on foot or with the comforts of modern tourism, creates a exploratory  momentum that transcends the static view. Mountains, rather than merely serving as a backdrop to the garden enclosure, are brought within their compass both in the form of representative rocks and through the poetic fictions of the garden owner. Traditions which lay store by the notion of the garden as a retreat from the world also offer a means of engaging with the practical issues of agriculture.          

The papers delivered will not seek to make far-fetched connections, or indeed to establish oppositions, between Chinese and European practices. The approach will be broadly comparative. A major focus will be on the period of the Ming dynasty in China, and the Early Modern period (Renaissance and seventeenth century) which runs roughly contemporaneously in Europe. 16th-century Chinese wood-block prints of landscape will be discussed, as will the frescoes situated within, and representing, Italian villa gardens. The reception of Virgil’s Georgics in 17th-century English poetry from the period of the Civil War will be the subject of one paper, while another will analyse the gardens created by the retired late-Ming politician and poet Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646). More recent themes will be the discovery of the Lake District by 18th-century devotees of the picturesque, and the poetic constructions invoking landscape that anticipate Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden, Little Sparta.        

A second conference following up this theme will take place at Dumbarton Oaks in May 2009: ‘The Interlacing of Words and Things in Gardens and Landscapes: Beyond Nature and Culture’. On this occasion, the area of investigation will be expanded to encompass American, Asian and Ancient Mediterranean perspectives.

To register see www.bicc.ac.uk or e-mail Daniel.holloway@area.ox.ac.uk

The support is acknowledged of: Dumbarton Oaks (Garden and Landscape Studies section); BIRTHA (Bristol Institute for Research in the Arts and Humanities), Institute for Garden and Landscape History (University of Bristol and Hestercombe Garden Trust), BICC (British Inter-university China Centre) and the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition.