The origin of western gardens can be traced back to ancient Egypt and Greece. 18 and 19 centuries of western gardens can be said to be the parallel development of Lenotel style and English style, and of course, many mixed entities have also emerged. Let's take a look at several typical garden countries. What are the characteristics of their gardens? (1) Italian Renaissance gardens. Villa garden is the most representative type of Italian Renaissance gardens. Villa gardens are mostly built on hillsides, and several terraces are made according to the slope, which is called "terrace garden". The main buildings are usually located at the highest part of the hillside, and the terraces are opened on a central axis extending outward along the hillside in front of them, including platforms, flower beds, pools, fountains and sculptures. The platforms on each floor are connected by pedals. Trees such as boxwood and lycopodium are planted on both sides of the central axis as the transition between the garden itself and the surrounding natural environment. Standing on the platform and looking in the depth direction of the central axis, you can see the infinite scenery from outside the garden. This is a garden form that combines the conventional style with the landscape style, with the former as the main form. There is also a new gardening technique in Italian Renaissance gardens-Perterre, that is, shrubs and flowers are planted on a large area of land and inlaid into various patterns, just like carpets laid on the ground. (2) French classical gardens: France has many plains, large natural vegetation area and many rivers and lakes. The French did not fully accept the form of "terrace garden", but applied the regular garden layout with symmetry and uniform central axis to plane gardening. The garden style represented by the Palace of Versailles is called "Lenotel Style" or "Louis XIV Style", which was popular all over Europe and the world in the18th century. Most of the royal gardens and private gardens in Germany, Austria, Holland, Russia and Britain are "Lenotel style", and the European gardens in the West Building of China Yuanmingyuan also belong to this style. Versailles covers an extremely wide area, about 600 hm ㎡. It was designed and planned by Lenotre, a famous landscape architect at that time. It has a central axis extending 25 meters from the center of the palace to the west. Large trees on both sides set off the central axis, forming a very wide Lin Yin Avenue, disappearing from east to west in the infinite sky. The design of Lin Yin Avenue is divided into two parts: the west is mainly composed of double water features, including a cross-shaped canal and an Apollo pool, decorated with marble sculptures and fountains. The northern end of the cross-strait cross-arm is the villa garden "Grand Tfianon" and the southern end is the animal breeding garden. In the eastern open space, there are several groups of large embroidered carpet planting altars symmetrically arranged left and right. There are some caves, water theaters, mazes and villas hidden in the Woods on both sides of Lin Yin Avenue, which are relatively quiet viewing places nearby. There are many straight Lin Yin paths in the Woods, and both ends of them have opposite views, thus forming a series of vision lines, so this kind of garden is also called the vision garden. (3) British natural landscape architecture. The combination of lush grasslands, forests and trees with hilly landforms constitutes a special landscape caused by natural winds in Britain. This beautiful natural landscape promotes the prosperity of landscape painting and pastoral poetry, while landscape painting and romantic poets indulge in praising nature, which makes the British deeply feel the beauty brought by natural wind. British landscape architecture rose in1at the beginning of the 8th century. Contrary to the "Lenotre" style, it denies the pattern of planting altar, straight forest vagina, square wall pool and plastic trees, abandons all geometric shapes and symmetrical layout, and replaces them with curved roads, natural trees and grasslands and winding rivers, paying attention to borrowing scenery and integrating with the natural environment outside the park. At this time, through the spread of Jesuit missionaries in China to the Holy See, China garden art represented by Yuanmingyuan was introduced to Europe. William Chambers, a British royal architect, visited China twice. After returning to China, he wrote an article about gardens in China, and used the so-called "Chinese style" technique in his Qiuyuan for the first time. (4) Japanese gardens. Japanese gardens are greatly influenced by China gardens, and the gardening techniques of landscape gardens are the same as those of China gardens. However, combined with Japan's geographical conditions and cultural traditions, it has formed its own unique style and system. Types and characteristics of Japanese gardens: ① Chiquan Zhushan Pavilion: In peacetime, Japan gradually got rid of direct imitation of China culture and paid attention to developing its own culture. Japan is an island country with beautiful scenery and close to the ocean, which truly reflects the Japanese people's love for the motherland and the feelings of an ocean island country. Gardens with Japanese characteristics also developed during this period, called "Chiquan Zhushan Pavilion". (2) The level of dry landscape:13rd century, Zen, Buddhism and Nanzong landscape paintings were introduced from China. The philosophy of Zen and the freehand brushwork techniques of Nanzong landscape paintings gave gardens another great influence, which made Japanese gardens show an extreme freehand brushwork and philosophical trend, which is also the biggest and most important feature that distinguishes Japanese gardens from China. The Horizontal Pavilion of Ganshan Mountain is a typical example of this freehand brushwork style. "Dry scenery" attaches great importance to placing stones, mainly using the shape of a single stone itself and the collocation relationship between them. The stone shape is steady, the bottom is wide and the top is cut, and it does not make strange structures such as flying beams and overhangs, and it rarely folds into mountains. This is very different from the rubble in our country. 3 "Tea Court". The area of "Tea Pavilion" is smaller than that of "Chiquan Zhushan Pavilion", which requires a quiet environment and is convenient for meditation, so the gardening design is more focused on freehand brushwork. People want to move in the garden, so they use grass instead of white sand. The grass is paved with stone roads, and several stones are scattered with stone lamps and several small trees. There is a Shi Shui bowl in front of the teahouse for guests to purify water. ④ "Swim-back" landscape garden. Guizhai Palace is a representative work of Japanese "back-to-back" landscape garden, which is a realistic simulation of natural wind as a whole, but it is mainly freehand brushwork locally. This garden is centered on a big pond, with a big island and two small islands, which is influenced by the "one pond with three mountains" in China Garden. Today, the scope and content of gardens in China are more extensive. It not only includes important components handed down from ancient times, such as royal gardens, private gardens, temple gardens and landscape gardens, but also extends to most areas of people's leisure activities: green parks in residential areas, street gardens, various forms of parks in cities, large green spaces around cities, natural scenic spots, national park browsing areas and convalescent areas. The form of the garden also presents a scene of flowers in full bloom. Westerners began to appreciate and love oriental garden design more and more, and began to study and learn. In the design of oriental gardens, more attention is paid to the arrangement and placement of various parts, such as plants, rocks, gravel layers, water and various wood structures, rather than winning by size. The connection between indoor and outdoor in oriental architecture is much closer than that in the west. For example, a traditional Japanese-style house is equipped with a large sliding door, and the garden is outside the door, so as soon as the door is opened, the sense of distance between indoor and outdoor is suddenly shortened. The residential area seems to extend into the natural scenery and blend in with the garden next to the house. Interestingly, it was at that time that these gardens provided a good example for private garden villas that led the current architectural trend. However, in western gardens, tradition is still the basis of design, and the form and space are still tempered in a rational way. Harmony and perfection are still the ultimate goals of design. Of course, this harmony and perfection is not limited to the form itself, but the unity of the form and the modern garden service with various functions and needs of society and most people. This is also the mainstream of contemporary western garden design.
Aesthetic characteristics of western classical gardens
Western garden art is very different from China garden art. The gardening art of western gardens completely rejects nature, strives to embody rigor and rationality, and develops meticulously according to pure geometric structure and mathematical relationship. "Forcing nature to accept the law of symmetry" is the basic creed of western gardening art, pursuing a pure and artificially carved beauty of clothing.
The artistic features of western gardens are prominently reflected in the layout and structure of gardens. The huge building is the command of the garden, always standing on the starting point of the central axis which is very prominent in the garden. Based on this building, the garden constitutes the main axis of the whole garden. Architecture controls the axis, and the axis controls the garden, so architecture also controls the garden, which belongs to architecture. On the main axis of the garden, several auxiliary axes are extended, and wide avenues, flower beds, canals, pools, fountains, sculptures, etc. are arranged. Open a straight road in the garden, form a Little Square at the intersection of the road, and distribute pools, fountains, sculptures or small buildings in dots. The whole layout embodies strict geometric patterns. Garden flowers and trees are strictly cut into cones, spheres and cylinders, while lawns and flower beds are marked as diamonds, rectangles and circles. In a word, according to the geometric figure, the shape must not be allowed to grow naturally. The water surface is confined to neat stone ponds, and their ponds are often built into circles, squares, rectangles or ellipses. People's sculptures and fountains are always arranged in ponds, pursuing overall symmetry and taking in everything in a glance.
Aristotle, the founder of European aesthetic thought, said that "beauty depends on volume and arrangement", and his view of time and space has been fully reflected in western gardening. Buildings, pools, lawns and gardens in western gardens pay attention to integrity and geometric combination.
And achieve the harmony of numbers. Pursuing similarity and truth. Leonardo da vinci, who was called a master of European Renaissance art by Engels, believed that the true meaning and full value of art lies in the true expression of nature, and the beauty of things should be "completely based on the sacred proportional relationship between parts", so western garden art pursues the similarity of every detail and reproduces everything in a realistic style.
In terms of garden layout, Hegel once said: "The most thorough application of architectural principles to garden art is French gardens. As usual, they are near the tall palace. Trees are planted in neat rows to form a boulevard, which is neatly trimmed, and the fence is also made of neatly trimmed fences. In this way, it was naturally transformed into an open-air mansion. " Western classical gardens follow the same principles as classical architecture in taste and composition. Landscape design moves the techniques and principles of architectural design from indoor to outdoor, and there is not much difference between them except for the different combination elements.
To sum up, western garden art puts forward three elements of "wholeness, harmony and uniqueness" and pursues rigor and rationality. Europeans' thinking habits since ancient times tend to explore the inherent laws of things, and like to put forward and solve problems in a clear way to form a clear understanding. This kind of thinking habit is characterized by symmetry, balance and order in aesthetics, and symmetry, balance and order can be determined by simple number and geometric relationship. "It is proportion that determines beauty and elegance, and it must be formulated into eternal and stable rules by mathematical methods", which is the highest aesthetic standard of western gardening art.