The Influence of Ancient Gardens in China on Modern Gardens

Classical gardens in China have a long history, and the unique forms of gardening art have a long history. As early as Zhou Wuwang's time, China had the activity of building a palace garden for the palace, which was the earliest act to provide a beautiful leisure place for the rulers. China gardens really started after the Han Dynasty and were influenced by the ruling class's imperial power thought, architectural concept, literary artistic conception and painting expression. Such as, Zi Xufu and Shang, especially Shang, expressed the richness of natural Lin Yuan in imagination with grand momentum, strange imagination and bizarre artistic exaggeration, which played an ideal role in creating realistic gardens for emperors. During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, due to the unprecedented fierce power struggle of the rulers, the country was divided, Taoism and Buddhism prevailed, and metaphysics came into being among the literati class. At this time, the literati either indulged in pleasure, were honest and clean, or wandered between mountains and rivers, forming a natural aesthetic, and the gardening characteristics of this period mostly cultivated emotions with natural mountains and rivers.

The structure of China classical gardens is dominated by natural landscapes, supplemented by artificial palaces, corridors, buildings, pavilions and other buildings, and imitates nature by artificial means, which reveals humanistic thoughts in different historical periods, especially the artistic conception of poetry, ci and painting as the pursuit goal of ideological realm.

First, the essential characteristics of China classical gardens

China is located in the east of the earth, with special topography, hydrogeology different from other countries and regions in the world, native plants and other characteristics. Its natural resources constitute a special type of local landscape, which is the constituent element of the spatial theme of China classical gardens. The exquisite craftsmanship of local materials and artistic expression of garden landscape are the main features of traditional gardens in China.

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One. China's classical gardens emphasize the philosophical concept of "although it is made by people, it is natural" and the greening concept of "from nature, above nature", and finally emphasize people's understanding and feeling of nature, so as to achieve the effect of harmony between man and nature.

Because of the poor living conditions in ancient times, people's living environment is relatively bad. China classical gardens attach great importance to the improvement of microclimate conditions, hoping to create an ideal environment that is more comfortable and suitable for people to live and move. Therefore, the layout of gardens, the planting of plants, the construction of pavilions and promenades are all based on comfort factors such as light and shadow, airflow and temperature, thus forming an ideal environment for people to live and live comfortably.

The most prominent feature of China's classical garden construction is that it does not stick to the narrow courtyard, but expands the visual boundary of space by borrowing scenery, so that the garden landscape is closely or symbolically linked with the external natural landscape, creating a garden landscape that is integrated with the natural landscape. This kind of garden modeling, whether from a dynamic or static point of view, can make people in the garden enjoy the limited landscape in the garden, but also see the more beautiful and vast natural scenery outside the garden and pursue unlimited spatial visual effects.

Classical gardens in China advocate the spatial organization techniques of dynamic and static combination, contrast between reality and reality, connecting the preceding with the following, step by step, fascinating and getting better, and the artistic conception of space twists and turns, so they often create a garden-like spatial layout landscape. Based on this principle, people in ancient China often divided the whole garden into many spaces with different shapes, different scales and different personalities, so as to obtain ever-changing visual effects, and all the elements that make up the space were mixed together, staggered and blocked each other, and the natural, landscape and human landscape were divided into several sections and displayed separately, so that people could see the interlaced scenes of different spaces and numerous landscapes, thus forming a seemingly endless garden scene.

Ancient landscape painters in China, grasping the typical features of various beautiful scenery in nature, meticulously presented the scenes of mountains and valleys, meandering water, flowers and trees repeatedly in a small courtyard, highlighting the three-dimensional space effect on the two-dimensional garden site and metaphorically representing the four-dimensional time effect. This is what the ancients called the concept of "building infinite space with limited area", which is full of oriental philosophy and wisdom. In the eyes of China landscape artists, "big" and "small" are relative, and so are finite and infinite. The key is to "fake the natural scenery, create the real interest of the landscape, and get the artistic conception of the garden", so as to achieve the goal of seeing the big from the small and the infinite from the limited.