[I:http://bradentonlawnservice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/LarryMalloy25.jpg]Walls that are ten metres high and a deep moat surround the Forbidden City in Beijing. For five hundred years no one was allowed in there except the Ming and Qing Emperors and their immediate retainers. They lived in a private world separated from the real world and graced by landscaping.
Concubines and eunuchs surrounded the Ming and Qing emperors. Everyone else was forbidden. So much talent and skill concentrated in a square for five hundred years produced startlingly brilliant ideas and breathtaking art.
An oxymoron lies at the heart of the environment that has been constructed in the Forbidden City. The buildings are laid out with precision in squares and straight lines. Within this geometric design the Imperial gardens have circles, fringes and curves. The Confucian idea of Earth contains within it the Taoist notion of heaven. The consequence of this juxtaposition is an effect of harmony and tranquillity.
Capability Brown is well known as the greatest English landscaper. Born in 1716 he started a work as a lowly gardener and worked his way up to a position where he was known throughout the country. His services were sought after by the landed gentry who vied to outdo each other in landscaping the surrounds of their stately homes. He designed and developed more than one hundred and seventy gardens, some of which continue to this day.
Garden architects in China and England alike favoured the grand vision. In China a man-made lake was dug in flat ground and the removed earth was used to make a substantial mountain beside the lake. With spades and wheel barrows Capability Brown constructed sweeping lawns, lakes, ponds and waterfalls. He was also an exponent of the ha-ha. This was a trench dug around the edge of the garden. It served to keep cattle and sheep out and at the same time created an illusion of space, suggesting that the manicured garden lawn extending into neighbouring fields and groves.
When Elizabeth Bennett, the heroine of Jane Austen\’s famous novel visits her lover\’s magnificent estate she remarks that she has never seen a place where nature and art are so happily married. In this observation she sums up an idea that is manifest in the Imperial Gardens, and in the parks and gardens of Capability Brown. It is a central idea in all landscaping.
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