The Garden Retreat in Asia and Europe

Ways of Dwelling in a Torn World

Yue Zhuang, Alasdair Forbes, Michael Charlesworth

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350447400
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Garden Retreat in Asia and Europe explores the meaning of gardens and designed landscapes as places of retreat and refuge in times of need or emergency. In the current times of war, pandemic, climate change, and global anxiety, the value of the garden as a sanctuary, a space where we can find refuge in a natural environment, has taken on new and poignant meanings and has attracted increasing academic interest. Multidisciplinary and multicultural in scope, this book examines perspectives from scholars including art historians, architects, philosophers, landscape architects and garden practitioners, reassess the importance of the garden as a foil to abiding and contemporary concerns and predicaments, whether understood from an individual, cultural or environmental point of view. Ranging widely across Asia and Europe, its chapters examine ideas, narratives and practices from the 4th-century Chinese poet Tao Yuanming, to the 12th century Iranian polymath Omar Khayyam, through to the late 20th-century British artist and film-maker Derek Jarman. Drawing upon traditional Asian philosophies like Buddhism, Daoism and Sufism and combining these with more recent western philosophies, the aim is to question how the unique virtues of gardens and designed landscapes can help to poise, educate, and possibly transform attitudes and behaviours in a time of personal, environmental, or cultural crisis. At once poetic, scholarly, and rigorous, this book provides insightful reading for students and researchers in landscape architecture, garden history, architectural history, art history, and cultural history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The garden retreat and theatricality
• 1 Garden, a refuge and a stage: Death of a garden owner and its moonlit theatricality in seventeenth-century China
• 2 Daguerre’s ‘natural diorama’: Landscape design and picturesque retreat in nineteenth-century Bry-sur-Marne
• Part II Dwelling, garden and the poetic image
• 3 Three settings from Wen Hengshan’s Album of Poems and Paintings of the Garden of Artless Administration, 1533
• 4 The gardens of Omar Khayyam: Poetic botany between Khurasan and Kathmandu
• 5 Finding solace in garden memories: Osvald Sirén’s life during the Second World War
• Part III Moral virtues and poetic virtues
• 6 Garden practices, ‘quiet’ virtues and understanding
• 7 Gardens of refuge, innocence and toil
• 8 Withdrawal and bewilderment: Plaz Metaxu, the ‘place that is between’
• Part IV The garden retreat and mortality
• 9 Pope’s Arcadia: Death re-enchanted
• 10 ‘Each stone has a life to tell’: Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage
• An afterword on withdrawal
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright