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Jardins Anglo-Chinois

© Kirk Johnson

When we think of the gardens of Imperial Rome, we usually think of peristyle gardens, such as those found in Pompeii, but the Romans also created landscape gardens. After much of Rome was destroyed during the fire of AD 64, the emperor Nero appropriated an area in the center of Rome of about 125 hectares to create his "Golden House". The historian Tacitus described this Golden House in his Annals: "Nero turned to account the ruins of his fatherland by building a palace, the marvels of which were to consist not so much in gold and gems, materials long familiar and vulgarized by luxury, as in fields and lakes and the air of solitude given by wooded ground alternating with clear tracts and open landscapes". The focal point of Nero's landscape garden was a lake; Nero's successor Vespasion built the Colosseum on the site of this lake. The Roman tradition of landscape gardening doesn't seem to have survived the fall of Rome, the European landscape garden was re-invented by the British during the eighteenth century.

China has a tradition of landscape gardening going back to the 4th century BC. Imperial Rome bought a lot of Chinese silk and it is possible that Nero's garden was inspired by Chinese gardens, we just assume that the Roman landscape garden was a separate development. We do know for certain that the English landscape garden is rooted in the gardens of China.

The first reference to Chinese gardens in English literature was in Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, an essay which was written by Sir William Temple in 1685 and first published in 1692. This essay is often regarded as the inspiration for the English landscape gardens; in it, Chinese gardens are described as being irregular and informal, quite different from the formal gardens of Europe. European ideas about Chinese gardens were quite vague until a Jesuit named Jean-Denis Attiret visited the gardens of the Yuan Ming Yuan, also called the Old Summer Palace, on the outskirts of Bejing. He described this garden in a letter dated November 1, 1743. In 1752 this letter was translated into English by "Sir Harry Beaumont" (Joseph Spence) under title A particular Account of the Emperor of China's Garden near Pekin.

By the time that the translation of Attiret's letter was published, Lancelot (Capability) Brown (1716-83) was already perfecting the English style of landscape gardening. Brown's compositions didn't look like Chinese gardens, they were idealized reflections of English landscapes with occasional "follies" as eyecatchchers. When the French began to develop their jardins anglo-chinois (Anglo-Chinese gardens), these follies or "fabriques" became even more important than they were in most English landscape gardens.

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