Introduction by William Howard Adams

Gardens deal with transformation, mutability, and faith. They fix for only a brief moment nature's flux, but their illusion of order gives us hope. Gardens have been made in every conceivable shape and for equally various reasons. As sources of food, medicine, pleasure, and awe, they have been lofty, refined, universal, ordinary, munificent, and austere. Escape, nostalgia, worldly ambition, and worldly exhaustion have all been excuses throughout the long history of garden-making. These human emotions, often masked in myth, religion, and ritual, not to mention our garden variety psychic needs, give gardening a dimension of interest that goes far beyond plant lists, soil conditions, and the vagaries of the weather.

A civilization without its own garden tradition and garden life would be judged impoverished, flawed, incomplete. Yet documenting and measuruing those evanescent achievements over the centuries, where most of the physical evidence has disappeared, has not been easy. Unfortunately the glimpses we get in the paintings, artifacts, photographs, and contemporary descriptions that make up much of our historical knowledge are secondhand, as are their idealized interpretations. In this century, however, the study of the garden has advanced and deepend through research of these materials, so that our understanding has grown as well.

If people at different times and places have had very different ideas about the way to organize their gardens and to conduct their garden life, it is largely because they have made very different assumptions about the relationship between themselves and nature. The garden has been seen as an allegory of man's own cycle of life and death. The Garden of Eternity is life's reward for Christian and Muslim as well as Buddhist. Gardens can also be a manifestation of our attempt to dominate and control nature for purposes that may be metaphysical or quite worldly. While the manicured gardens of China and Japan represent man's eternal search for a state of spiritual equilibrium in the universe, the very geometry of the gardens of Versailles speaks of the political authority of the king, far removed from Zen tranquility.

Moral imperatives and political agendas aside, gardens and garden-making, no matter what the style, tradition, or rationale, come down to the basic elements of earth, water, air, and, on occasion, fire. The twentieth century's accelerated ability to manipulate these ingredients and to alter the natural environment, bringing ecological devastation to whole continents, only obscures the biological role of these ancient elements. The annual cleansing of the ground by fire still practiced in humble agrarian societies—sometimes called "slash and burn" agriculture—gives a mystical role of fire in the growing cycle a special function that probably surprises the modern urban dweller. He may be puzzled by the reminder in the Bhagavad Gita that "even amidst fierce flame the lotus can be planted."

Over thousands of years the respective skills of gardening and agriculture have clearly defined themselves, yet it is important to remember that in the beginning gardening was only one aspect of the production of food. Agriculture has always been a utilitarian, economic means of production. Its routines, discipline, and rhythm require a completely different approach to planting, fertilizing, and harvesting compared to the family garden plot set aside for food and medicine. From all the evidence, the earliest garden craft evolved out of the primitive beginnings of a man's grubby attempts to farm, even though our yearnings have conjured up a more romantic, mythical state of origin, including Paradise itself.

From the start, gardens have resulted from a hand-to-hand struggle to impose some kind of order on a turbulent, unpredictable, often perverse nature. "The first artist," as Camille Paglia has written, may well have been "a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature's demonic energy in a moment of perpetual stillness." But if the priest was the first artist, the gardener was surely the second as he asserted his humanity over the landscape in order to harness and redirect nature's unstable energy through his efforts.

At one level, gardening is about striving to find some rational if not ideal accommodation with nature in a rather one-sided match of forces, since nature's own laws are ultimately beyond our control. The natural cycle of life and death can endow a garden with a feeling of melancholy even when it is at its brief moment of triumph. Most gardeners prefer not to dwell on this flaw in nature's character but turn to the simple, underlying human faith common to all gardeners, that the dead seed we put in the ground will in fact spring to life next season in the mystery of reproduction.

Five thousand years ago, the ancestor of modern corn could not be distinguished from other wild grasses growing in the highlands of Mexico. No one could have imagined that the tiny seeds of this puny weed held the possibility of producing food for millions of people. But through close collaboration with nature, adapting to her laws, the Mayans discovered how to increase the size of grass by selection and breeding until it reached a mighty stalk of modern corn. In the process, they learned that as much as they depended on this mysteriously altered grain, the plant itself was dependent on them. Because of the construction of its ear, protected by tight husks, corn cannot seed itself. It would be extinct if man did not take a hand, unwrap the cob, and plant the seed each spring. Through this ritual of collaboration it is understandable why corn has entered the theology of the Mayan people. It is also an example of early biological manipulation that would later form the foundation of all of our advanced garden horticulture.

In Japan, the cultivation of rice over thousands of years has helped to shape the countryside into a vast complex of gardens. Rice culture has been embued with a spiritual meaning equal to that of corn in the highlands of Mexico and Central America. Just as the Great Inca turned the first furrow for the planting of corn with a golden plow, so the emperor of Japan executes the primal gesture of the ruler as gardener-cultivator by entering the imperial rice paddy each spring to plant rice, a symbol of the nation's historic dependence on the success of the annual crop.

Aside from the metaphysics of princely horticulture, royal gardens and parks have been established as manifestations of earthly political power in every civilization. Social order emerges with the concentration of power and ceremony in the hands of a ruler. Hierarchy imposed on chaotic, formless nature as a new way of organizing the world was a visible element of the mystique of kings. The theme of the garden as a tool of statecraft runs deep, as we will see, throughout the long history of gardening. Ancient literature takes it for granted. Renaissance rulers, from upstarts in Tuscany to the kings of France, adopted gardening as a link to the Golden Age of Alexander the Great.

Contemporary love of gardening in this urban century is a phenomenon that has spread widely, even though the threads that connect it with its historic roots are lost to all but the specialist. Even the simplest form of gardening is a particular kind of human experience that hints at a long and glorious past, both material and spiritual, but a sense of this continuity seems to elude us.

Gardening, as J. B. Jackson has reminded us, continues to "satisfy the aspirations of everyday existence...work that has quality and measure, capable at best of humanizing a small fragment of nature." When gardens with their sticks and stones and leaves of nature do rise above honest craft and are recognized as works of art, they become a part of the continuous process that all art shares. The antecedents that shape our appreciation of gardens include not only the historical past but the common biological heritage of our five senses, which have hardly changed since prehistory. A part of the garden's art is in its ability to stimulate our sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. But the use of our sensual apparatus has been greatly impaired in this century because of our isolation in an increasingly hostile, unnatural environment. If nature as we have known it is not hopelessly and absurdly irrelevant, and if we are able to return our environment to its once stable condition, then the stimulating proximity of nature may also return the art of the garden to a place of honor. The account of the garden's past that follows is intended to help restore some of its universal significance by encouraging us to recognize the extraordinary diversity of gardening throughout history and its ability to humanize a small but essential fragment of our existence.