Overview

Suzhou, near Shanghai, is among the great garden cities of the world. The city's masterpieces of classical Chinese garden design, built from the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries, attract thousands of visitors each year and continue to influence international design. In The Gardens of Suzhou, landscape architect and scholar Ron Henderson guides visitors through seventeen of these gardens. The book explores UNESCO world cultural heritage sites such as the Master of the Nets Garden, Humble Administrator's Garden, Lingering Garden, and Garden of the Peaceful Mind, as well as other lesser-known but equally significant gardens in the Suzhou region. Unlike the acclaimed religious and imperial gardens found elsewhere in Asia, Suzhou's gardens were designed by scholars and intellectuals to be domestic spaces that drew upon China's rich visual and literary tradition, embedding cultural references within the landscapes. The elements of the gardens confront the visitor: rocks, trees, and walls are pushed into the foreground to compress and compact space, as if great hands had gathered a mountainous territory of rocky cliffs, forests, and streams, then squeezed it tightly until the entire region would fit into a small city garden. Henderson's commentary opens Suzhou's gardens, with their literary and musical references, to non-Chinese visitors. Drawing on years of intimate experience and study, he combines the history and spatial organization of each garden with personal insights into their rockeries, architecture, plants, and waters. Fully illustrated with newly drawn plans, maps, and original photographs, The Gardens of Suzhou invites visitors, researchers, and designers to pause and observe astonishing works from one of the world's greatest garden design traditions.

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9780812222142

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Reviews

Henderson, a talented landscape architect and designer himself, offers a helpful representation and unique tour of this collection of some of China's most famous gardens. . . . He sees the gardens afresh and leads one through, pointing out what is special, what is ordinary, separating the generic from the unique, the lighthearted from the grand. He is sensitive to their subtlety, nuance, wit, seasonality, perfume, sounds, twists and turns, drawing out aspects of their poetic nature. . . . I would love to be in Suzhou on a cool spring day and to set out in the morning with this guide in my pack. . . . to visit these places, to sit in them sipping tea while reading his thoughtful observations and wry comments, turning to his directions for the next path or garden. In this [book] are wisdom, perception, and genuine guidance. * Laurie Olin, University of Pennsylvania *

Henderson, a talented landscape architect and designer himself, offers a helpful representation and unique tour of this collection of some of China's most famous gardens... He sees the gardens afresh and leads one through, pointing out what is special, what is ordinary, separating the generic from the unique, the lighthearted from the grand. He is sensitive to their subtlety, nuance, wit, seasonality, perfume, sounds, twists and turns, drawing out aspects of their poetic nature... I would love to be in Suzhou on a cool spring day and to set out in the morning with this guide in my pack... to visit these places, to sit in them sipping tea while reading his thoughtful observations and wry comments, turning to his directions for the next path or garden. In this [book] are wisdom, perception, and genuine guidance. -Laurie Olin, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Ron Henderson is founder of L+A Landscape Architecture and Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is also Professor of Landscape Architecture and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University and former Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Tsinghua University, China.

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