Returning to The Essence of Garden——Happy Garden

Location: Jinan, China

Client: Jinan Landscape Architecture Administration Bureau

Area: 800 m2

Design: 2009

Completion: 2009

Award: Jinan Garden Festival Design Merit Award

There are 9 Designer’s Gardens in Jinan Garden Festival, and the Festival Organization Committee launched a design competition for these gardens. Finally, Atelier DYJG’s Happy Garden won the competition and had opportunity to present their understanding of the “garden essence” and interpret the idea of building it as a spatial garden, a processing garden and a poetic garden.

H. Repton, a famous garden historian and English landscape garden designer, had said, “A garden is, or ought to be cultivated”. Actually, the earliest gardens, such as vegetable gardens, orchard or herb gardens were pragmatic. Later, these pragmatic gardens gradually evolve to all types and styles of gardens, and many theories, such as garden space and art, came into being. Happy Garden is a return to the simple garden essence that we have ignored, forgotten or not recognized, and brings people the fun of rural life.

Besides being a horticulture activity, garden is also a kind of art, a space art. In Happy Garden, a wooden boardwalk winds through an irregular gourd-crawling treillage built with bamboo. Walking on this zigzag boardwalk, visitors can experience unpredictable spatial and visual variation, inside and outside, high and low, brightness and darkness，open and closed. This responds to the space characteristics of Chinese traditional garden.

Garden is also an art of process. Garden’s building, plants’ growing, blooming, fruiting, withering and rebirthing, are the normal lifecycle of a garden. The Festival is open in September and closed in next May, and this is not very ideal for Jinan, a north China city. Happy Garden embodies an art of process and shows different charm in different life phases. Here, construction, maintenance, picking, seed sowing become integral part of the garden, ever-changing and full of dynamic.

Gardens should be poetic. Bamboo is a cheap and strong construction material, symbolizing Chinese rural characteristics. Garden treillage is very popular in a farmhouse, and gourd is the most common plant in a farmhouse courtyard. Its fruit not only is edible and useful, but also represents well-being, peace and happiness in China. Sunflowers, the most common rural scene, are planted everywhere in the garden. Sunlight shining through gourd treillage dappled the ground, making the garden with a thick pastoral poetry.