Chinese Garden Design - Scenery Borrowing

The terrain of a private Chinese garden itself is always confined, so in order to avoid the feeling of cramping, the investigation and incorporation of outside natural landscape resources into garden’s own scene are considered seriously by Chinese gardeners. For the places where there is no captivating landscape features worth borrowing, the Chinese gardeners will use artificial mountains, trees or architectural structures etc. as screens. On the other hand, Chinese gardeners will try to borrow any features that are worthy and interesting for their gardens.

The scenery that has been borrowed by Chinese gardeners includes natural landscape features from outside their gardens as well as scenes from within their own gardens. The outside landscape features can include any objects, such as an attractive silhouette of a mountain, a temple or a pagoda on a remote hill, a floating fishing boat in the distance, or even a flower of neighbor’s garden is also attractive to the Chinese gardeners. Through proper arrangement, these outside natural landscape can be intimately mingled into the garden scenery. Thus, the garden’s boundary is extended far beyond its limits to the outer landscape and the Chinese garden’s site is seemingly multiplied. Sometimes, it is really hard to say whether those beautiful outside landscapes belong to the garden or if the gardens are just an extended part of those landscapes.

Inside a Chinese garden, one scenic section always partially borrows the scenery of another section, not only to inspire the viewer’s curiosity for further discovery but also to enlarge the confined areas as well.

Through reflecting, water in the Chinese garden was used to borrow the floating cloud, the moon and stars, the trees or the architecture on the lakeside. Water adds another dimension to the garden and also visually widens the garden space.

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