I went to the Yu Yuan (Jade Garden) yesterday. It's on the edge the Old City of Shanghai and a very famous and much visited garden. It was built during the Ming dynasty and survived the Cultural Revolution intact because it was the HQ of the Little Sword Society which took over the Chinese part of Shanghai during the Taiping Uprisings against the Qing dynasty which took place across southern China in 1854-6. It was this anti-imperialist role that saved it from Mao's excesses in the 1960s.
Walking around the garden it was difficult to unravel its essence. It doesn't have the serenity of a Japanese zen garden, or the careful placing of a few specimen trees against a carefully planned back drop that a Japanese gardener would achieve. Or the landscape gardens with changing vistas of William Kent as there just isn't the space, or the carefully managed coloured patchwork of flowers of the famous UK gardens such as Hidcote or The Dillon Garden in Dublin. Neither does it have the symmetry and elegance of a sultan's garden which uses water for sound and for it's cooling effect, or the repetition of a feature as at France's Villandry, or naturalistic planting as at Great Dixter's meadow.
It's about rocks and water, a few specimen trees such as Magnolia grandiflorum or Gingko biloba, but essentially it is full of pavilions. Good places to sit and listen to the birds, or watch the fish, or sit in the shade in the breeze. It has twisting paths that run through artificial caves and nook and crannies, but unless you were sitting inside a pavilion (which as a visitor you cannot do, you can only look at the 500 year old furniture) it would not be calm. The number of people visiting certainly added to the busyness of the place.
What I like about good gardens is their serenity, however that is created. I need symmetry, or a calming background to a scene, or something such as a long border to tie a hotch potch of herbaceous plants together, or sweeping curves of different hues of the same colour, or a sparsity. None of that was here and so the garden did nothing for me.
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