Forty years ago, westerners with a hankering for good ole Chinese food slid into a red booth at a joint called "Fragrant Palace", and titillated their taste buds with the No. 1 combo - Chicken Chow Mein, Pork Fried Rice, egg roll, and almond cookies for dessert. At the end of this exotic meal, they could say that Chinese food wasn't that different, not like eating innards. Unbeknownst to them, they were chowing down on stuff Chinese people wouldn't have paid money for and would have eaten only under duress. Indeed, when the white devils were gone, the cooks and waiters dug into fare like snails, pig's feet, tripe, and whole fish with eyeballs that could be sucked like . . . well . . . like eyeballs.
Today, westerners know that chicken chow mein is not authentic, but they have yet to learn what authentic Chinese gardening is. As long as someone convincingly tells them that a bunch of plants is Chinese gardening, they'll lap it up as eagerly as their ancestors lapped up chow mein.
The first stumbling block to understanding a Chinese garden is that it is not a garden as a westerner understands gardens. A westerner knows a garden as a bunch of plants grown for food or beauty. Each plant is distinct from every other plant and from any structures nearby. If a plant is not performing, just rip it out and replace it with a better one. If a better plant is not found, just leave bare dirt. The viewer's enjoyment of the plants that are left is theoretically not diminished by the absence of the banished plant.
All the elements in a western garden are tightly controlled. All plants should be pruned to evoke orderliness and symmetry. They should not be touching their neighbors so that they have room to grow and so that they can be completely seen. All weeds and debris should be removed, leaving pristine dirt to give an impression of cleanliness. It's a wonderful system for keeping gardeners employed but it's the opposite of the system that should be employed in a classical Chinese garden, which has as its purpose to evoke in the visitor a feeling of walking in nature.
Unfortunately for visitors to the Portland Chinese Garden who want authentic Chinese gardening, the landscape design is the result of western gardening principles and is no longer authentic. But because visitors don't realize that what they are seeing is not authentic, they walk away with the impression that there's no difference between western and Chinese gardening. For them, Chinese gardening is just as sterile and boring and not worth a second trip.
Let's explore how the classical Chinese looked at a garden. They saw the garden as an organism, a community of plants, stones, architecture, and poetry, that presented an idealized world in which man lived in harmony with nature. The plants softened the hardness of the buildings and stones, but in a natural way. The plants were arranged in communities and allowed to grow so as to appear as if they had sprouted there naturally. Any pruning or relocation was done only after informed deliberation about the effect on the viewer. Did it enhance or destroy the viewer's feeling of being in nature? Only if the feeling was enhanced was the change made. Truly one had to be more artist and poet than horticulturalist to be a good gardener in the Chinese style.
If done right, Chinese gardening is deeply moving, rather than sensational, and anything but sterile and boring. Like a great painting, nothing seems incongruous. The plants appear as if they have been growing in harmony with their neighbors all their lives. Plants screen the necessary but ugly indications of the modern world. Bare dirt, a sure sign of human disturbance, is not seen. Moss grows freely. Vines, creepers, and branches dangle in the viewer's face, offering the sniff of a flower, the feathery touch of tendrils and leaves, and the bling of fruits. There are deep shadows and impenetrable tangles that mystify the viewer and allow him to imagine deep forests in the middle of the city. As he moves along he is surprised by sudden openings that reveal beautiful vistas. All of nature's splendors, both the secretive and the open, are evoked in a proper Chinese garden.
After ten years of tinkering by western gardeners, does the Chinese Garden in Portland evoke nature's splendors? Take a look at the two pictures above. Which evokes nature and which evokes control? The leftside picture is in the Chinese Garden. The rightside picture is a sidewalk tree well across the street. The tree well evokes nature better than the Chinese Garden!
When the Portland Chinese Garden first opened, it was authentic. Now, it is as similar to an authentic garden as a poodle is to a wolf. The poodle is pretty, smells good, has no fleas, and has a shot at the blue ribbon at Westminster, but he won't arrest your attention the way a wolf will. Like the wolf, an authentic Chinese garden will remind you that you are a part of nature, not its lord and master.
Anyone visiting the Portland Chinese Garden will get the poodle, not the wolf. Expecting authentic Chinese, he gets chicken chow mein.
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