GUEST ARTIST

Yesterday afternoon, we heard a speech talked by an artist who is also an expert in gardening. He mainly talked about the Chinese traditional gardens, such as classical palace garden, private garden, temple garden and scenic spot garden.
He told us how gardens design. At the very beginning, he uses a Chinese character "园" which means garden to tell us what should in a garden, because most Chinese characters are pictographic. In this way, it attracted people and people all have interest and hear it. Then he started to tell different parts of the garden. First a Chinese traditional garden should have an area and use walls to circle it. Inside of the garden, we should have a lawn, a pond, some trees, a pavilion, a corridor connected to the corridor and some strange stones. How should they put in order? It is the second question. He said in a traditional Chinese garden, the purpose of the designer to design a good garden is “移步换景”. It means people in different place should have a beautiful picture in front of him. Even two people are only a step far. The second problem the artist talked about is how much area should the pond take? The pond of the garden is a very important thing. It can reflect the whole garden and the goldfish in it can make the garden more active. The shape design of the pond may not be regular. Just make a garden lively is ok. How to select the different kinds of trees or stone is the third question. He took most of the time to talk about this, the trees needn’t be the old tree which is elder than a hundred years. It should divide the stone hill and water, the arrangement of the trees, stones and ponds should be charming. For the stone hills, they are all picked in the Tai lake in Jiangsu province. They have amazing shape but they are not made by hand, but made by nature. The expert said it needn’t like some real things, the strange shape will make you always imagine.
In general, it’s an interesting speech. Although I have been to the garden in Suzhou, but at that time, I almost know nothing about it. From this speech, I learned a lot.