In the early 1700s, a radical new garden style arose in England and dramatically overhauled centuries of rigid French and Italian styles that dominated the gardens of Europe. In this episode we unveil the captivating story of how Chinese influences have subtly dug their way into the fabric of England's cherished country gardens. We trace the historical voyage of exotic plants from the Far East to the rolling landscapes of English estates.
Through interviews with experts and stunning visuals of gardens adorned with Chinese-inspired elements, we celebrate this cross-cultural pollination that continues to shape the timeless allure of English gardens.
Through interviews with experts and stunning visuals of gardens adorned with Chinese-inspired elements, we celebrate this cross-cultural pollination that continues to shape the timeless allure of English gardens.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Tradition, trade, and culture have connected Europe and China for hundreds of years.
00:08In the 18th century, a small number of products escaped from China and lit a touch paper in the
00:13West of excitement. In this special series, we'll uncover the intertwined social and cultural
00:20histories of Europe and China from the ancient Silk Road to the modern era.
00:26Art is traveling as a silent ambassador to spread the word about culture and civilization.
00:32It's amazingly impressive because they were such incredibly talented artists.
00:36When you talk about silk, with a value of three or four garments, you could buy a palace.
00:42We'll be seeking out the European spaces where traces of China lie hidden in plain sight.
00:50This is the Chinese room and it's definitely one of my favorites within the house.
00:55Welcome to Traces of China.
01:17Gosh, they smell absolutely amazing. I mean, what could be more English, right?
01:26There are not many art forms which the British can actually claim to have invented,
01:30and the landscape garden is possibly one of them.
01:34But only in the European context. Once you look at the
01:38world context, then of course the Chinese were there 2,000 years before.
01:47English gardens are known for their wild, blooming flowers and a harmonious embrace of nature.
01:53But the roots of these carefully crafted landscapes can be traced far beyond the British
01:57Isles, deep into the ancient traditions of Chinese garden design.
02:04But what is a Chinese garden? Nestled in the heart of the English countryside
02:09is an unexpected treasure.
02:11This is Chinese, Daphne Philem.
02:13Yes, Daphne Philem, yep.
02:16And this is another Chinese rose.
02:20Let's go along here.
02:22Colin Little and Penny Sterling have completely reshaped their family home
02:27into the most remarkable homage to the 2,000-year-old art of Chinese garden design.
02:35Oh, my goodness.
02:36This is just a view into the garden, really.
02:39A threshold.
02:41A threshold. This is exactly what the archway is all about.
02:43It's a threshold to go into the garden.
02:45Double dragon gateway, because it's got two little dragons up here.
02:49I suppose for the uninitiated, how would you describe a Chinese garden?
02:53Chinese gardens are supposed to be a mimic of the whole of nature.
02:58So that's why you need water, because you need a lake.
03:01You need mountains, so you have stones.
03:04And you need flowers and buildings as well.
03:12People talk of going to a Chinese garden as being a voyage of exploration, really.
03:16You're supposed to discover one garden after another after another.
03:21This is the garden of 10,000 shadows.
03:24Should the sun ever shine coming through the beech tree,
03:27you get more than 10,000 shadows coming through.
03:36This is a Tang Dynasty poem selected by a Chinese friend of ours who said,
03:42and you need poetry in a Chinese garden.
03:46My evening raft journey starts in the lake near the woods,
03:50when the insects sing and the reeds sigh.
03:53Ten thousand shadows are cast by the moon's light
03:56and a thousand sounds rise in the autumn air.
04:02Now I have reached the evening of my life
04:04and my longing for home is growing upon me.
04:06Beyond those floating clouds in the northwestern sky,
04:10what is the destination of the flowing river?
04:14How terribly appropriate, seeing as how both of us are ancient.
04:16Oh, man, it's moving though, isn't it?
04:18It is, it is.
04:19Wow.
04:31Why do you feel like you've been so deeply attracted to Chinese gardening
04:36and the whole ethos behind it?
04:37Yeah, why?
04:39I'm asking you to...
04:41I'm asking you to...
04:44Why?
04:46It brings us back to the whole idea of making a garden as a miniature of the world.
04:50You've got your own little world.
04:52You've got the mountains and the lake and the rivers and the pathways and the buildings
04:57and it's all in there.
05:03Much more than just pagodas and bridges,
05:06Chinese gardens are an exploration of what a garden can be.
05:12Ideas of how to be in nature, how to see it and take pleasure in it.
05:17That's a borrowed view.
05:18It is a borrowed view.
05:20That is a borrowed view if ever I saw one.
05:24But how did these ideas become rooted in what is thought of as an English garden?
05:32So the earliest record of Chinese gardens from Suzhou started from 500 BC.
05:38You can see it's developed for over 2,500 years.
05:44Suzhou, often referred to as the Garden City,
05:47is renowned as the birthplace of classical Chinese gardens,
05:52where the ancient garden design principles were perfected
05:56and went on to inspire garden culture across China and the rest of the world.
06:02Chinese gardens, they try to create this poetic and also philosophical atmosphere.
06:08So when you are in the Chinese garden, you should have this freedom of thinking beyond.
06:15Dr. Wei Yang is an urban planning pioneer.
06:18Her work is focused on the harmonious integration of nature and human habitation,
06:24drawing inspiration from ancient Chinese philosophies.
06:28I want to show you a very famous example of Chinese landscape painting.
06:33It was painted in the Song Dynasty in the year 1113.
06:39It's called The Scroll of Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains.
06:48God, it looks absolutely stunning.
06:50It's cinematic, isn't it?
06:52The original copy is in the Forbidden City.
06:56The Scroll of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains is a 12-metre long masterpiece,
07:02often cited as one of the greatest achievements in Chinese art history.
07:08The Chinese garden design is very much influenced by the Chinese landscape painting.
07:13Once you have seen this, you would really start to make philosophical connections
07:17between the Chinese landscape painting and the Chinese gardens.
07:22Yeah, so there's that symbolic dimension.
07:24All of these are things that are kind of primal attractions, aren't they?
07:27From this painting, you can tell there are some very strong elements.
07:32So you would have rocks, which represent mountains,
07:38waters, representing rivers,
07:42and also pavilions, representing houses.
07:46So these are exactly the key four factors
07:49in the Chinese garden design.
07:54What the Chinese garden tries to create is not really replicating the real world,
07:58but actually the spiritual connections between the garden and the outside world,
08:03and also trying to promote a sense of freedom.
08:06You wouldn't really trim the trees in that particular shape.
08:10You would really allow them to create this unique shape.
08:13While this 900-year-old scroll would not have been directly known of in the UK,
08:19principles it embodies would later serve as an inspiration
08:23for a new fashion of landscape garden design.
08:27What would the contrast have been back in the day,
08:29before the kind of arrival of some of this new Chinese style?
08:33If you would imagine, at the time,
08:35the British garden design was very much influenced by the Chinese garden design,
08:40the British garden design was very much influenced by the French style.
08:44So it's highly controlled into symmetrical shapes.
08:48Naturalistic is not only about using natural elements,
08:52it's really about how you put them together and how you present them.
08:56So they're going from a world that is very axial, symmetrical.
09:00Yeah, into these random lines, elegance.
09:03But actually, these lines are highly controlled.
09:06These elegant lines are more difficult than the straight lines.
09:10You really have to train your hands and also have to train your eyes.
09:14So I think this Chinese philosophy and the Chinese culture
09:16trained the Chinese people to appreciate this elegance.
09:19Do you think there would have been any resistance to these sort of ideas?
09:23I think British people were very open
09:25and they were fascinated by the Chinese culture and by the difference.
09:29That's why we had this major Chinese garden design movement in the 18th century in Britain,
09:35because people just loved it.
09:37I read a line, it was a plea for irregularity.
09:48So is there a way you can kind of try to paint a picture for us
09:51about that time during the 1700s?
09:55I like this idea, the metaphor of the ideas floating on the wind like these seeds.
09:59Give us a sense of the world that they were landing in and how they came to take root.
10:04Yes, I think in the 18th century, there was a lot of uncertainty about China
10:08and there was really a lot of admiration.
10:10Well, the first reports of Chinese gardens came back from the 16th century onwards
10:17from Catholic missionaries.
10:18There were drawings, in particular some made by a man called Matteo Ripa,
10:24a Catholic missionary who produced the first copper engravings
10:30that the Chinese emperor had ever seen.
10:32And he was commissioned to make a series of these
10:34based on some paintings of the imperial garden.
10:39And he brought back some sets of this to Europe, calling in at London
10:44and he had an audience with the king.
10:46And the possibility is that some of the influential figures of the time,
10:51like the third Earl of Burlington, who was landscaping his estate at Chiswick,
10:55might have seen these drawings and started designing in the same way.
11:02Once a few aristocrats were doing it, the fashion took off.
11:10Chinese pavilions, bridges, pagodas and intricate water features
11:15started appearing across the country estates of the 17th century Georgian Britain.
11:21But the real transformation occurred when the philosophies
11:25that underpinned the physical structures started to grow their own roots.
11:33There's a letter sent by a French Jesuit missionary called Jean-Denis Attire
11:37and he's talking about the Chinese imperial garden,
11:40but it also could be taken to describe
11:43the ideal of an English landscape garden of about the same period.
11:47And he says they've raised hills and valleys are watered with clear streams.
11:53They run on till they form larger pieces of water and lakes.
11:58They go from one valley to another,
12:00not by formal straight walks as in Europe,
12:02but by various turnings and windings adorned on the sides with little pavilions.
12:08And the risings and hills are sprinkled with trees, pieces of rock,
12:11placed with so much art, you would take it to be the work of nature.
12:16So you've got this idea of it's the complete reverse of the Versailles,
12:21the huge straight lines disappearing into the distance.
12:24Now straight lines are more or less banished.
12:27And if you had a straight walkway or drive leading up to your house,
12:30you'd sweep it away and you'd have a curling one
12:33to give you different views from different angles.
12:40The historic gardens here at the Hestercombe Estate in Somerset
12:44offer a unique juxtaposition of both formal and naturalistic design approaches.
12:51Hello, Claire. How are you doing?
12:53Nice to meet you.
12:53Nice to meet you.
12:55Wow. God, this is very, very beautiful.
12:59Well done, I guess. I guess. Congratulations, right?
13:02So you're the head gardener here, right?
13:04I am.
13:04So this is Hestercombe's formal garden.
13:07So I guess, I mean, the basic question is what makes a formal garden formal?
13:11It's really hard to pinpoint, but I think a lot of it is it's an informed landscape.
13:17It's a designed landscape.
13:18It's prettied up with the flowers, I guess.
13:20But I think the geometry is part of that.
13:23Putting down a hard structure and then filling it with soft nature, if you like.
13:28Yeah, it's interesting.
13:29The aspect that you get from being up here is very much you're kind of looking over.
13:33Yeah.
13:34Looking over the garden.
13:35You almost can take it all in from this single point.
13:37Yeah, it's really good.
13:38And if you imagine in the house, looking out from the top windows onto your garden.
13:42So it would have been quite an elitist view, I guess.
13:45Interesting. Yeah.
13:51I mean, it's very interesting, isn't it?
13:52If you were used to seeing gardens like this, with that strict geometry,
13:58you know, with the house looking over it all and seeing it all as one.
14:02It looks like a carpet that's rolled out in front of you.
14:04You can imagine how going to a more naturalistic garden,
14:09you know, with all that light and shade and all those kind of hidden objects and structures,
14:14you can see why it might be quite radical at the time.
14:17As the Chinese-inspired English landscape garden became the height of fashion in the 18th century,
14:23landowner and garden designer, Copplestone Bamfield,
14:27created a wild, winding walk through the grounds of his estate.
14:33They wanted there to be drama all the time in their gardens
14:36and almost like a sense of the fear and wonder of nature.
14:39So, craggy rock faces and dark spaces, open spaces, taking you on a journey.
14:44Using paintings, original designs and planting plans,
14:48the team at Hester Coombe have recreated each part of the original Chinese-inspired garden.
14:56It's a great view from here. It's a really good view, isn't it?
14:59It doesn't appear to be a kind of a construct.
15:02It doesn't feel like a garden, does it? Yeah, right.
15:04And a lot of people walk through here and think, this is just the landscape,
15:07this is just wild, this is just what walks are like.
15:10But actually, it's very managed.
15:12It's a natural valley that's been manipulated to create this scene, basically.
15:18The Chinese seat that we have here is basically a nod to him
15:23kind of telling everybody that he knows what's going on, you know, he's aware
15:26and he's part of it, he's ahead of his game because he's always got a Chinese seat.
15:31So, from here, you have a glimpse through to the mausoleum.
15:35You don't want to see the whole thing because you want that bit of interest.
15:38And then, the view across the pond, you get a glimpse of where you've been
15:42in the Octagon Summer House down there, and then across the pond in the Vale of Taunton.
15:48The idea of the borrowed view is a big part of every Chinese garden.
15:53And there's a whole science attached to this.
15:55You have distant borrowed views, which are mostly mountains.
15:58You have a view of the mountains, which is a view of the sea.
16:02You have adjacent views, which could be other buildings.
16:08And the idea is you make use of objects which can be seen,
16:12which are actually beyond the garden itself.
16:15But you calculate very precisely where to put your garden features
16:19to make use of those distant views.
16:21So, instead of everything being laid out like a geometrical pattern,
16:25you've got a much more natural garden with a sequence of surprises
16:31and views that you only get when you reach a particular point.
16:41Oh my goodness.
16:42It's quite magical, isn't it?
16:43It really is.
16:48It does feel a bit like a Chinese garden.
16:50Yeah, it's the precision, isn't it?
16:52Like that rock definitely has to go there,
16:54and that fern definitely has to go there.
16:56And it's that kind of like manicured nature, I guess.
17:01It's so beautiful that it's kind of...
17:04Doesn't look real, does it?
17:05Doesn't look real.
17:09I think that's the spiritual dimension.
17:11It's what the Chinese gardens try to create.
17:14It's beyond the physical dimension.
17:19I quite often will come and rub the cork stones so that they really gleam.
17:26So that's one of the jobs that we do to maintain this view.
17:29I see you've got two brushes there.
17:30I've got two brushes, so you can have a go.
17:32Put me to work.
17:37My background is in fashion and textiles,
17:40so I've been to art school and it's kind of like some massive art project.
17:54So it wasn't just the landform and the layout that was changing in the Georgian garden.
17:58It was the plants themselves.
18:01But how did these Chinese flowering shrubs and trees
18:04that we commonly associate with the English garden
18:06come to be here in the first place?
18:21So many plants that we take for granted are Chinese.
18:25I can just list them,
18:27but it would take me to the end of the film to list them all.
18:30But a good one is a chrysanthemum, magnolia, camellia, hollyhock, hydrangea, gardenia.
18:41I mean the hydrangea though, it's so British.
18:45It's so synonymous with the British garden, right?
18:48The camellia would have been very sought after for three reasons.
18:53One, it's got beautiful colouring.
18:55And the second, as you can see, it loves the shade,
19:00which is very good for a country that doesn't get much sun.
19:05Careful consideration was given to selecting the right plants for import
19:08as it wasn't simply a matter of aesthetic appeal.
19:11So this is the magnolia?
19:13This is the magnolia.
19:14Throughout the 19th century, the world's leading botanists,
19:17who also became known as plant hunters,
19:20worked with a limited knowledge to select species they believed
19:24could thrive in their new environments.
19:27They would mostly come on East India Company ships from Canton,
19:32because that's the only place they could get to.
19:34And they would come to the East India Company,
19:37and they would come to the East India Company,
19:39and they would come to the East India Company,
19:41from Canton, because that's the only place that Europeans were allowed to be.
19:46Trouble is that Canton is tropical,
19:49so the problem was always to find temperate plants and then do a deal.
19:53So they'd say, you give me a few seeds of that,
19:56and I will give you something from Europe.
20:00And these gift exchanges took place all the time.
20:03OK, so it was a two-way flow?
20:05Two-way flow.
20:06After the initial introduction of these exotic plants
20:10to wealthy landowners and the country estates,
20:13they gradually began to find their way into urban areas,
20:16becoming more widely available in towns and cities.
20:20So can you try and paint a picture for us?
20:23When this was the absolute perimeter of London City,
20:26can you try to give us a sense of what that must have been like for them
20:29to encounter Chinese plants for the first time?
20:32Well, I think the main thing is increase the colour of the environment.
20:37Right, yeah.
20:38So you think of Georgian London as being sort of, you know, brick-coloured,
20:43and then the Chinese plants,
20:46all of those would bring colour that you've never seen before.
20:49Yeah, and so would that have been it, ultimately?
20:51Like, the exoticism of it, the smells and the colours,
20:54was that what was driving this?
20:57Oh, for sure.
20:57Just pure sensory pleasure?
20:59Absolutely, yeah, and it was not just about the smell.
21:02It was not from, you know, Holland.
21:04It was from some really distant place.
21:08With the fact that it comes so far.
21:10It comes so far, it adds it to the cachet of it.
21:13And then once you've got it, then I guess the challenge is how to grow it.
21:17How to grow it, how to propagate it,
21:19how to make sure it produces seeds so you can pass it on.
21:23And that's why the frustration that was felt by a lot of gardeners,
21:28that they couldn't get anything to grow,
21:30which is why they wanted living plants.
21:33But living plants require completely other technology.
21:39And what was it that bridged that gap?
21:41How were they able to then import live plants?
21:44What you do is you build a greenhouse on the ship.
21:47No way, that's brilliant.
21:48And you put a gardener.
21:49No!
21:50Yes, to sleep with the plants.
21:54During the plant-hunting era,
21:56not only did hundreds of exotic species travel from China to the UK,
22:01but also traces of the cultural rituals and practices that surrounded them.
22:06This is quite unusual in London, isn't it?
22:08To have this many plants on the street.
22:10I feel like there was an initiative to bring plant life back
22:14out of the gardens into the public.
22:16The only way to do it is to put it in pots, which is Chinese.
22:20Right!
22:21Chinese gardens were always in pots.
22:24It's funny, you're talking there,
22:25and there's a rich smell of flowers in the air right now.
22:29And I'm wondering which one of these that is.
22:31God, it's beautiful, isn't it?
22:34That's where it's coming from.
22:36All the way down the street.
22:37You can smell that from all the way down the other side of the street.
22:43That is amazing.
22:45It's intoxicating.
22:46Oh my gosh.
22:48And that is a gift, not just everybody who lives here,
22:51but everyone just passing through.
22:52Nature is public, by definition.
23:08By the late 18th century, the ideas of Chinese garden design
23:12mixed with the English landscape became known as Anglo-Chinoise gardens.
23:17And over the following 300 years,
23:19this new naturalistic style set seeds in the imagination
23:23of garden designers across Europe and can still be found today.
23:36The idyllic English garden is celebrated worldwide
23:39for its grace and natural beauty.
23:42Multi-award winning garden designer Chris Deacon
23:45is at the forefront of this tradition.
23:48For you, what is the quintessential Chinese garden?
23:51Firstly, it's about nature, reflecting nature.
23:56One of the things is a sense of space,
23:58to create areas that generated emotion, that resonated with us.
24:03And that movement, even in a small space,
24:06you can still have that journey and sense of discovery.
24:10Would you say that you had Chinese elements in your garden designs?
24:14Yeah, very much so.
24:16That principle underlines everything we do.
24:19It's fundamental to good garden design, I would argue.
24:25So we've created a room outside that's in scale with the interior room.
24:31And we've used materials that also have the same sort of colour palette.
24:35And then we've got our focal point at the end.
24:37So that's one of the other key points of Chinese design,
24:40is to have that focal point to draw us through into the space.
24:43To the untrained eye, there's still quite a lot of straight lines here.
24:47It doesn't look overtly Chinese, if you like.
24:49What it is, it's taking the principles behind Chinese design
24:53and applying them to our English, I say, contemporary garden design.
24:59The flow around the space.
25:01So I want to take people on a journey,
25:03so that they're coming from the house
25:05and they've got a reason to go through the garden.
25:08Again, scalable structure.
25:10Bigger trees beyond.
25:12Then we scale down in height.
25:14And then we come down to the textural planting.
25:17Sweeps and drifts.
25:19And again, going back to the sort of the Chinese design principles,
25:24they loved contrasting textures.
25:27Big leaves next to fine cut leaves.
25:30Spiky next to round.
25:32This is your borrowed landscape.
25:33And that's that link bringing that landscape into the garden.
25:37So these also are designed as a pair to draw the eye down
25:46and frame the bench as the focal point.
25:49So you're not scared of a bit of symmetry still?
25:52No.
25:52So you're kind of picking from the Chinese style,
25:54what you like, what you need.
25:56These fundamental principles of Chinese design
26:00have underpinned really what we do in British garden design for a long time.
26:06It is just good design practice.
26:08But if you look at a Chinese garden,
26:10well, they're reflecting their landscape.
26:13If we superimpose a Chinese garden here,
26:16we're not reflecting our landscape.
26:18So actually, we're breaking one of the principles of their design.
26:22So what we're doing is we're saying,
26:23well, what have we got?
26:24How do we bring that in, but based on those principles?
26:27What's the perception of English gardening in China, for example?
26:32Traditionally, it's been actually quite common for garden designers
26:35in this country to go out and recreate English gardens
26:39out in places like China and Japan,
26:42what we would call a typical rose garden.
26:44So they looked to us, funnily enough,
26:46for what we've done, how we've adapted their principles,
26:49and then kind of fed it back.
26:57When you create a really successful garden,
27:01and it can be any style,
27:02but if that speaks to you,
27:04if that gives you a sense of well-being,
27:07if that gives you a sense of place,
27:08if that gives you joy,
27:10then that's what gardens are.
27:15For me, walking in a garden like this,
27:17it just gives you time.
27:20You can't be distracted by anything when you're here.
27:22You're just in the moment.
27:25I think by looking at other cultures to see what's happened,
27:28what they've done, how they think,
27:30we can very much enlarge our own way of thinking.
27:36You relate to the garden the way you relate to your philosophy of life.
27:42The pathway is a meander through life,
27:46not just a pathway through the garden.
27:48You have energy flows.
27:50The chi that's running through you is also running through the plant.
27:55So you become one with nature,
27:58but it's nature on your terms.
28:00It's not nature in the wild.
28:02You bring the wild into the domestic scene.
28:08Hi.
28:09Did you plant this?
28:10Oh my God.
28:13What kind of plant is it?
28:14It's a jasmine.
28:16She's called Jasmine?
28:18Oh my gosh.
28:21It's impossible to measure the subtle and profound ways
28:25these historic cultural exchanges impact our everyday lives,
28:30and yet we should always appreciate that these dialogues are ever-evolving,
28:34with their influence steadily enriching our world.
28:38A lot of Chinese people, when they got older,
28:40would retire from Beijing or wherever it was they were and make a garden.
28:46So we've done that.
28:48Life begins when you make a garden.
28:52Would that do?
28:53That would do fine.