Gardens

Last Monday, we attended to see the speech about Chinese ancient gardens by Professor Zhao Bin on the third floor in Nanjing Foreign Language School building.
Zhao Bin is a famous garden-designer and he introduced what gardens are like in China.

The typical Chinese gardens include the soil, which means lands, the water and also the trees. The structures are from the old Chinese character for “garden”. There are four kinds of gardens-The Royal Gardens, The Personal Gardens, The Temple Gardens and The Tourist Attraction Garden.

Mr. Zhao also discussed about the gardens in Suzhou. The gardens there are showing people ancient city forest-silence and deep, obvious history and culture. Suzhou Gardens are just like the Chinese ancient drawing. There are lots of famous gardens in Suzhou, such as Zhuozheng Garden, Liu Garden and Yi Garden. They have small areas but they all in different style. Sometimes, they depend on the Chinese mountains, streams, flowers and other creatures. Sometimes they depend on Chinese ancient poems in Qing Dynasty or Song Dynasty. Sometimes they decorate the stone mountains and the trees in limited space, put everything in the right position. Those are the reasons that people feel much bigger in them than they actually are.

Suzhou Gardens are also called the reality that came from the drawing and the poems. The artists plant trees and grow flowers. They are exactly the same as the paintings. They are not only for people to see but also for people to be more cultivated.
Although Suzhou Gardens are small, the artists create various kinds of scenes by using different ways. When walking through the gardens, what you see are bridges, streams, red walls, green stones, or little routes that pass by. Looking through the windows in all shapes, the views are always changing. Suzhou Gardens are always more than people could imagine.