8 3Lanfcscape Hrcbitecture 



It is a strange fact that about this time (1690) the 

 Jesuit Father Attiret, with his companion missionaries 

 working in China, began writing home about the won- 

 derful gardens in that country, where the imitation of 

 nature seemed to be the dominating factor of their 

 design. The Jesuit Father wrote about the end of the 

 seventeenth century. Sir William Chambers, quot- 

 ing him in 1777, says that in one of the Imperial Gar- 

 dens near Pekin, was an imitation of the great city of 

 Pekin, and thus describes their landscape gardening : 



"The Chinese Gardeners very seldom finish any of 

 their walks en cul de Sac, carefully avoiding all 

 unpleasant disappointments. In straight roads of 

 smaller dimension the Chinese very artfully imitate 

 the irregular workings of nature, for although the 

 general direction be a straight line, yet they carefully 

 avoid all appearance of stiffness or formality by plant- 

 ing some of the trees out of the common line; by 

 inclining some of them out of the upright, or by 

 employing different species of plants and placing 

 them at irregular distances, with their borders 

 sometimes bare, and at other times covered with 

 honeysuckle and sweet briar, or surrounded with 

 underwood." 



Then, just as the same idea often comes to several 

 people independently and without the knowledge of 

 the other, this natural style of landscape gardening, the 

 true art as now fully recognized, suddenly flowered. 



