The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin: by Paul A. Harris Main Menu Paul A. Harris

Rocks and Water, Large and Small

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Chinese gardens are cosmological landscapes designed to express ‘the entire universe with its ‘ten thousand things,’ and make this profusion intelligible” (Jencks 1978, 196). The Chinese word for landscape, ‘shan shui,’ literally means mountains and water, and evokes the Isles of the Immortals. It suggests balanced oppositions between yang and yin, masculine strength and feminine moisture, material and mental stolidity versus yielding and following the path of least resistance, rough and smooth textures, stillness and motion (streams), silence and sound (waterfalls).
Rocks, individually situated or piled into rockeries, evoke mountains. Scaling, producing nature in miniature, is an important design principle in Chinese gardens. In an oft-cited 18th century treatise by Shen Fu, he writes that “in piling up rocks into mountains…the aim is to see the small in the large, to see the large in the small, to see the real in the illusory and the to see the illusory in the real” (in Jencks 1978, 196). Rocks and rockeries were more than visual evocations of mountains: as Parkes writes, “rocks are thought to partake of the powers of the mountain less through their resembling its outward appearance than for their being true microcosms, animated by the same energies that formed the heights and peaks.” 
 

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  1. Chinese Lithophilia Paul A. Harris

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