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2. Some Human

Principles

A STROLL in a garden affects our senses of touch, sight, sound, and smell. The sense of touch is affected by feelings of muscular activity and memories of tactile sensations. So is it also with sound and sight and smell, recalling memories from the past. These sensations stimulate perceptions, which then lead on to the formation of intellectual concepts. These three compose the materials of our imagination. The pleasure of a sensation is determined by its duration, intensity, and character. We derive pleasure from perception by discovering esthetic harmonies and unities, while pleasure in intellection arises from relating our concepts.

Any design to be successful must stimulate recognition of the universality of experience. This applies to gardens as well as to other works of art. A successful garden then must satisfy certain needs felt by the people who use it. These needs are for logical, economic, esthetic, and spiritual unity. They require the presentation of truth, the satisfaction of a physical need, the apprehension of a complete esthetic totality, and finally man's identification with nature and his God.

Logical Unity. We love to look at things that are logical, the reflections of truth, and the realities of our environment and daily lives. We respect sincerity and abhor falseness. We appreciate what we can understand and feel and know, but we hate to be fooled. We want genuine things about us. If we have to choose between artificial roses, no matter how beautifully and artfully they are contrived, and a bed of modest violets, we would still prefer the latter. We reject sham and look for what is real.

Economic Unity. When we seek the satisfaction of a physical need we are simply choosing what we can put to use. This is economic unity which is easily grasped. We tend to select what makes sense and has for us some practical value, and we discard the senseless and useless. Thus, for example, a young family needs a simple garden where the growing children can play without the parents' worrying that they are ruining the garden and with the least risk of injury to the children. In such circumstances a fish pond or intricate flower and shrubbery arrangements would be disastrous. Or, a retired couple who love to work in their garden need a place which will challenge their creative energies, providing a happy way to pass the time that hangs heavy in retirement. Physical needs vary with the individual, but a good garden that satisfies these needs, whatever they be, has economic unity.

Esthetic Unity. We want our garden also to have esthetic unity. It must be a composition that affords pleasure in the beholding because we can immediately appreciate, consciously or unconsciously, harmonious relations in the color, texture, shape, size, attitudes, and intervals of its parts. Stated subjectively, it is a harmony of interest and not merely of objects or characteristics.

If a garden has logical and economic unity but not esthetic unity, it is not a real garden. Art is the missing factor. Design, of course, is not hard and fast. It varies with each project which has its own conditions—the objective ones of the site and the subjective ones of the people who will live on it. In his book Landscape for Living, Garrett Eckbo recognizes how esthetic unity may be captured when he writes:

"Our theory then must point the way to good form in the landscape; but it cannot define it rigidly, on an exclusive, selected basis, with dogma and formulae, rules and regulations,, precedents and measured drawings. We must base ourselves upon a flexible understanding and assimilation of those basic questions of scale, proportion, unity, variety, rhythm, repetition, which have been the primary guides for good men in all fields in all times and places."

Spiritual Unity. Going one step further, granted that a garden has logical, economic, and esthetic unity, if it still lacks a spiritual unity, it has not achieved its final and best purpose. This is the unity which ties the building to its natural environment, and then links the people who live there to both. It means that in the course of living in our house and garden we become a part of it, and it a part of us. This is the unique quality, the ideal of a Japanese garden.