Desert Gardens: Waterless Lands and the Problems of Adaptation

Humanities Research Centre, ANU, Canberra
29, 30, 31 March 2005

The HRC’s conference on Desert Gardens: Waterless lands and the problems of adaptation was convened by Ian Donaldson and Libby Robin and held at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, on 29, 30, and 31 March 2005. This meeting, which launched the HRC’s 2005 theme of Cultural landscapes, was the second in a sequence of three international conferences on gardens sponsored by a group of research institutions in the United States, Britain, and Australia. These were the Huntington Library, Arts Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University (CRASSH); Cambridge University Botanic Garden; and the ANU’s Humanities Research Centre.1

The series bore the overall title, Moving Gardens, a title that reflected not just the mobility of the participants, but a central and uniting theme in all three conferences. Gardens create a comforting illusion of stability and rootedness, but are also subject to evolution and change. They move in a variety of senses, varying not only from season to season but more subtly over longer periods of time. Like the plants that make up their individual elements, gardens – and ideas about gardens – migrate, and in migrating, undergo numerous mutations, large and small. An oriental garden in a western setting will inevitably carry a different set of cultural meanings from its counterpart in China or Japan. A European botanical garden re-created in the antipodes may serve as an eloquent image of imperial power, or colonial nostalgia. It may challenge local conditions (for example, in its thirst for scarce water) and the local conditions often return the favour, creating new hybrids and horticultural variety. Representations of gardens, in books, prints, engravings, paintings, also migrate from country to country, as do artists and authors. These movements of people and artefacts in turn affect the ways in which gardens are imagined, created, and perceived.

Each conference set out to examine the art of the garden in relation to these geographical and temporal movements, and to associated shifts in cultural attitude. Each aimed to pay particular attention to local issues, dilemmas, and resources, and to be interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together plant scientists, garden historians, social historians, environmentalists, urban planners, art historians, philosophers, literary scholars, artists, and writers in a common conversation. The first conference, entitled Activity and repose: place, memory, and sociality in Chinese and Japanese gardens, convened by Stephen H. West (University of California, Berkeley), was held at the Getty Research Institute and the Huntington Library on 3 and 4 December 2004. The topic related to the Getty Research Institute’s theme for the 2004-5 academic year, Duration, and to a focus of intense current interest at the Huntington, where a Chinese garden – intended to complement the Huntington’s famous Japanese garden -- is presently under construction. Representatives of the local Chinese community from the nearby San Gabriel Valley (a community which now has approximately 600,000 members) were amongst the audience, participating in the often brisk debate concerning the signification and usage of oriental gardens in western settings. Many of the central features of a traditional Chinese garden, as several speakers showed, are themselves adaptations of elements that may be traced back for many centuries to supposedly foundational (but probably mythical) events: such as the famous fourth-century poetry contest at the Orchid Pavilion, where cups of wine floated down a central, serpentine channel – which has been for more than a thousand years a standard motif in representations and reconstructions of the traditional Chinese garden. The relationship between gardens and artistic creativity has also been a theme of the third and final conference, held in Cambridge University Botanic Garden from 8 to 10 July 2005. Here the title Moving Gardens was interpreted in another sense, with the emphasis on various ways in which those who visit and work in gardens may be emotionally and creatively transported. (For details, see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2004-5/movgardensthree.html)

The Canberra conference, Desert Gardens, had ecological, environmental, and climatic questions always near the centre of the frame. It looked at ways in which traditional ideas about the role and function of the garden have been modified in relation to local conditions, and especially to one problem of increasing global urgency: the scarcity of water. The meeting had a genuinely international flavour, with presentations about Australia, India, Africa, Europe, the Americas and beyond. We even discussed the cold deserts of the polar landscapes (north and south) and Mars! The idea of desert colours flavoured the conference, from the red of Australia’s centre to the white deserts of Antarctica, the driest continent, all challenging the traditional green of gardens.

The papers from the conference will be published electronically (in late July/early August 2005) in the Australian Humanities Review, http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/. For a full report on the meeting, please consult this website.