When I decided to write this article, I looked through several books for a good description of what a poem is. If a poem may be said to have an aim, it must be to make the reader see with a new acuteness and feel with a new awareness . Many people might say that this is the definition of all great art, but it doesn t describe all great gardens. Garden design is one of the oldest and most traditional of the arts. While a painting usually needs to be a bit innovative in order to be interesting, this isn t true of gardens.
Gardens are often collections of plants, the emphasis is on the individual plants.
In a collector s garden, the designer s job is to arrange this collection into a unified garden, the plants are seen as being interesting in and of themselves. Gardens are also often designed to be settings for architecture or for social events, the gardens of Vaux le Vicompte and the palace of Versailles are great works of art, but I wouldn t call them living poems. There are two main traditions in garden design, the Eastern and the Western . For most of the past three or four thousand years, the formal garden has been dominant in the West. Many poems were composed and read in formal gardens, and overgrown formal gardens often have a poetic quality, but the idea of a garden being a visual poem is mainly a product of the Eastern tradition.