Origin of the Living Exhibition Garden

Modern garden expositions are largely in form of exhibition gardens, so each garden expo has generally more than 100 exhibition gardens in various types. These gardens demonstrate the vigor and charm of the expo as its essential part, like cells to the biota.

City garden has been the most representative exhibition garden in China’s garden expositions, and each held garden exposition had several outstanding city gardens. Nevertheless, most of the city gardens of the expos have prominent problems in ideology,artistry and uniqueness. The objective of local governments to build exhibition gardens is to advertise the city brand, to fully display the history, humanities and natural conditions of a certain city. Thus small gardens often shoulder the responsibility of expressing the characteristics of the city in all directions and covering multiple themes. Some exhibition gardens are expensive,but most of them are simply the imitation, copying or even miniature of the local historical gardens, folk architectures or scenic spots, lacking of the demonstration of landscape art,forming similar designs. Simulation and history representation seems to have become a conventional design model for these city gardens. Traditional pavilions, towers, small bridges and flowing waters, rockery and waterfalls… these typical structures along with diverse landscape collections gather year after year. Although expos are held far apart, the exhibition gardens seem familiar.Stepping through the garden expo feels like in a showplace with dazzling ancient architecture collections. In this way, garden expos will gradually lose public attraction and interest.

Among categories of expositions worldwide, garden expo has consistent purpose with others, which is to display the latest ideas,scientific and technological achievements and research outcomes of human beings, and to exhibit predictions and assumptions about the future. If the exhibition garden is just copying the past rather than looking forward to the future, and constantly repeating rather than innovating, then these exhibitions must be contrary to the expo purpose thus being unsustainable.

Faced with the stereotyped city gardens, many scholars, designers and managers put forward various measures intending to overcome the difficulties. In order to motivate the thought-provoking and innovative designs for exhibition gardens, we planned the designers’garden area at the Xiamen Horticulture Expo 10 years ago.Although these gardens caused great controversy after completion,after all, it was the first time that the gardens exhibiting landscape art appearing in China’s garden expos, which enriched the types of the exhibition garden and opened up brand-new possibilities and experience for other exhibition gardens. The later on garden expos are generally equipped with such exhibition gardens, intimated a fresh batch of creative and thought-provoking works. In 2011, we organized nine master gardens in Xi’an Expo Park, which attracted wide attention from the public, designers and professional medias home and abroad. The five creative exhibition gardens designed by foreign designers published in this issue ofLandscape Architecturejournal are typical cases.

Among all the planning and design projects related to the garden exposition, I am rather interested in the designing such creative garden, because of the limited restrictions and simplex function, providing the designer with the opportunity to realize what captures their imagination. Designers can be released from the fetters of complex site conditions in ordinary daily projects,expressing their ideas on gardens’ concept more freely, and discovering try new possibilities of garden design.

Because creative gardens often carry a strong experimental feature and are subject to designer’s personal style, its represented ideas may not be widely understood and accepted by public,and the related design methods can hardly be directly referred to in other large-scale or complex public projects. Yet their frontier exploration of design concepts can be enlightening and groundbreaking throughout the whole industry. Like fashion shows where most exhibits may not necessarily to show up in a clothing shop, but the designers’ inspiration would guide the current fashion trends, popular styles and the public preference.

The public attraction and sustainable development of garden expos hardly realized without the extensive public participation,so interactive and participatory exhibition gardens, or the gardens related with public livelihood should be widely encouraged, such as balcony gardens, roof gardens, courtyard gardens, horticultural gardens, home-farming gardens, healing gardens, children’s gardens etc. Not only can such gardens enrich the exhibition contents in expos, but also allow garden expos, gardens and gardening being involved into the public daily life.

The contents and types of the exhibition garden will be increasingly diversified with various garden expos being carried out in the future. Nevertheless, no matter how exhibition gardens being categorized, they should be integrated into public life, be capable to arouse curiosity and happiness, be available for both appreciating and playing, and additionally be unique, conveying outstanding ideas on art, nature and culture, showing the latest achievements of horticultural development, facing toward the future and exploring the unknown. As the vast exhibits in other expositions home and abroad, the insistence on innovation is where the exhibition garden origins.