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Garden a symbol for female
Garden a symbol for female









So when you stood in front of this statue you were meant to think about those qualities.īy this time many landowners and garden builders were Freemasons, and there are a number of gardens that contain masonic symbolism. For example, here we see a statue of Hercules in the garden of the Villa Castello in Florence – Hercules being a symbol of courage and virtue. And these motifs were put there to convey a message.

#Garden a symbol for female series

The Renaissance garden designers filled their gardens with motifs from classical mythology, taken from Greek and Roman works such as Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and especially Ovid's Metamorphoses, which relates a series of myths concerning the theme of transformation. The Renaissance period was a golden age for sacred and symbolic gardens. Here let me just give a few examples, including a couple from modern times. Tauris, 2005) I write about sacred and symbolic gardens in various parts of the world and various different cultures – from the Zen Buddhist gardens of Japan and the Taoist gardens of China to the Mughal gardens of India and the Renaissance gardens of Italy. In my book Gardens of the Gods (London: I. So entrances are transitional, hybrid features, and therefore are often guarded by hybrid creatures such as sphinxes, gryphons and satyrs. You leave behind the everyday world and you go over a threshold into the rarified world of the garden. So in many cultures entrances to gardens are treated in a special way. The word temple means literally a place “set apart”. If we think of a garden as a kind of outdoor temple, the entrance is an important feature. This notion exists in many traditions, and hence one often finds the centre of a garden or piece of land marked by a stone, a mound, a fountain, a tree or some other feature.Īnother example of a universal garden motif is that of the entrance or threshold. One example is the motif of the centre, the idea that when one marks the centre of a sacred space one is symbolically marking the centre of the world, the axis mundi. The meaning that one attaches to these things is partly culture-specific and region-specific, but there are certain motifs that are universal. Thus a journey through the garden becomes a kind of initiatory itinerary from which you come away having learned something or having been transformed or uplifted in some way.Ī message can be created in a garden in basically three different ways, or using three different languages: the language of form and shape the language of the plants and their symbolic meanings and the language of the man-made features that are placed in the garden. A garden is an interface between nature and art, and there are many examples of gardens in which nature and art are combined to convey a message – of a moral, philosophical, spiritual or esoteric nature. Here are a few reflections on gardens as places where the aesthetic and the esoteric can be combined.









Garden a symbol for female