Oldest Garden
July 6th 2006 03:10
The Oldest Gardens in the World
What are the oldest gardens in the world? It is a difficult question, and perhaps one that is impossible to answer in black and white terms.
It does kind of depend how the word garden is defined. Nowadays, we use gardens for recreational purposes, but the oldest garden-type spaces were used for religious purposes, and often associated with burial sites. They contained ornamental planting, but were probably not used for recreation as we employ garden-type spaces today, whether public or private.
However despite the ambiguity of it all, there are two gardens that are believed to be the oldest, in both the West, and in the East.
In the West, it is thought that the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep II at Deir el-Bahri in Egypt (discovered in the 1860s) contained one of the oldest gardens. In this case the 'gardens' were believed to have been no more than a tree-lined court that was reached by means of a processional causeway that linked the valley temple to the mortuary temple. For more about it, see here.
In the East, the Chines hold the magnificent Tiger Hill, in Suzhou prefecture. Tiger Hill (so named bcause the Hill looks like a crouching Tiger) has been a tourist destination for thousands of years, and holds natural beauty as well as historical sites.
Some of the marvels at Tiger Hill include:
Sword-Testing Rock: a rock cut clean-in-two, supposedly by a sword of legendary sharpness.
Sword Pond: a small rectangular pond in which some 3000 swords are believed to be buried. No one has dug for the swords because the Leaning Pagoda's foundations would be disrupted.
Yunyan Pagoda: this is China's Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is seven stories in height, and in fact pre-dates and is taller than the tower at Pisa.
So there you have it, the humble rose garden has ancient origins, and roots as far back as civilization itself!
Thanks to Wikipedia for the research material.
What are the oldest gardens in the world? It is a difficult question, and perhaps one that is impossible to answer in black and white terms.
It does kind of depend how the word garden is defined. Nowadays, we use gardens for recreational purposes, but the oldest garden-type spaces were used for religious purposes, and often associated with burial sites. They contained ornamental planting, but were probably not used for recreation as we employ garden-type spaces today, whether public or private.
However despite the ambiguity of it all, there are two gardens that are believed to be the oldest, in both the West, and in the East.
Mortuary Temple of Mentuhotep II
In the East, the Chines hold the magnificent Tiger Hill, in Suzhou prefecture. Tiger Hill (so named bcause the Hill looks like a crouching Tiger) has been a tourist destination for thousands of years, and holds natural beauty as well as historical sites.
Some of the marvels at Tiger Hill include:
Sword-Testing Rock: a rock cut clean-in-two, supposedly by a sword of legendary sharpness.
Yunyan Pagoda
Yunyan Pagoda: this is China's Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is seven stories in height, and in fact pre-dates and is taller than the tower at Pisa.
So there you have it, the humble rose garden has ancient origins, and roots as far back as civilization itself!
Thanks to Wikipedia for the research material.
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