The Garden as a Performance

The aim of this article is to suggest that one should think of gardens in terms of performances and not necessarily in terms of architecture, painting, or poetry, for it is possible to show that, strangely enough, gardens seem to share certain features with performance arts. Such an approach seems fruitful since it allows one both to grasp the fact that gardens combine culture and nature and to underline the role of the latter, which cannot be reduced to a sheer medium as is traditionally done. The contention is that gardens should be treated more like a continuous, dynamic, partly planned process in which people can participate in different ways on a par with other non-human ‘actors’. Moreover, the category of performance seems to offer a useful framework helping to solve certain problems inherent in traditional ways of thinking about gardens.