Faced by all Chinese landscape architects - the big challenge was what constitutes the “contemporary” in the realm of a Chinese garden? Moreover, how precisely does a garden located far removed from China seek to embody “Chineseness” in anything other than imitative and antiquarian manner? Specifically, how can the traditions of Chinese garden making continue to find replenishment as new generations of Chinese-New Zealanders explore ways of interacting with both the world around them and the history that has brought them to this place in a manner that is both unique and that will also serve to engage the minds and bodies of all other visitors to the garden?

China gave rise to one of the world’s longest continuous traditions of garden culture, a tradition that produced a form of garden that was the private domain of the elite class to, its walls designed to keep at bay all those not already highly trained in the proper cultural manner of reading its various features. At the same time, the tradition also proved itself a pluralistic and ever-changing one, prone always to shifting fashions and marked regional differences, quick to adapt itself to the specific circumstances of both time and place.

In keeping with this aspect of the tradition’s adaptability, Wellington’s Chinese Garden will need to be both “Chinese” in important ways, but also and uniquely, it will need to respond to and engage with its specific location in time and place, imaginatively and creatively. Ji Cheng China’s greatest traditional garden designer, captures something of this complex balance between the actual and the ideological in his magisterial treatment of the topic, first published around 1635, as translated by Alison Hardie under the title The Craft of Gardens:

“Making use of the natural scenery is the most vital part of garden design. There are various aspects such as using scenery in the distance, near at hand, above you, and at certain times of the year. But the attraction of natural objects, both the form perceptible to the eye and the essence which touches the heart, must be fully imagined in your mind before you put pen to paper, and only then do you have a possibility of expressing it completely”

Underpinning the Chinese tradition of landscape usage and garden design were at work certain principles of design (symmetry, axiality, hierarchy, and disclosure) that sought both to capture in microcosm something of the majesty of the forces of nature that we are all of us part of and to embody the harmony that, according to Chinese understanding, prevails throughout the cosmos.

The garden to be built here in Wellington is to be a public one accessible to all, its walls, far from serving to exclude, must invite within all those who wish to enjoy a moment’s respite from the bustle of an increasingly interconnected and hectic early twenty-first century world. It must, therefore, seek to be a living embodiment of aspirations that although derived in this specific instance from a particular tradition of garden design are nonetheless universal in their appeal.

Appropriately, then, the Design Brief that this plan responds to speaks of:
“…a unique, contemporary Chinese Garden that will symbolize the history of the Chinese people in Wellington, the Chinese migrant experience and the contribution of the Chinese community in the enrichment of the cultural experience and fabric of the city”.

The Chinese garden is part of the winning entry in the recently concluded competition for the redevelopment of Frank Kitts Park, the Garden of Beneficence. It was designed by Wraight + Associates Ltd, in conjunction with Athfield Architects and Duncan Campbell