Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium: Sound and Scent in the Garden (review)

As Director John Beardsley observed, subjects of the Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies symposia have ranged widely over their 40-plus years. An initial focus on historic gardens of certain times, places, or styles has expanded since the late 1980s, encouraging cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches along with broader considerations of landscape architecture and its scholarship.¹ Topics such as “The Dutch Garden in the 17th Century,” “Gardens in John Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum,” and “Recent Issues in Italian Garden Studies” have been complemented by “Vernacular Gardens,” “Cultural Landscapes of Sub-Saharan Africa,” and “Food and the City.” Though these events and their subsequent publications are hardly revolutionary, they afford their subjects varied perspectives and a certain conservative respectability. Speakers may be versed in the subject itself or called on to consider it within the context of their own particular expertise.

The call for proposals for this year’s symposium, Sound and Scent in the Garden, organized by D. Fairchild Ruggles, clearly had a historiographical bent: “… how does the historian capture those sensations [of sound and scent] except through words which survive in manuscripts, itself a visual medium?” While many proposals concerned modern or contemporary work, the symposium focused mostly on older gardens, in part to balance recent symposia’s more modern foci. Aside from examples cited by John Dixon Hunt and artist Hugh Livingston, Italian gardens of the 1930s were the most recent discussed.

The fourteen presentations encompassed a range of places and periods, including ancient Greece, medieval Europe, 17th century Rajasthan and St. Petersburg, 18th century China, and 19th century Illinois. Some focused on both sound and scent while others emphasized one or the other; all were thoughtfully and complementarily sequenced.

John Dixon Hunt’s paper was an appropriate start. Even at the first Dumbarton Oaks symposium, he reported, Eugenio Battisti played an audiotape of an Italian garden; today, Hunt observed, without the tape, we have only text. As befitting the founder of Word & Image and author of The Afterlife of Gardens, Hunt moved between references to sound and scent by past writers and designers such as John Evelyn and Humphrey Repton and more recent designers and artists such as Bernard Lassus and Hamish Fulton, emphasizing the experiential aspect of gardens. Noting that experience can get lost in the emphasis on form and narrative, Hunt argued for historians’ acceptance “of a bigger world out there. … To have something in our lives that we cannot measure is incredibly important.”

Both Anatole Tchikine and Priyaleen Singh considered the sensoriality of garden waters. Tchikine discussed the concept of water in the Italian Garden ideal. In this style, promulgated by Anglo-American writers in the early 20th century and promoted by Ugo Ojetti to help construct an Italian identity, water’s visual and spatial form was emphasized to the diminishment of its other sensorial qualities. Singh discussed how garden designs celebrating the monsoon reflected the strong seasonal awareness of late medieval Rajput culture (in current Rajusthan) was reflected in garden designs celebrating the monsoon. Garden features and devices referred to the monsoon through their by names or their handling of water, or how they might enhance the actual monsoon’s effects.

Elizabeth Hyde examined fragrance as enmeshed with flowers, notions of ephemerality, and expressions of power in the gardens of Louis XIV, a king himself referred to as “the great immortal flower that spreads its odor over all of Europe.” At a time when Descartes warned of the senses’ deceptions, flowers from all over the world made the Trianon gardens a heady imperial showplace, where, as Félibien observed, “spring presided.” Comparing the writings of Hippocrates, Theosphrates, Galen, and Dioscorides, Alain Touwaide dealt with the development of perfumes made to act on specific ailments, linking these “bottled gardens,” which in a sense delocalized the garden, to the rise of pharmacology.

Hugh Livingston, who created the currant Dumbarton Oaks installation The Pool of Bamboo Counterpoint, focused on his own...