A constellation of bird cages suspended like lanterns house paper canaries, possibly metaphoric bellwethers for the fortunes of a site, that was after all, was once a mine.Situated 1 km away as the crow flies, but considerably further around the lake shore on foot, the University Gardens comprised projects by nine design schools.Whereas the garden plots allotted to each Master’s Garden were relatively level and orthogonal with a thick bamboo buffer, the University Garden sites exhibited a quite different set of conditions. Set on the banks of one of the Expo’s artificial lakes, half of the garden sites occupy direct water frontage, while those further up-slope benefit from the enhanced overview that comes with elevation. With a greater divergence of lot sizes ranging between 7 500 and 13 000 sq ft, the typically elongated and irregular form of the sites increased the perimeter-to-area ratio of each garden when compared to the more symmetrical Masters’ Garden plots. Furthermore, unlike the Masters’ Gardens, no bamboo buffer was predetermined, so that the individual garden plots were by default directly adjacent and entirely open to neighboring allotments and the surrounding landscape, further amplifying the effect of interface rather than the introversion associated with the Masters’ sites . In the descriptions that follow, I roughly corral the nine University Gardens into four categories; sensory, labyrinthine, representation,blueberry planter and process. As per the masters gardens, I use this draft rubric to explore two University Gardens in detail, two at a more cursory level, and the remaining five in passing.

Three gardens effectively elevate the non-visual senses, so famously repressed as unreliable and deviant under the rationalist hegemony of the all conquering eye of modernity. Employing a multifaceted indulgence of the olfactory senses, the Scent Garden by the University of Toronto is the most legible example . A grove of conifers provides the base-scent, amongst which a survey grid of perforated poles use wind-generated turbines to dispense accent aromas. Finally, a crystal pavilion displays bottled fragrances in the round, acting as a kind of scent-bank for posterity. The Sky Garden by the University of Southern California aims to amplify the sense of touch; not in terms of the haptics of rough and smooth texture, but as a membrane through which the interoceptive senses ascertain temperature . The garden generates extreme microclimates with two mechanical contraptions; at one end a half sphere of adjustable reflective plates creates a solarium effect, while at the other, a complex three-dimensional matrix of overhead wires houses an array of mist emitters forming an artificial cloud. By destabilizing the very ground that we move on, The Net garden by Peking University amplifies the internal feedback mechanism which tracks the relative position of parts of the body to the top of the sensory hierarchy . A field of multi-canted planes clad in flexible expanded mesh of various gauges destabilizes movement, forcing the visitor to recalibrate the habits of bodily calibration and orientation. Despite massively over-engineered safety balustrades that were installed against the designer’s wishes, the garden invokes Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ early fractalized Perceptual Landing Sites, where ‘forcing the body off balance forces it to show itself for whom or what it is’.To experience moving over this alien scape requires an investment of effort; as Phillip Ball notes, ‘journeys in fractal land are arduous’, they are ‘noisy and unpredictable’.For Arakawa and Gins, through the act of negotiating the many inclines and declines of the fractalized surface, the perceiver ‘…switches off automatic and onto alert; she realizes that she must, from now on, anticipate the consequences of her every move’.

Over this ‘difficult ground’,visitors become so preoccupied with the immediacies of proprioceptive action that they neglect to maintain sight of the larger picture, leaving themselves vulnerable to disorientation. When moving in such a tactical manner, the distant goal-oriented nature of vision is used less for direction-finding, although the eyes still have a role to play, albeit in a revised capacity.Close vision is body-based in the sense that when it judges distances and textures, it does so not to control or indulge a scene, but to guide the immediacies of movement. Evaluating bodily potential to move between or make contact with a succession of objects, vision effectively becomes a haptic sense; much in the way that bats use their ears to see, the eyes are no longer a device for seeing, but for feeling. In this mode of operation, distant landmarks and sightlines go unnoticed, leaving navigational duties to the habitual nature of proprioception, which is only able to keep the body oriented in the short term. Like the gyroscopes used to track dead-reckoning vectors in ships and airplanes, the error compounded from registering many body-referenced direction changes provides an unreliable account of one’s passage. Indeed, when the visitor steps off The Net and back onto dry land, there is a moment of re-acclimatizing sea legs where we discover that we cannot readily reconcile our point of entry with our exit. Soon—as we look up from our feet and recalibrate distant vision—we re-establish orientation, but while the disjunction lasts, we are, in the words of Arakawa and Gins, ‘more body and less person’. As the only labyrinthine exhibit amongst the University Gardens, the Garden of the Forking Paths by U.C. Berkeley plays on the notion of choice without lucid outcomes . Framed on two sides by a bamboo frame, the garden is entered through a single aperture at the highest corner of the site. Having crossed this threshold,nft channel a critical scene confronts the visitor: the path bifurcates repeatedly, so that one way becomes many, fanning out over the convex landform that runs down to the lake. At eye height, small trees partially obfuscate the view ahead, making the relative value of each fork unclear.

Either side of the path, two flush steel channels are fed with water upwelling from a single source; each time the path bifurcates, the water runnels are also split in concert. At each fork, the visitor must make a choice and then again and again. Further, as the way becomes clearer, paths begin to topographically separate on the vertical axis. Some runnels also separate from pathways, holding level as the path falls away with the lie of the land. One path becomes thirty—some resolving seamlessly at the lake level, others requiring steps to make the transition. At the far corner of the garden, a bonsai tree balances on an elevated but unreachable plane that meets eye level as one descends the adjacent steps. In the collective Chinese imagination, rivers flow from west to east, but the Chan-Ba River, upon whose floodplain the garden is situated, flows in reverse—from east to west . Referencing this site-specific hydrological myth, the garden concept reverses the automated tendency of water to converge, establishing in its place a system of divergent flows of both people and hydrology. Read metaphorically, the bifurcating flows question a worldview in which history converges to form a meta-narrative. Within this familiar order, the tributaries of history, like water, progress downstream converging inextricably towards a single cogent outcome; ‘we say that time flows’, notes Bernard Cache, ‘but we also place ourselves in landscape where … we are already funneling it into a gullet’.Inverting this pattern creates multiplicity rather than resolution; the notion of parallel worlds or stories rather than singular histories. It implies a type of labyrinth with a single entrance and many exits, where each egress is slightly different, invoking perhaps the Borgesian short story in which the Garden of Forking Paths becomes to be understood as ‘an enormous riddle, or parable, …a growing, dizzying net of divergent and parallel times’.But unlike the matrix labyrinth and the single-path labyrinth , the forking labyrinth is never clearly resolved with a critical revelation or a return to the beginning. In the case of the Garden of the Forking Paths, being delivered down to the lake edge is evasive but is reward enough.Unlike the Masters’ Gardens, which focused on the representation of mythical landscapes and nation-states, the two representationally oriented University Gardens attempted the translation of the designers’ home ‘range’ into hilltop garden plots. In the most extreme example, the Pampa Traces garden by Universidad Torcuato de Tella seeks to literally translate an iconic Argentinean landscape to the other side of the world . The Wind Poem garden by University of Hong Kong takes a contrasting approach, viewing the garden as an opposite foil to the restless 24hr lifecycle of their city; the world’s densest.By seeking to embody and amplify dynamic ecological processes, this category included the most polemic garden proposals of the university collection. With waterfront locations, two of the gardens make use of the potentially dynamic interstitial edge of the lake. Seeking scaffoldings for secessional ecologies, the Eco-Plane garden by Columbia University uses a sliding deck while the Thickened Waterfront garden by the Architectural Association employs an enfolded landform of miniature ecotones and peninsulas. Eco-Time garden by Feng Chia University takes a more cybernetic approach wiring up green columns that are designed to dematerialize under the future cloak of verdancy.

To be sure, while processualconcepts are integral to landscape design theory and praxis, it is difficult terrain in a garden expo, given the short window for ‘ecological emergence’ and the singular nature of most visitations; just as geological time is invisible to us in the landscape, so too emergent time is invisible to the Expo visitor.When explicitly interpreted by a designer or commentator, individual garden references become explained. But without such guidance, what do the general public make of these cryptic projects that are so different from the other transparent thematics on offer at the Expo? In this context, is it, as Jane Gillette postulates, ‘very difficult for the garden designer to express complex ideas using only the garden’, and even more ‘difficult for an audience to ‘read’ them’?In this regard, I observe two meta-approaches within the gardens under discussion. Regarding the first, many of the gardens in focus can be defined as theme gardens under Marc Treib’s definition of a theme as ‘perceptually apparent idea’ that has been applied ‘to fashion the garden’s form’. Treib concedes that an ‘obvious concept’ does not necessarily imply significance, but does nevertheless carry a certain ‘underlying assertion of validity’.For example, the labyrinthine-type gardens traded in the stability of a universally accepted theme with which to ground this semiotic transferal between designer and audience. Once the visitor accepts the terms-of-reference that typically come attached to a labyrinth, they appear more open to accepting the garden as a ‘game-board’ and indulging in its idiosyncrasies. Meaning is constructed in a closed/open exchange; while the designer establishes a scaffolding of meaning, the audience seeks to unwittingly deconstruct this edifice by flooding the garden like water or like ants, investigating every interstitial nook for holes and gaps and in the process evolving the dynamic significance of the garden. Here, in answer to Gillette, complex ideas are expressed through the garden, but most importantly they are also received. The great risk associated with themes is their potential for wearing out through overuse, and indeed the labyrinth—although handled with inventive dexterity by those designers who employed it at the Expo—treads this fine line between novelty and cliché. The second meta-approach encompasses garden designs that do not fall so readily under an obviously identifiable concept. To appropriate Treib’s usage of the term, I identify these approaches under the rubric of ‘zeitgeist; they seek to substitute stable but potentially exhausted garden themes with inventions that attempt to capture the essence of a contemporary cultural preoccupation. The ‘processual’ type gardens that I identified as characterizing a number of University Gardens—and to a lesser extent some of the ‘representational’ gardens—fall under this umbrella. Each attempted to build significance around fluid concepts of ecology and process, ideas which are by no means new, but are yet to establish agreed safety lines of communication between author and audience. The result was that zeitgeist gardens had no fallback position and tended to rely on their own self-referential narrative. In these instances semiotic transferal—whether intended or fabricated—was demonstrably absent on the ground, and the limitations of the garden as a conveyor of complex syntax was exposed.