Korean Garden - Style of A Korean Garden

Style of A Korean Garden

Similarly to the English garden, a Korean garden is natural, simple, and unforced. The garden involves both the people within it, and the buildings, in an unforced and at times irregular asymmetry, where the total landscape flows in a natural and progressive way without being forced, or ritualized. Western landscape designs by the likes of Capability Brown and the American Frederick Law Olmsted are comparable.

A Korean garden is generally classified into eight categories: palaces, private residence, country village or Byolso, pavilions, Buddhist temples, Seowon, royal funerary grounds and villages.

While each has unique features, generally they include: shaped trees, landscape elements from mountains through hills, various sizes of rivers or streams to scale, small circular ponds, larger ponds with islands within them, stands of bamboo, "rockeries" or multiple rock arrangements, waterfalls where possible, granite basins of square or round design, pear, apple, and other fruit trees. Harmony depended on no single feature or absolute form dominating the perspective.