The Couples Retreat Garden

A previous post described a visit to the Opera Museum that we made with Jeff Thrasher, who was visiting for a few weeks of business.   On the same rainy day, we also visited the Couple's Retreat Garden.

 The Couple's Retreat Garden lies a few blocks away from the Opera Museum on the far East Side of the PingJiang District.  It's one of the many classical gardens in Suzhou.  It's not the largest or the most extravagant.  That's a good thing though, since it doesn't seem to draw the huge tourist buses that you find at Tiger Hill or the Humble Administrator's Garden.  It's off the beaten path too, which probably helps.

 All the world over throughout all of history it seems that the wealthy have been universally afflicted with a need build gardens of some sort.  It probably goes back to before the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  Every palace in Europe,  Manor House in England, Schloss in Germany,  Chateau in France...all of them have a formal garden of some type.  The Chinese seem to have been afflicted similarly.   But the Chinese sense of elegance is not one of symmetry with everything laid out into neat rows and patterns.  The traditional Chinese garden has the goal of producing a more natural-looking combination of plant and water and rock.  And then they mix in walking paths and a few structures from which to contemplate and enjoy.

The goal is to make it look like a naturally occurring spot in a forest or on a river bank.  The end result, though,  is a bit like something out of Disney World.  It looks real...but almost too real to be believed.

 The strange thing is that, despite making Suzhou a tourist attraction, the gardens can hardly be found if you don't know where they are there.   They mostly lie behind the same nondescript walls that flank many of the city streets.  If you don't stumble across the entrance or the bus parking lot, then you could walk right past without even knowing.

Except for the gardens that have a pagoda.  The pagodas are hard to hide behind a wall.

Despite being less visited than some of the other gardens of Suzhou, the Couple's Retreat Garden still rates an entry on the UNESCO World Heritage List.