Positive Garden Aesthetics

Abstract The cognitivist environmental-aesthetic theory of Positive Aesthetics—that holds that nature untouched by humans, known through the lens of science, is always aesthetically good—is not relevant to gardens. Nonetheless, I argue that every garden (with one possible exception) is aesthetically positive, that true summative aesthetic judgements about (bona fide) gardens are always on balance positive, and that every garden possesses more aesthetically positive features than negative ones. I offer three arguments for this thesis: (1) once a garden has more negative than positive aesthetic properties, it loses both its design and its purpose; (2) once a garden has more negative than positive aesthetic properties, standard or typical gardening practices are no longer useful for maintaining the garden; and (3) a particular garden that has more negative than positive aesthetic properties is no longer the garden that it was; to bring it back, so to speak, is to redesign and reinstall a new garden.