sharawadgi

In 1685, Sir William Temple sat in his garden at Moor Park in Surrey and composed an essay on the philosophy of gardening. He had read Jesuit accounts of Chinese gardens and wanted to name what he believed was the Chinese principle governing them: artful irregularity, the deliberate avoidance of straight lines and bilateral symmetry. He called this principle sharawadgi and declared it superior to the formal French garden with its parterres and geometric allées.

The essay, 'Upon the Gardens of Epicurus,' was not published until 1692, after Temple's death, and the word sharawadgi moved into English horticultural writing. No Chinese scholar, then or since, has found an equivalent term in any Chinese dialect or text. Temple probably confected the word from half-remembered Jesuit accounts, perhaps mishearing something, perhaps inventing entirely. The Chinese themselves had their own careful vocabulary for garden aesthetics, none of which resembled sharawadgi.

Despite its dubious origins, the word did real work in the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole cited it in 'The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening' in 1771 as a legitimizing concept for the English landscape garden movement already transforming country estates from clipped hedges to sweeping lawns and serpentine paths. Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and William Kent had all argued for naturalistic garden design, and sharawadgi gave the idea a foreign credential. The word functioned as aesthetic authority on loan from a civilization Europeans admired but could not easily verify.

Sharawadgi entered dictionaries as a genuine English word by the early nineteenth century, and it survives as a term in garden history and aesthetic theory. It appears in discussions of the picturesque, in histories of Chinese influence on European taste, and in philosophical writing about beauty and disorder. The word is a small monument to how one essayist's creative misremembering can become a concept with independent life.