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The ACC Humanities Lectures, featuring experts of contemporary and Asian culture and the arts as speakers, will take place until July this year. The lectures, which have been taking place at 7 p.m. every last Wednesday since April, have provided insightful talks, all free of charge, on animals, sustainable design, and gardens so far this year. The last lecture, focusing on disasters and recovery, will take place on July 27.

The lecture series hosted by the ACC provides the general public with new knowledge and perspectives delivered by leading scholars and specialists of culture, the arts, the humanities, and social sciences. The last lecture that took place on June 29, entitled “Veke: Nine Gardens of Seven Seasons,” address the role of gardens in our lives.

Kim Bong-chan, the featured speaker that day, was born and raised on Jeju Island. Working at Jayeon Jeju and The Garden, he has had extensive experiences with planning and designing gardens, cultivating vegetation, and managing farms. As the chief supervisor of botanical gardens at The Garden—predecessor to today’s Veke—he planted and grew the diverse plants that have come to characterize Veke. He currently owns and runs his own small farm where he nurtures a variety of plants for gardening.

Mr. Kim giving his lecture.

The audience in attendance.

“Veke is simultaneously a wild garden and a place of harmony between life and death”

The word veke is incomprehensible to almost everyone who hears it the first time. Koreans think it is a word from some other country. The mysterious word nonetheless has a captivating power. Mr. Kim describes Veke as “simultaneously a wild garden and a place of harmony between life and death.”

Veke or beke is indeed a word in the Jeju dialect which refers to the unruly piles of stones used to mark the borders of vegetable fields. Farmers in Jeju have been using the rocks and stones that they plucked out of their fields to build these haphazard-looking fences. Because these fences are erected without any plans or designs, there are cracks of varying sizes in between the stones, through which weeds, shrubs, and mosses grow.

Veke offers a gateway into a well-cultivated, orderly ecosystem that boasts seamless transitions between times and between spaces. There are only 50 or so species of plants across a little over 200 square meters of the garden. The rustic simplicity of vegetation is the result of a conscious choice to avoid excess. Mr. Kim believes that trying to impress with excess is deathly to the sophistication that can only be found in simple things. The consequence is an impressive outdoor space that appears to capture the essence of Jeju’s natural landscape.

Seven seasons pass in Veke, from early spring to the dead of the winter. New growths spring from under the ground in early spring. Maple trees begin to awaken in the middle of spring. Early summer is when the garden’s vitality is at its peak. The dreamy pink of muhly grass marks autumn for the garden, followed by a moss garden full of fall colors later in the season. Then winter comes around, revealing the cracks embrace all dying lives to prepare for new births in the spring. Veke is designed to obey the natural cycle of life and death in the best sense a garden can.

A Space of Harmony between Dots, Lines, and Planes

“Cities are plane-centric as they are dominated by the planes of block-style buildings. Trees serve as lines that necessarily punctuate such urban landscapes,” says Mr. Kim, whose approach to gardening emphasizes the harmony of dots, lines, and planes.

“Every object found in nature consists of dots, lines, and/or planes,” Mr. Kim continues. “Even the most complex-looking shapes can ultimately be reduced down to some compositions of dots, lines, and planes. Planes are stable, but also seriously imposing. Dots and lines usher in changes, rhythms, and depths to render a space more natural-looking.” Mr. Kim notes that vegetation in harsh environments, such as high altitudes and coastal land, has extremely simple forms.

A garden filled with evergreen forests tend to be somber and grim because the coniferous branches block out sunlight. Evergreen trees, boasting solid textures, also look quite rigid. Mr. Kim thus prefers to relegate these stern-looking trees to the background of his garden projects to provide depth-adding darkness. He places deciduous trees near the center of his gardens to regulate light and darkness.

Mr. Kim says: “Regardless of its size, a garden without depth looks plain boring. In order to add depth to the landscape, it is important to hide certain sections so that no one can have a complete view of the garden at once.” Adding depth in landscaping, in other words, means only hinting at the additional existing space beyond without completely exposing it. Walls and fences that pay little respect to actual traffic, too elaborate touches to the topography, and the brooks and streams that are so in vogue in today’s urban landscaping are, in Mr. Kim’s words, unnecessary complications that undermine the depth of open spaces.

Overlapping is a particularly effective way of adding depth to a small garden. The vertical overlapping of the stems of different plants makes the garden look deeper-set and cozier. The key is the variation in the thickness of the lines (stems) and in the distances between them. The deeper in the back a plant is in a garden, the thinner its stem should be. The darkness that hovers around these plants maximizes that sense of depth.

Smaller Means More Beautiful

Obsession with tall trees is detrimental to gardens. Size is relative. How big or small a given object is depends on its relationship to the rest of the given space. It is important to choose plants on the basis of how well they would harmonize with their surroundings and not based on their sizes. Treelings may look humble, but they are full of life. They can withstand diseases and other detrimental conditions better than mature trees.

Some trees, such as paulownia, trees of heaven, and Chinese sumac, boast a significant presence despite their relative shortness. These are fast-growing trees whose trunks and branches stretch out straightforwardly without bending and twisting. Because their branches also tend to grow solid, they admit lots of room in their crowns. It is these open spaces between the branches that direct our gaze toward not the trees, but their surroundings. Through these spaces, we can finally appreciate the trees as set against their backdrop.

Sequencing spaces is akin to building a narrative. The garden at Veke is connected by a single path, which encircles the main building that divides the spaces—between the open and closed ones, between the bright and dark ones, and between prairie vegetation and forest vegetation. It is the variability of these spaces that render Veke such a marvel.

Mr. Kim keeps asking himself: “What is a garden? How should the garden of the future differ from the garden of the past?” Every time he asks these questions, he arrives at the same answer: that all the gardens there are in the world are either ecological gardens or non-ecological ones. To him, only the former—gardens that conform to the law of nature—are gardens in the true sense. Veke epitomizes that vision.

Veke is home to a microcosmos of small plants and insects. It reminds visitors of the countless multiplicity of small life forms that they have not realized until now. The soil and the trees seem to breathe at Veke. Its garden becomes all the more beautiful in the eyes of the beholder when the beholder begins to notice the small, unknown things that inhabit the area.

The latest installment of the ACC Humanities Lectures series drew a far larger crowd than any of the previous lectures, gaining attention from landscapers-wannabes and homemakers alike. The value of these lectures reaches its peak when the lectures appeal to such diverse groups of people.

The next and final lecture of the series will take place in Theater 3 at ACC Archive and Research at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 27. Shin Hyeong-cheol, a professor at Chosun University and a literary critic, will discuss the themes of disaster, narrative, and healing as manifested in Drive My Car, the latest feature film from Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Find out more about the ACC Humanities Lectures SeriesClick to view.