A Comparative Study of Five Professional Gardeners in Jiangnan of Mid-late period of Ming Dynasty.

In the Mid-late period of Ming dynasties, five professional gardeners emerged in the Jiangnan area, including Zhang Nanyang, Zhou Bingzhong, Zhou Tingce, Ji Cheng and Zhang Lian. The five gardeners were basically divided into four generations by age, and there were temporal and spatial intersections between their life experiences and gardening activities. This paper conducts a comparative study of the five people’s own life experiences, social relations, and the dissemination of their works, in an attempt to discover the links between them and thus understand the similarities and differences in their respective gardening concepts.