If I stopped to give it a moment’s thought, I’d have to admit that my decision to write an essay on the aesthetics of a horticultural display is somewhat akin to Barney the Dinosaur publishing a treatise on Nietzsche. So I guess I just won’t stop.

The Huntington opened its new Chinese garden, Liu Fang Yuan, last Saturday. I paced my way down the outside of the great white wall of its western border Sunday afternoon, wondering where the entrance was so that I could, so I supposed, start judging the garden’s beauty.

This is a review in a newspaper, after all, and so it’s supposed to tell you how good the thing I’m reviewing is. A garden is supposed to be beautiful. So it’s a simple task. Go in. See how beautiful it is. Write a few hundred words about it, dropping the penetrating insight and evocative power of my written word somewhere on a scale from gushing to vitriolic, depending on whether or not the tea house gives out free sugar cookies (they don’t).

Problem: After viewing the garden, I find myself unequal to this task of critique.

Liu Fang Yuan, or the “Garden of Flowing Fragrance”, is to me an enigma. It is a study in wholesale, manufactured, on-the-fly instant tranquility. Its pillars and railings are clean to a fault. Every span of walkway has its own name which, visitors are assured, is rife with layers of deep meaning. Even its rocks are imported from China – American rocks were deemed not peaceful enough.

A man-made lake covers perhaps a quarter acre of the garden’s layout, forming the centerpiece around which terraces, pavilions and walkways lace their way. Carved wooden gateways frame the views and stone bridges stretch out into and across the water.

Guarded by its smooth white wall on one side and hills covered in pines on the others, Liu Fang Yuan seems to cut itself off, creating, though it seems impossible, an oasis within the Huntington itself.

Upon entering the “Corridor of Water and Clouds”, I was struck by the undeniable visual appeal of this place, by its careful planning and precise execution. My layman’s appreciation deepened as I wound through the vistas in turn.

Somehow, the designers pulled a trick on me. Standing at the edge of a platform and looking out at the lake, forest and clouds from right here felt like a perfectly novel experience, despite knowing that two minutes ago I contemplated exactly the same physical surroundings from right there, just ten meters away.

Despite the over-maintained, over-engineered, over-populated, over-hyped vibe I absorbed, I felt myself slowly succumbing to Liu Fang Yuan. I had decided I’m not yet enough of a cynic to complain about something for being too perfect.

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