In laying out gardens, pavilions, wandering paths, small mountains of rocks, and flower plantings, try to give the feeling of the small in the large and the large in the small, of the real in the illusion and the illusion in the reality.
I would often squat down by unkempt grassy places in flower beds or by niches in walls, low enough so that my head was level with them, and concentrate so carefully that to me the grass became a forest and the insects became animals. Imagining that small mounds of earth were hills and that shallow holes were valleys, I let my spirit wander there in happiness and contentment.
Shen Fu – Six Records of a Floating Life (1809)
