A good practice of keeping gardens neat and beautiful is one of our people’s traditional customs.
Koryo people liked sinking wells and growing fruit trees and flowers in their gardens.
It was common to plant several kinds of trees like junipers, matrimony vines and willows around wells to landscape gardens.
It is said that those in the central part of Korea round Kaegyong (Kaesong at present), which was the capital of Koryo, would enclose their houses with hedges that often consisted of juniper trees, needle juniper trees or flower trees.
Some of them used to decorate their gardens with odd-shaped rocks and big stones or famous flowers.
Such landscape gardening of the Koryo age was the inheritance and improvement of Koguryo peoples’ landscape gardening practice in accordance with Koryo peoples’ aesthetic feelings and emotions.
The murals in Anak Tomb No. 1, one of the Koguryo tombs, show artificial mounds and pavilions with lotus ponds and rocks of fantastic shape, enclosed by fences or cloisters.
In addition, the eastern wall and the east part of the southern wall of the inner chamber of the Koguryo Tokhung-ri Tomb are painted with lotus ponds and scenes of colourful events, which tells us that dwelling houses used to have gardens with lotus ponds in the east.
Landscaping of front garden, inner garden and back yard that constituted gardens of houses in the Koryo age differed greatly according to class and social positions, but it gives a full description of one aspect of civilized house customs of Koryo people who were good at making their gardens elegant.
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