Guides · Garden · 13 min read · Updated September 2026

Planting by direction

The tradition planted a house as it sited one, with the four animals in trees. What the manuals want along each side of a plot, the evergreens to the north, the tall dragon to the east, the low tiger to the west and the open south; the tree that must not stand in the gate; the sayings about the mulberry, the willow, the poplar and the peach, and which are puns; the Ming garden’s borrowed view; and what the energy research says a tree on the west wall does.

Oriented E 090°

Wood

Fig. 01 Bamboo in a courtyard. The tradition’s tree of the east, planted where the dragon may be tall.

A house with ground round it is a site, and the tradition planted it as it sited it: the hill behind became a row of evergreens, the dragon on the left a stand of bamboo, the tiger on the right a single tree kept low, and the bright hall in front an open lawn with nothing on the line from the door to the gate. The manuals added a list of sayings about particular trees, some of them observations and some of them puns, and the Ming gardeners added an art. This guide gives the plot planted by direction, the sayings sorted into the two kinds, and what the research on trees and buildings makes of a rule that was written for shade and shelter before it was written for luck.

The four animals in trees

Plan 01 Trees round a house, by direction A plot of ten metres by eight with the house at its centre and the door and the gate on the south. Along the north the manuals want the evergreens, a windbreak taller than the roof, the tortoise made of trees; along the east, the dragon side, bamboo and deciduous trees that may stand tall; on the west, the tiger side, a single deciduous tree for the afternoon sun, kept below the eaves so that the tiger does not raise its head; along the south, low flowering shrubs that leave the bright hall open and the door in the light. Nothing stands on the line from the door to the gate: a tree in the gate makes the character for idleness, and a tree before the door blocks the mouth of qi. The plan is the Form school’s site drawn in trees, and it is also the arborist’s: shade where the sun is hot, shelter where the wind is cold, and the view kept open where the house looks out.

The plan the four animals essay draws for a landscape is drawn again, at the scale of a garden, in trees. Along the north, the manuals want the tortoise: evergreens in a row, denser and taller than the roof, the windbreak the northern house needed against the winter and the wall of green a southern one wanted at its back. Along the east, the dragon, the trees may be tall: bamboo in a clump, since the east is Wood and spring, and deciduous trees that leaf with the year, so that the morning sun arrives through them and the side that should be higher is. On the west, the tiger, one tree, deciduous so that the winter sun reaches the wall, and kept below the eaves, since a tiger that raises its head above the dragon is the fault the manuals name first; its work is the afternoon, when the west wall takes the summer sun. Along the south, low and flowering, so that the bright hall before the door stays open and the door stays in the light; a tall tree before a door is a mountain in the mouth of qi, and the character for a tree inside a gate, xian, means idleness, which the sayings take as a warning. Nothing stands on the line from the door to the gate. Knapp records the arrangement from province to province and finds the north row and the open south almost universal, the dragon and tiger sides observed where a household had a practitioner, and the sayings everywhere.

The sayings, and which are puns

Fig. 02 The manuals’ sayings about trees, eight of them, with the reason each gives and where the tree is welcome. Half are puns and half are observations, and the tradition did not always tell them apart: the mulberry is kept from the front of the house because its name sounds like mourning, the willow from the back because it is the graveyard’s tree and droops, the poplar from the courtyard because its leaves rattle all night, which the sayings call ghosts clapping; the cypress belongs to the tomb. The peach is welcome because its wood was thought to turn ghosts, and the peach-wood boards hung on doors at New Year are the ancestors of the couplets; the pomegranate for its seeds, the pine for its winter green and its long life, and the bamboo for Su Shi’s reason, that a house without it is not fit to live in. The list is the one the Ming manuals and the almanacs repeat, and Knapp records it from the houses themselves. The sayings are given in the form the folk manuals use; the sources are the Yuan Ye for the garden’s art, Knapp for the beliefs, and Clunas for the Ming garden. Where the reason is a pun the site says so, and where it is a tree that drops, drips or rattles, the arborist agrees with the saying.

The manuals and the almanacs carry a list of trees to plant and to avoid, and half of it is a list of sounds. The mulberry is kept from the front of a house because sang, mulberry, sounds like sang, mourning, and a household would not have the word at its door; the willow is kept from the back because it is the tree of the graveyard and droops, and because the back of a house should rise; the poplar is kept out of the courtyard because its leaves rattle all night, which the sayings call ghosts clapping their hands, and which an acoustician calls a poplar; the cypress belongs to the tomb and not the house, for the same reason the yin house essay gives that the dead and the living keep separate trees. On the welcome side, the peach because peach wood was thought to turn ghosts, and the boards of peach hung on doors at New Year, the tao fu, are the ancestors of the couplets; the pomegranate for its seeds, which are children; the pine for its winter green and its long life, and so for the north; the osmanthus, whose name sounds like nobility; and the bamboo, for the reason the poet Su Shi gave, that he would rather eat without meat than live without bamboo. Clunas’s study of the Ming garden finds the same trees in the estate accounts as in the poems, planted for fruit and rent as well as meaning, and the site sorts the list the way the drawing does: a pun is a pun and a tree that drops, drips or rattles is a tree an arborist would also keep from a bedroom window.

School · The Ming garden’s art

The Yuan Ye, the treatise on gardens that Ji Cheng finished in 1631, is the tradition’s one book on planting by an artist rather than a geomancer, and its rule is the opposite of a list: suit the site, follow the ground, and borrow the view. Its chapter on borrowing, jie jing, teaches the gardener to frame what lies beyond the wall, a hill, a pagoda, a neighbour’s tree, so that the garden is larger than its ground, and to plant so that the frame is kept; Wen Zhenheng’s treatise on the scholar’s things, which Clunas reads beside it, gives the trees a scholar should have at his window and the ones he should not. Neither book mentions the dragon or the tiger. The site takes them as the art the rules were for: the four animals say where the tall trees and the low ones go, and the Yuan Ye says what to do with the view between them.

What a tree on the west wall does

Evidence · Shade, shelter and the sides

The tradition’s plan is the arborist’s, and the arborist has measured it. Heisler’s review of trees and building energy finds the two effects the manuals separate by direction: a windbreak on the windward side, which in the northern hemisphere is usually the north and west, reduces winter heating, and shade on the sunny sides reduces summer cooling, with the placement deciding which a tree does. Akbari and colleagues measured houses in Sacramento with shade trees on the west and south and found cooling energy cut by about thirty per cent and peak demand by a similar share, most of it from the west tree, which is the tiger’s tree kept for the afternoon sun. Ulrich’s patients recovered faster with a window onto trees, and Kuo and Sullivan’s tenants with trees outside coped better and fought less; the bright hall kept open to the south is the view those studies measured. A deciduous tree on the west and evergreens on the north is what an energy consultant draws for a house in a temperate climate, and it is the tradition’s plan with the animals’ names left off.

The tree, in section

Fig. 03 What a tree on the west wall does, in section. The same house and the same deciduous tree on its west side, drawn twice. On a summer afternoon the sun stands high, about fifty-five degrees at three o’clock in a temperate latitude, and the tree in leaf stops it before the wall and the window, so that the west room, the one the tradition called the tiger’s and kept low, is in shade through the hours that heat a house most; Akbari’s Sacramento houses with a tree in this place cut their cooling energy by about a third. On a winter afternoon the sun stands low, about twenty degrees, and the bare tree lets it under the branches to the wall and the window, which is the whole point of a deciduous tree in this place and the reason the sayings never put a pine there. The evergreen row on the north side is the same in both seasons and does the other half of the work, breaking the winter wind on the side the sun does not reach. A deciduous tree to the west and evergreens to the north is what Heisler’s review draws for a temperate house, and it is the tradition’s tiger and tortoise with the animals’ names left off. The sun angles are for about forty degrees north, mid-afternoon at the solstices; nearer the equator the summer sun is higher and the west tree matters more. The savings are Akbari and colleagues’ measured range, for houses in a hot dry summer.

The evidence note gives the numbers and the section above gives the geometry, which is the part a household can check with its own eyes on two afternoons. The sun on a summer afternoon in a temperate latitude stands high, fifty or sixty degrees at three o’clock, and it comes from the west and the south-west, which is why the west room of a house is the hot one and why the tradition, which had no thermometer, called the west the tiger’s side and kept it low, closed and shaded. A deciduous tree in leaf on that side puts its crown between the sun and the wall, and the wall and the window behind it are in shade through the hours that heat a house most, from two until the sun goes down; Akbari’s houses with a tree in that place used about a third less cooling energy, and the tree was doing what the drawing shows. On a winter afternoon the same sun stands at twenty degrees, and the same tree, bare, lets it pass under the branches to the wall and the window, so that the room takes what warmth there is; a pine in the same place would keep the wall in shade all year, and the sayings, which put the pine to the north and never to the west, knew it in their way. The north row is the other half of the drawing and does the other half of the work, breaking the winter wind on the side the sun does not reach, which Heisler’s review measures as a saving on heating rather than on cooling. A household with one tree to plant and a west wall that heats up has the tradition’s answer and the arborist’s in one sentence: a deciduous tree, tall enough to shade the wall by midsummer, on the west, and nothing evergreen there.

Planting, in order

The north. Evergreens in a row, denser and taller than the roof: the windbreak and the tortoise.
The east. The tall side: bamboo in a clump, deciduous trees that leaf in spring, the morning sun through them.
The west. One deciduous tree for the afternoon sun, kept below the eaves; the tiger low.
The south. Low and flowering, the bright hall open, the door in the light; no tall tree before it.
The axis. Nothing on the line from the door to the gate, at any size.
The sayings, sorted. Keep the mulberry from the front and the willow from the back if the words matter to you; keep the poplar from the bedroom window because it is loud, whatever you think of ghosts.
The view. Frame what lies beyond the wall and plant to keep the frame; the Yuan Ye’s rule, and the one that makes a garden larger than its ground.