Evaluation of rock gardens according to the semantic differential technique

Recently the negative effects of industrialization and global warming, which is being felt in every part of life, have been a very important component of landscape architecture studies. These negative factors necessitate landscape planning designers to bear new designing concepts and alternative resolutions. In these sense, rock gardens have an important role on bringing nature and the people, which are increasingly distanced from nature in dense urban environments, together by reflecting some natural landscape characters to cities.The aim of this study is to evaluate rock gardens in terms of landscape architecture and to find out how the users estimate the planning style differences of rock gardens that are located in different countries. For this purpose, specified rock gardens from Japan, England, Scotland and Turkey have been investigated. For determining visual effects of rock gardens, these areas have been photographed to analyze visual impact of these rock gardens and the pictures are evaluated by different questionnaire groups using Semantic Differential Technique.Consequently, as compared with other countries, the rock garden design works in Turkey have been found as unsatisfying in terms of aesthetics and quality. It has been detected that rock gardens in other countries have a specific theme and a style which represents a landscape character of the country they belong to. As a result of the research, it has been pointed out what to consider in rock garden design works and some suggestions about rock garden designs are given.