• Journal of the Korean Institute of Traditional Landscape Architecture
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.14-25
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• 2016

This study aims to investigate what flowering plant Jeongjo loved, the attitudes and the reasons, and their implications. The study method was to investigate the contents and meaning in the historical records and to describe their interpretation. Jeongjo's life was consistent with very abstinent life style. His food, clothing and shelter were simple, and he did not show the interests in music, various arts and craft, women, and so on. He did not even show his interest in the flowers and plants of fairyland, beautiful flowers and plants. Jeongjo knew various kinds of flowers, and he was proficient in artistic expressions such as literature or painting with flower material. Due to this kind of attitude, there were few cases to demonstrate his taste on the specific flowering plant. The only one that Jeongjo revealed as his favorite flower was the pomegranate. However, the pomegranate was not the simple flowering plant as the subject of enjoying to Jeongjo. The pomegranate has the meaning of indicator plant to indicate the season of rice farming. Therefore, he made it to be the intermediary to indicate the farming season, which counted a few. Besides, Jeongjo who was threatened by the trials of assassination to him in his early throne period utilized 5,600 pomegranate flowerpots as the barricade of his shelter by arraying them with the type of stone piles in $B{\bar{a}}zh{\grave{e}}nt{\acute{u}}$(八陣圖). The use of Jeongjo's pomegranate flowerpots was not related to the visual utilization like ornament at all, which was very unique case. From multiple records, it was found that the pomegranate was the flower to be with Jeongjo in his period of reign. It is remarkable that the reason why Jeongjo kept pomegranate for a long time like this had the difference from enjoying practice on the ordinary flowering plant. This study has the limitation to be conducted depending on the Korean translated data. Further studies are required according to the translation performance of new historical records.