It is celebrated for its artistic way of dealing with the spaces between various kinds of architectural form.Buildings make up one third of the total area of the garden,the hall of which being the most remarkable in Suzhou. The garden is separated into the middle ,eastern,northern and western parts. The ancestral temple and the house lie to the south of the garden.Featuring man-made mountain and lake scenery in the west and garden courts in the east, the middle part of the garden is the original site of the Xu's East Garden and the Liu's Hanbi Villa, and is regarded as the best part of the whole garden. The eastern, northern and western parts are the extensions of the Sheng's Garden. The eastern part is noted for its strangely shaped limestone, the northern part idyllic scenes, and the western part the delights of woody hills.

The number of stelae in the Lingering Garden has never been surpassed by any other gardens in Suzhou.Superbly inscribed with the works of more than a hundred calligraphers in the Jin,Tang,Song,Yuan,Ming ,and Qing Dynasties, these invaluable stelae bring to light the evolutionary course of Chinese calligraphy in the past 1,000 years. The whole garden possesses with pride 42 rooms and halls, a 670-meter-long roofed walkway,200 lattice-windows of different kinds, 44 parallel couplets and stone carvings , 373 stelae, and 17 such valuable old trees as gingkoes, southern wisteria, etc. which fall into 8 catalogues.