A Guide to the Bonsai Garden of Shanghai Botanical Garden: Attractions and Visiting Tips

Flowers & Gardening Jan 1, 1970 0 views

The Bonsai Garden of Shanghai Botanical Garden is the largest and finest bonsai garden in the country. After three generations of masters and artisans devoted their careful creation and collecting to it, the value of its finest bonsai has become impossible to estimate! Even so, with the full support of its supervising department...

The Bonsai Garden is located in the northwest part of the artificial ecology area and covers 41,000 sq m. It consists of four sections: the introductory landscape, tree-stump bonsai, mountain-stone bonsai, and services. Within the garden are a bamboo pavilion, bamboo corridor, bark pavilion, brushwood gate, vine trellis, and exhibition rooms with grey tiles and whitewashed walls, forming a Jiangnan-style courtyard garden.

In the introductory landscape section, the first hall of the Bonsai Museum is a brick-and-timber structure with an area of 115 sq m; the second hall is a composite structure with an area of 374 sq m. Both halls are Jiangnan residential-style buildings. The halls display historical materials on the development of Chinese bonsai, with emphasis on materials about the Shanghai-style bonsai. On display in this section are giant bonsai such as "Guest-Welcoming Pine," "Pine and Crane for Longevity," and "Withered Wood Meets Spring."

In the tree-stump bonsai section there is a winding composite-structure covered corridor with a total area of 563 sq m. The corridor divides the whole section into several small courtyards, in which more than a thousand tree-stump bonsai of various kinds are displayed. Both sides of the corridor are open, with railings set below, and each courtyard has two opposite gates for entry and exit. On rainy days or under the blazing sun, visitors can view the bonsai in the courtyards on both sides right from the corridor. In the Vigorous Pine Courtyard of this section, the coniferous and cypress bonsai include five-needle pine, Buddhist pine, black pine, true juniper, Chinese juniper, golden larch, and dwarf yew, among other species, vigorous as green pines and cypresses, simple and elegant. The flowering and fruiting bonsai in the Flowers and Fruit Courtyard include plum, elm, wisteria, crabapple, pomegranate, red maple, firethorn, silverberry, and wintersweet, among other species. The small and miniature bonsai exhibition was originally in a Ming-and-Qing-style imitation building named Four Scenes Pavilion. The pavilion is a composite structure with an area of 322 sq m. All the displays in the pavilion are various small tree stumps grown in small pots just a few inches across; from a distance they look like objects in the palm of a hand, while up close they have the bearing of trees in open country. In 1995 the small and miniature bonsai were moved into the exhibition greenhouse. The greenhouse is octagonal, of composite structure, with an area of 443 sq m.

The Water-and-Stone Bonsai Hall in the mountain-stone bonsai section is a Ming-and-Qing-style imitation building of composite structure with an area of 449 sq m. At the entrance is a 7 m long Guilin landscape bonsai made of axe-cut stone, majestic in momentum. The hall displays a total of 28 water-and-stone bonsai made from various stones such as axe-cut stone, Ying stone, stalagmite, stalactite, Taihu stone, pumice, sandy limestone, sea-mother stone, and reed-pipe stone, gathering all kinds of wondrous mountain and river scenery within a matter of inches.

Bonsai of the Bonsai Garden of Shanghai Botanical Garden

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A Guide to the Bonsai Garden of Shanghai Botanical Garden: Attractions and Visiting Tips

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