SHANGHAI GARDENS May 17

Sunday afternoon, May 17, Daring (Wang Danli) agreed to take me to the Shanghai botanical garden.  I assumed this would be a fairly quick 2 hour trip and that I'd be back at the hotel by 3:00 p.m.  Shanghai Gardens is not close to a metro line, so we decided to take a taxi.  Of course, the driver told us that we would encounter construction on the way (I've been noticing construction all over the city, especially areas where there seem to be no real reason for tearing up a road and putting it back together.

At any rate, in a short time, we made it to the garden, and oohed and aahed at the beautiful flowers.   But we were quickly confused because after about half an hour, we had apparently finished the garden tour.   That's where it was nice to have someone who spoke Chinese with me.  Daring struck up a conversation with an older man, who was walking by, and discovered that we needed to walk to other direction.  He told her that frequently, people who come to the gardens think this was all there was, but  did not realize how much more there was to see.

Here on this small lake we passed a group of elderly musicians.

It was here that it felt as if we had finished the garden, when we discovered how much more was left.

There are, I believe four gates to the gardens, and we discovered by walking in the other direction all that lies ahead of you here...

  Here's Daring.   We took a lot of pictures so she could send them to her boyfriend in Hefei.

Daring is interning with Porsche and now, as I write this in June, is hoping to switch to Dell as a summer intern.   All part of her graduate studies.   She also took the English Comprehensive Exam again.  She said she passed it, but is shooting for a higher score.   She hasn't heard yet.

 Here is the exterior of the tropical greenhouse.   I remember the one we have in Seattle, at Volunteer Park, and remember the humidity and the earthy smells, and, of course, the exotic plants.

When we walked into this greenhouse (it's huge), it was overflowing with orchids, orchids, orchids, and more orchids.   And many other exotic plants, whose names I failed to record.
The air was warm, but not humid and clean smelling.

                                  

                             

                            

 Running the length of the building is an elevated bridge, which is open to the public and allowed us to walk the length of the building looking down on the plants.

                                  

                                   

                                 

When we left the tropical house, we visited the second green house, where, instead of the humid tropics, we found the plants of the arid deserts.

                     

The other half of this building contained exotic plants like those of the carnivorous variety and bromeliads.

                     

                       

                     

Here we leave the greenhouse and take a little rest before we head on to two more sections of .Shanghai Gardens

The third special section is the Bonsai Garden.   Not just a building with some small potted plants but a large courtyard with many buildings surrounded by and filled with an endless variety of bonsai of fairly substantial sizes.

       The tree in the above photo is not a painting.  I thought it was as I walked toward the house, which house more trees, but discovered it is indeed a perfectly shaped and groomed tree.   Please enjoy the few photos I have included here.

               

                          

We wandered around a little until we found our way to the last house was the house of Chinese Orchids, which are cymbidiums.  Unfortunately for us, the flowers were gone, and we had only the various plants, the house, a greenhouse in the back, and a beautiful bridge.

                      

                    

Daring tells me the sign on the right tells us man on the left is a Japanese plant lover who saved the Chinese cymbidiums from extinction.  Apparently something happened, and the cymidiums disappeared.   It was then that the hero appeared and provided the plants to restabilish the cymbidiums in China.

This would have been a lovely garden had we been here when the flowers were in bloom.
Three other buildings housed flowers that had already bloomed, so we found our way to the exit gate, a dfferent one, and headed for the metro station.   It seemed to be  a half mile away, but when we finally made it to a main road, we ended up taking a taxi.  After 4 hours, a hot sun, and a lot of walking--almost 7 miles--taking a taxi instead of looking forward to standing on a full metro seemed like a great idea.   The only problem was we ended up in a couple of traffic jams caused by cars filling up an intersection when the traffic light turns red, keeping the cross-traffic (us) from getting where we needed to go.   But eventually we made it back to Xujiahui and a place to eat dinner.

Shanghai Gardens was full of interesting plants and flowers.   We were a little late in the season, but not too late.   The Conservatories are always going to be good places to visit since they are climate controlled; the flowering trees and the seasonal flowers mean visiting a little earlier in the spring would be wise.   One month earlier might have been a good time.

After I posted pictures, some of my Shanghai friends said they were planning to go to the gardens again because they had missed much of what we saw that day in May.