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In early May, I was fortunate to get invited by the Huntington Botanical Garden to give a talk about Classical Chinese Gardens in Suzhou. While over there, I went back to visit the Classical Chinese Garden on site, Liu Fang Yuan (流芳园) The Garden of Flowing Fragrance.

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It has been terribly busy in the last few months since we are moving to a bigger home. We have put up our old home for sale and it is almost certain that it will be sold in the next month or so. When we first bought it in 1999, the backyard was 1000 square feet of bare dirt. My wife and I spent most of our leisure time for more than a year to get it into shape. About eight tons of bad soils were hauled out before new soil, new pavers, and new plants all came in. It seemed like every week there was a pile of something on the driveway, and it was very exciting to see all the changes and progresses. That experience was a major factor for me to make the decision of becoming a landscape designer. It was so much more rewarding than working hard on an engineering project for several months only to see it getting cancelled for some other reasons.

Here are some photos of our garden in the beautiful and wet spring of 2010:

1. One of the frontyard beds completed in 2008 after removing a boring Bradford Pear tree and a small patch of lawn. The big shrub with blue spikes of flowers is Echium candicans ‘Star of Madeira’ and the giant-leafed plant in the back is Tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Steroidal Giant’. Both are extremely fast growers.

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Sorry if there is any confusion, but my topic today is a new garden of ancient plants at the San Francisco Botanical Garden near its north entrance . I happened upon this garden after I took my brother to the California Academy of Sciences last month. Even after a tour that is too brief, I can strongly recommend this little gem to all gardeners for not just its nice collection of exotic plants, but also for its very well designed layout and beautifully constructed hardscape. Here are some of my photos:

Dinosaur foot prints set the mood!

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A good way to get over jetlag is to follow the local time schedule with lots of physical activities, and I did just that by going to the 7th China Flower Expo the next day after I landed in Beijing. This once-every-four-year event is the Olympic Games of the Chinese horticultural industry. A brand new exhibition center was built for the show with many green features such as these membrane roofs doubling as rainwater collection system.

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My son had a play-date last Sunday afternoon (5/24) and my wife said that we have not visited a garden together for quite some time. I guess I must have been really good in my previous life to be this blessed, so we decided to go visit Filoli.

For those of you who do not know, Filoli is a 650-acre country estate built in 1917 in the city of Woodside. The main house is 36,000 square feet and the garden covers 16 acres. It is open to the public with an extremely capable crew of gardeners. This is probably the finest example of formal style garden in the Bay Area.

The name Filoli is a shorthand of the first owner’s credo: “Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life.” I mentioned this as an example during my talk about Classical Chinese Gardens in Suzhou where most gardens have meaningful and unique names. It is a poetic way of declaring the intention and it just sounds more interesting than Huntington Garden, for example.

Here is a signature view of the pond and Yew columns in the distance:

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