Category: Travel

Interesting Details at Getty Villa

For those who do not know, Getty Museum hosts a world-class collection of Western Arts in two locations, one is the sleek and modern Getty Center overlooking the Los Angeles basin, and the other is the Getty Villa, the original musuem on the Pacific coast in Malibu. A few weeks ago, I visited both, with […]

Presidio Habitats Exhibition

Last Sunday (April 3, 2011) I joined a small group for a guided tour of the Habitats Exhibition at the Presidio in San Francisco. This is an outdoor art exhibition with a theme of designed habitats for wildlifes that are currently here and those that once lived here. It is sponsored by FOR-SITE foundation and […]

Garden of Flowing Fragrance

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.

New Plants from NorCal Show

Every February I get a nice preview of most of the new things that will show up at our local nurseries by attending the NORCAL trade show in San Mateo Event Center. This one-day program is intended for all the wholesale vendors and suppliers to show their products to retail outlets. Naturally the most important […]

First Garden Tour of 2010

Right before the beginning of this week-long barrage of storms, I went on a tour to see a Persian fruit tree nursery (Pars Produce in Alamo, CA) and a hilltop garden in Lafayette. Even though the nursery was messy and had exorbitant prices, they do stock some unique fruit cultivars from Iran. I ended up […]

Trip to Beijing Part 4: 798 Art District

Ask any serious art collectors and they will tell you that the contemporary art scene in Beijing is on par with all of those traditional strongholds such as Paris or New York. For many, 798 Art District is a poster child of this movement, if not already a little over its peak since its popularity […]

Trip to Beijing Part 3: The Summer Villa at Chengde

As the capital of China for the last six hundred years, Beijing is blessed with many huge and elaborate royal gardens. Surprisingly, it can not lay claim to the largest surviving royal garden. The 1380-acre-plus Imperial Summer Villa is in a small city called Chengde about 160 miles to the northeast of Beijing. Since I […]

Trip to Beijing Part 2: 7th China Flower Expo

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 […]