Expo attracts green fingers worldwide to Chengdu
The International Horticultural Exhibition 2024 Chengdu opened in Chengdu, capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, on Friday.
With a kaleidoscope of horticultural technologies and garden arts from home and abroad showcased during the event, it offers a comprehensive and onsite ‘101 handbook’ for gardening devotees worldwide.
According to Zhou Jun, deputy head of the municipal garden city construction management bureau, this year’s edition has built 39 international gardens, covering the world’s major styles of British, French, Japanese, Italian, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian garden design. The number of gardens on display, foreign gardens, and those undertaken by industrial associations and companies have all surpassed previous records of the world horticultural expo.
Zhou added that the expo’s major underlying value will be the exchanges and mutual learning as it presents new plant varieties, gardening products and
technologies, and novel garden design ideas. Chengdu has a rich history that spans over two millennia. Its unique natural geography provides the lush urban environment with greenery all year round and diverse blooming flowers in each season, which has long been hailed by poets and writers since ancient times.
The expo’s gardens will be on display from April 26 to October 28, highlighting the captivating cultural essence of Sichuan, the
Oriental philosophy of residential living, as well as diverse international gardening aesthetics.
Apart from foreign exhibitors, the event also invites multiple Chinese cities to demonstrate their own architectural and gardening features.
The Beijing Garden follows the layout of its ancient imperial gardens, while the Shanghai Garden showcases the city’s fragrant flora. Visitors can be immersed in a verdant canvas of
trees and grass, experiencing the century-old beauty of the Chinese seashore stack bridges, the northwest landscapes along the Yellow River, and the delicate elegance of southern residential houses all at once.
The burgeoning urban gardening heat in China has inspired growing communication and cooperation between different Chinese regions and attracted worldwide gardeners.
Qiu Yamin, a promotion ambassador of the 2024 Chengdu International Horticultural Expo, has her own botanical garden of more than 3,000 square meters, with more than 2,000 kinds of plants inside.
“I hope to further promote home gardening via the expo by visiting ordinary households and doing live-streaming shows to tell the stories of flower growers,” Qiu said. “At the same time, I will also take this opportunity to learn and exchange with international counterparts and spread our Chinese horticultural concepts to the whole world.”
The 46-year-old Canadian garden lover Chad Sinclair has been studying Sichuan’s characteristic ‘Penjing’, the ancient Chinese art of shaping trees and depicting landscapes in miniature, in Chongzhou City for about two decades.
He has learned about traditional Chinese paintings, tea culture and the like to enrich his Penjing content. Currently, Sinclair has made over 500 pieces of Penjing art, each pictured and shared with global netizens via social media platforms.