Vegetable Garden: Creative Horticultural Farm for Happy Home

Beijing Expo 2019 features an individual garden for vegetable horticulture, which is named Vegetable Garden. The garden aims to build an ornamental, high-tech farm that allows public participation and give a full display to Beijing’s green, high-quality, safe and efficient vegetable cultivation industry while expanding the space for the industry’s development. 

The Vegetable Garden covers 3.6 hectares, including 3.15 hectares of outdoors space and 0.45 hectares of indoors space. It consists of eight functional zones and is designed to demonstrate the spatial and temporal relations between man and vegetables through an integrated, experiential display from multiple perspectives of nature, countryside and cities in the past, at present and in the future.

The outdoors exhibition space consists of the “Happy Home” combined area in the center and the surrounding “Vegetable Demonstration” and “Countryside Yard” combined areas that simulate different scenarios (such as forest, swamp, desert, and grassland), demonstrating the process of humans discovering and understanding vegetables in the natural environment and the evolution of plants from the remote past to the present day. In addition, the “Countryside Yard” combined area is comprised of various typical rural courtyards and balcony samples that showcase various forms of countryside landscapes and testify to the close connection between vegetable horticulture and mankind today. 

The indoors exhibition space consists of the Vegetable Life Area, Vegetable Science and Technology Area, Vegetable Museum and Interaction Area, which demonstrate how vegetables penetrate into daily life, how science and technology change daily life and how arts decorate daily life and enable visitors to have an interactive experience. The Vegetable Life Area organically integrates all sorts of vegetable horticultural products through artistic installations in the public and personal living spaces, with an aim to showcase green lifestyles and enable visitors to directly experience the charm of science and technology and understand the inseparable bond between vegetables and daily life. The Vegetable Science and Technology Area focuses on showcasing modern technologies concerning vegetable cultivation in the new era, where visitors can feel that science and technology are changing daily life. The area not only displays various species of vegetables, but also demonstrates vegetable production with simulated scenes. Through exhibits such as Tomato Encyclopedia, Plant Factory, Mushroom World and Top-quality Vegetables, it fully showcases the charm of modern urban farming. The Vegetable Museum recounts stories about the relationship between vegetables and humankind and the combination between vegetables and arts from a global perspective, where visitors can gain systematic knowledge about the origin and spread of vegetables and China’s cuisine and vegetarian cultures. The cross-border exhibition area in the museum will display a wide range of artistic works related to vegetables, including painting, sculpture, installation and video. The interaction area enables visitors to personally taste vegetarian delicacies and experience the artistic charm of vegetables. 

The Vegetable Garden will also hold activities such as Portraits of Vegetable Celebrities, Food Education in China, Vegetable Creative Workshop, and Vegetable Theme Day. Those interesting, informative and experiential activities will attract visitors to participate, deepen and expand the Vegetable Garden’s functions in scientific education, knowledge dissemination and artistic creation, and spread relevant knowledge among the public.