Hubei Garden: Dancing Phoenix Showing Its Colorful Feathers in the Ninth Heavens

Chu people admired phoenix which danced in the Ninth Heavens showing its beautiful feathers. Unfolding the design drawing of Hubei Garden of Beijing Expo 2019, you will see a dancing phoenix coming alive on it. With the main garden road and landscape grilles as the phoenix bones and a series of thematic horticultural exhibition spaces as feathers, a conversation between Hubei’s physical geography and cultural history and Hubei’s modern ecological horticulture is initiated.

At the entrance of the garden, the layered Three Gorges of the Yangtze River and the colorful flower belt interlace with each other. Named “Three Gorges Impression”, it is the landmark landscape of Hubei Garden. The sharp contrast between heavy-texture steel plates and delicate grasses and flowers symbolizes that Jing-Chu culture with a long history has been refreshed with infinite vigor in the new era.

Keep moving forward, you will see the transition space “Chu Phoenix Showing Feathers”. It takes the arched low wall made of plain dark cleft stones and “Fraxinus hupehensis” which is a bonsai of Hubei characteristics as the visual main body. The characters “Chu Phoenix Showing Feathers” are written in the cursive style with the base shaped like a keycap of the keyboard, and the character “Chu” in different writing styles are engraved on the background wall. They constitute the thematic nameplate landscape of Hubei Garden.

Thematic gardens like “Bamboos Recording History”, “Benevolence of Grasses and Trees”, “Zen Sayings of Stones” and “Tenderness of Rivers and Lakes” are a great display of the integration among landscape geography, humanistic spirit and ecological horticulture of Hubei.

In the thematic garden “Bamboos Recording History”, the T-shaped landscape grilles arranged in an arc symbolize the varied and winding terrain of Hubei. It is the backbone of Chu and the cultural context of the phoenix. In the thematic garden “Benevolence of Grasses and Trees”, visitors can admire tall arbors springing up between the stones and growing to be straight and luxuriant, as well as the granite circle and hollow weathering steel plates interlacing with each other and creating a comparison between actuality and illusion. They express Chu people’s spirit of enduring great hardships in pioneer work and having the courage to explore and innovate. The thematic garden “Zen Sayings of Stones” integrates the “way” of horticulture into the way of Tai Chi, presenting the vehemence of “a mountain in the garden can reflect the steepness of the Huashan Mountain”.

Thousands of lakes dot the landscape of Hubei. The Yangtze River flows from east to west, and the world-famous Three Gorges Dam is also located in Yichang, Hubei. Rivers and lakes moisten the fertile land of the Jianghan Plain, making Hubei “the land of fish and rice”. In the thematic garden “Tenderness of Rivers and Lakes”, the circular water body expresses the vastness of “a pool in the garden can reflect the vast rivers and lakes” and the sentiment of nurturing all things.

The final continued space of the garden is themed by “Boutique Building of the Phoenix Tail”. A set of arched and abstract “phoenix tail” made of weathering steel as well as horizontally-linked decorations constitute the characteristic landscape gallery frame, which makes “Chu Phoenix” change from a plane form into a vertical landscape and offers a “station” for visitors to rest.