Chinese Landscape Painting #1
This image below left was the first I saw of the Chinese city of Wenzhou where I now live. The bridge in the photo is the one disappearing off the top edge of the frame in the map on the right and the mountains are the big green patches at the bottom. They’re not alps but they’re much more than hills. When I saw this image it was early 2020 and I was still living in Dubai – a city very much not associated with either mountains or rivers. In Wenzhou, you’re never very far from the Sanyang Wetlands (the blue and green bit in the lower middle) that are part of the Wenruihe river system that discharges into the Ouhai River. I used to cross one waterway on the way to my bus stop and two more to get to my supermarket, but Venice it is not. Even though there’s much that’s unremarkable about the city, two very good decisions have been made that go a long way to compensate. One is to not build on the mountains, and the other is to make the banks of the rivers and waterways as attractive as possible. Riverbanks that also function as amenity space are always good but, because the city is surrounded my mountains on three sides, it also means that views along many streets will terminate with mountains that aren’t built on. I appreciate this.
Chinese Landscape Painting #1
The banks of the waterways along the route of the water taxi service due to commence to coincide with the Wenzhou International Horticultural Expo next year, are being tidied up and landscaped in a style familiar to municipal landscaping across Wenzhou, if not the entire province of Zhejiang. The basic elements are grass, azaleas and trees. The grass is laid as turf, and is always tufty – smooth lawns aren’t the look. The grass will usually be cut with an ordinary domestic lawnmower. The azaleas will be in hedges that are sometimes double hedges, and they are always clipped. These hedges usually border paths but may also form island shapes within the expanse of grass. The trees will usually be camphor trees, but sometimes with a mix of maple trees, and may be more than five meters high, trucked in overnight, and replanted with three of four wooden supports and drip-fed liquid nutrients from a bag hung from the trunk, until the root system establishes. This is the pattern whether it is residential community landscaping, roadside landscaping or a median strip. It’s not horrible, although municipal landscaping can be repetitious while gardens for private schools can have too many feature plants. .
I’m forming a theory that fields of pretty flowers in summer are a precursor to major landscaping work. Only now did I notice the site office being constructed on the far side of the flowers. This was September 2023.
17 March 2024: Chinese landscape painting likes a blank canvas on which to start. The first step is to get an excavator onsite to remove large rubble, rocks, concrete or anything that may have been dumped. It’s usually just general rubble unlike say, in Australia where you might find discarded mattresses, parts of an automobile body or various household appliances.
One the general site smoothing has been completed, soil more suited for plants is trucked in a spread in a layer about 20cm thick across the site. Existing trees are generally retained, and secondary trees are planted. The photographs below show the layer of new rich brown soil as well as the secondary trees supported by yellow or the green poles that will stay for about six months. The third shows some of the azalea bushes have arrived.
20 March 2024: The dwarf azaleas are planted as borders for the path, and the larger ones are used to form those islands in the middle of what will eventually be grassed. The garden begins to take shape. All this work seemed to take place with very little direction, as if everybody knew what went where and what to do.
21 March 2024: Turf was offloaded early in the morning and a team of about ten people, half of them women, laid the turf in one day.
22-29 March 2024: This was a week in which nothing much happened, possibly because many of the upcoming 清明节（QingMingJie, Tomb Sweeping Festival) for which people traditionally return to their hometowns to pay their respects to their ancestors.
13 April 2024: Several quite large trees are placed by a crane from the street. This was specialist work supervised by an arborist.
27 April 2024: It’s now five weeks since the excavator arrived. After some additional planting along the path, the garden is good to go.
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23 Nov. 2025 4:00PM update: A year and a half on, somebody has decided more trees and large shrubs are needed.
24 Now. 2025 5:00PM update: I returned the next day but the plants and trees were gone, and I couldn’t see anything newly planted. I thought maybe it was a delivery error. These things happen.
26 Nov. 2025 3:30PM: Yup. On my way to somewhere else, I notice these newly planted trees on the other side of the river, one bridge up.
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