Weird plants at Chenshan Botanical Garden, Shanghai

Following on from my previous post, since I couldn't go abroad for the national holiday here in China, and I absolutely wouldn't open my mind to the joys of Stampede culture around tourist spots in the country, I decided to stay in Shanghai as is tradition most years.

I then decided, one one of the sunnier days, to go to the brand new Chenshan Botanical Garden. I'm somewhat of a naturephile trapped in the prison that is a megacity, so botanical gardens are fairly important features of a city for maintenance of my own sanity. A nice reminder of bugs that exist and thrive on flowering plants rather than that banana peel I left out too long or my own blood, assures my brain that the world might not actually be entirely made of concrete.

I had been to an already huge botanical garden here in Shanghai before, but this one was bigger - TWICE the size (2 square kilometres), and twice the distance from my home; it took a little over an hour to reach.

Chenshan Botanical Garden is largely a research area, with a lot of closed-off areas for whatever secret experiments they might be doing with plants. Many experiments are open to the public, such as testing how certain plants thrive in Shanghai's climate and how various combinations of two or more plants work together in the same patch of soil. Naturally, this is my kinda place. With a focus on Science communication, me and Chenshan have so much in common!

So yeah here's a few pics, made into collages with a frustratingly convoluted piece of freeware.

First thing I noticed was a lot of weirdly, totally unrelated sculptures. S'all good.

Despite the weather still hitting 28C at this point, it was technically Autumn. Most flowering plants were not particularly impressive outdoors, aside from some weird twizzly gourds and borg-like sunflowers, but being outdoors is not why I came here, despite what I made you believe earlier.

I actually came for the main event: The gigantic conservatory. It comes in three sections; one for general tropical stuff, one for desert stuff, and one for rare, exotic stuff. I put them in random order here because I'm an idiot.

I could not work out whether this leaf's underbelly was some kind of egg sac collection meticulously laid out in symmetry (many animals are very good at this kind of thing), or just a weird, inexplicable feature of the leaf itself. I'm assuming the latter since it was on every leaf but...

Going back outside, feet already dead from many hours in the gardens, I realised I had only covered about 10% of the place. Nearby I found a large Quarry, transformed into a spectacle with a giant waterfall, a lake, a Chinese medicinal garden, a rock garden and more. It didn't take me long to find a stairway to climb to the top of the hill the quarry was dug into.

A temple was at the top so I immediately considered it a challenge to reach it, with the added benefit of being able to get a panoramic view of the entire park without having to actually go to all of it.

As you can see, the botanical garden is somewhat huge - although this image doesn't capture everything (I can't even see the conservatory) and rather spectacular.

The whole area used to be a giant construction site, quarry included, but presumably whoever was in charge overspent and needed somebody to repurpose it to get him out of bankruptcy. Although this garden was largely a research centre and such, it offered very little in terms of unique content when compared to the other botanical garden in Shanghai. In fact, many of the featured plants were more or less the same. This makes sense outside due to climate, but I didn't see a single baobab tree in the year-round conservatory!

With that in mind, my next goal is Singapore. I've wanted to go for many years and the more I learn about it, the more I realise its status as an ecological paradise - as far as cities go, anyway.