Plum Blossom in Century Park
Plum Blossom
On Sunday we went in search of Plum Blossom. I had already seen many sprigs of artificial plum blossom for sale in the run up to The Spring Festival. People like to have it in their houses as part of the decoration for the season’s festivities.
Century Park Pudong
But the rain has now arrived and with it, the plum blossom for real. We could have made an expedition to a plum garden way out of town, but we felt that was taking things a little too far, so with a little research I found that there are parks near the centre of the city that take plum blossom seriously and so we headed off to Century Park on the other side of the Huangpu river in Pudong.
Quadricycle
Bubbles Century Park
Now as in all parks in China, people were out doing their thing. Riding along on hired quadricycles, or ballroom dancing or playing with bubbles, but what most people were doing was what we had gone to do, which was to look at the blossom.
Photographing Blossom
Photographer with chair
Now blossom watching is taken very seriously. A lot of the watching was taking place through camera lenses. This may be due to the fact that there is an annual prize for the best shot of blossom. There were many men with tripods, even a man with a chair sitting in amongst a grove of plum trees, waiting for the perfect shot.
Model posing
There was a girl in a pink coat (no accident), posing in front of various trees looking into a mobile phone whilst some bloke took various photographs.
Happy Snappers
And then there were the happy snappers, like us, just so happy to see such a wonderful sight on the 1st March. And it was delightful to see so many people out enjoying the spectacle. There were thousands of trees and something like 20 varieties, many in massed plantings of the same type.
Grafted plum trees
Some of the trees had been brought in especially and will no doubt be removed later in the season. Some had been grafted so that there was a white layer of flowers with a crimson layer of blossom above. There were trees with white flowers, some with
Blossom canopy
peach coloured ones, some bright pink, some crimson and the smell was absolutely gorgeous. It was delicate and barely noticeable on isolated trees but getting up close to a mass planting the perfume wafted through the air in ribbons of subtle aromas that I shall never forget. It’s a pity that all those trees planted by the nursery for the Channel Tunnel embankments at the back of Fordwich weren’t fruit trees. Just imagine the smell we could have enjoyed in the springtime. It could even have become a tourist attraction…
Plum Blossom en masse
There are other blossom and flower events to come, cherry, peach, wisteria, peonies, rose, rhododendrons even rape…. There are mass plantings of these flowers all over the city, each having their season and it is such a beautiful way to appreciate a particular type of blossom or flower. We came across a mass planting of peonies in the garden alongside the Forbidden City in Beijing a couple of years ago and loved the smell and spectacle of those, so I’m so looking forward to tracking down the next one on the list which will be the peach blossom. (Having lived amongst rape fields for 20 years, I’m going to give that one a miss.)
Postscript
It’s not free to go into Century Park. Unlike the in UK where municipal parks are free to enter and are paid for through local taxes, we had to pay CNY10, roughly £1 each to enter.
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