The final phase of The Huntington's Chinese Garden (Lui Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowering Fragrance), in San Marino, California, opens to the public on Friday, October 9. The new features add 11.5 acres of new gardens, pavilions, and other elements, making the landscape, at 15 acres total, one of the largest classical-style Chinese gardens in the world.
Some of the new features include a Stargazing Tower, at the highest elevation in the garden, where visitors can enjoy distant view of the mountains beyond and the Mount Wilson Observatory. Astronomer Edwin Hubble's papers are part of the Library's holdings.
The Verdant Microcosm is designed for the display, study, and creation of penjing, (the Chinese counterpart to Japanese bonsai) and also scholar's rocks.
The Reflections in the Stream and Fragrance of Orchids Pavilion: a place to pause and reflect and be inspired by poetry.
The Courtyard of Assembled Worthies is paved with pebble mosaics and links the Clear and Transcendent Pavilion on the north side of the lake with a new exhibition complex.
An art gallery will open in May 2021, and later, the garden will open a Library in the style of a scholar's studio and a casual restaurant with outdoor seating.
Philip Bloom, curator of the Chinese Garden, said one of the new garden's primary goals is to "make Chinese gardening traditions -- including landscape design, architecture, art, and poetry -- accessible to a wide audience of both Chinese and non-Chinese visitors."
Plans for the expansion were developed by Los Angeles architect Jim Fry, and they were based on conceptual designs of the Suzhou Institute of Landscape Architecture Design in China.
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