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The biggest new garden in the world

Beijing’s new city park, the Olympic Forest Park, will spread over 680 hectares in northern Beijing, and essentially serve as the ‘back garden’ to the 2008 Olympics and then provide environmental as well as leisure benefits for the city. The large design team that has created the ‘vision’ for the project aims to produce a landscape of mountain and water that will represent the art of the Chinese garden in the 21st century. The park was expected to be completed by the end of 2007, but is in fact having its final touches added this month.

The design chosen is interesting: it treats the park as a natural extension of the city, or a symbolic ‘return to nature’ which is significant as it will also be eco-sanctuary, serving as an important source of oxygen for the area. Beijing is dangerously warmer than its surrounding countryside due to urban heat island effect – which means that where people live closely together and use fuel and consume oxygen, temperatures are higher than in fields or forests, so this immense  park will eventually benefit Beijing, and the planet as a whole. 

Key features of the design include Main Mountain and Main Lake (the Chinese can be surprisingly bland with names!). The former will be made of 3.98 million cubic metres of earth, creating an enormous man-made mountain. Main Lake will be 122 hectares in area. In most Chinese garden design, style comes primarily from a landscape based on a natural ecosystem and that uses native plants and species.  It’s a remarkably easy style to copy in the Western garden, and over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring how to ‘easternise’ a western garden in a cost and style effective fashion.

(the photograph shows Grand View Gardens, Beijing - the only public garden based on a novel!)

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