This Chinese garden is a traditional masterpiece — but it’s in California

HONG KONG — Imagine sitting in a splendid 15-acre Chinese garden such as might be found in the ancient city of Suzhou, sipping jasmine tea in a shaded pavilion and listening to a young woman plucking the strings of a guzheng.

Then imagine you're also in the heart of Southern California and can see on the horizon the purple-hued ridges of the San Gabriel Mountains, towering palms and the terracotta-tiled rooftops of Spanish-style houses.

Liu Fang Yuan (Garden of Flowing Fragrance), located at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in the city of San Marino, is a newly built masterpiece of Chinese flora, stone and wood.

Featuring a number of different types of garden — rose, Japanese, cactus — it also showcases rare books in its extensive library, artworks and exotic plants, and invites poets and speakers to perform, recreating a surround-sound experience of 2,500-year-old Suzhou's famous garden culture.

At its cultural height, Suzhou, in eastern China, was the country's undisputed centre of the lettered arts, a place of great refinement and high ceremony.

Liu Fang Yuan took three decades to conceptualise and build and came at a cost of US$54.6 million (S$72.5 million). More than 20 benefactors gave US$1 million or more each, according to the donors' wall erected just outside the garden's moon-shaped gateways, and most of them have Chinese surnames.

So why exactly was this grand, multimillion-dollar, mega-Chinese garden — one of the largest outside China — so important to build?

In some ways, Los Angeles County might seem like a strange home for it. Even the climate is vastly different — Suzhou's humid subtropical climes are in contrast to San Marino's Mediterranean dryness.

The seed for this floral masterpiece might have been planted in the early 1900s, when The Huntington's founder, railroad magnate Henry Huntington, first became enamoured of Asian-style gardens.

Perhaps he had been swept up by Orientalism, the 18th- and 19th-century Western scholarly study of the languages, literature, religions, philosophies and art of Asian societies.

In 1912, he bought a Japanese-style house, had a bridge custom-built by a Japanese craftsman in his expansive backyard, and planted exotic flora to create an American interpretation of a Japanese garden.

Today, aficionados still revere Huntington's Japanese garden, with its meticulously raked Zen garden and prized collection of bonsai, as a refined and elegant expression of Japanese sensibilities.

However, Chinese gardens in particular "were essentially unknown among Americans during Huntington's lifetime", says Mr Phillip Bloom, The Huntington's June and Simon KC Li Curator of the Chinese Garden, and director of its Centre for East Asian Garden Studies. Huntington died in 1927.

In the 1980s, The Huntington began exploring the possibility of creating a distinctly Chinese garden, partly as a way of distinguishing between different Asian styles.

The acting director of its botanical gardens, Mr James Folsom, became interested in building a lake in a water run-off depression on the property.

That got him thinking about what to plant along the area. He envisioned a group of deciduous trees with striking autumn colours that would create a landscape rarely represented in Southern California.

The chosen planting area, around the man-made lake, also has a cooler microclimate suited to many colourful trees native to China, including ginkgo, maple and pistache.

Throughout the decades that followed, Folsom, now the Telleen/Jorgensen director of botanical gardens at The Huntington, and his team developed a master plan.

To capture the authentic elan of a Suzhou-style private garden, the team, which included Jin Chen, a Chinese-American landscape architect, went in search of companies in China that had deep experience in designing classical Chinese gardens. They interviewed five companies in Suzhou, Shanghai and Beijing.

The team settled on the Suzhou Institute of Landscape Architecture Design for its "elegant and thoughtful" work, and across the Pacific, the two teams worked on translating the architect's vision into a concrete plan.

The Suzhou firm advised on how the garden structures could be built. It also sourced materials throughout China and created bridges, pavilions, paving bricks and roof tiles in their Suzhou workshops.

Transporting these elements to the US, the firm also sent along teams of artisans, who worked on the project for many years, assembling and installing the garden's structures. Their meticulous and expert labour is evident in the courtyard's decorative paving, for which the artisans arranged each pebble into an elaborate classical pattern.

Liu Fang Yuan illustrates how many trees and shrubs seen in North American or European gardens originated in China, including numerous types of roses, peonies, camellias, apricots and flowering peach trees.

The Huntington opened its first phase of the garden in 2008, an expanse that included the lake, a teahouse and a series of pavilions surrounding the lake.

The new phase, 12 additional acres and opened in October 2020, features gallery and exhibition spaces such as the Flowery Brush Library and the Studio for Lodging the Mind.

A meandering path leads visitors around the lake, through stunning courtyards, past a waterfall and series of rockeries, and up through an area where miniature trees are displayed.

The walk leads upwards to the Stargazing Tower, a covered wooden pavilion with a bird's-eye view of the entire garden and Mount Wilson in the distance.

The best view, Mr Bloom says, is during the winter and early spring, "when the sky is clear and the clouds are rising over the mountains. I also like walking through the garden when it is raining, or just after it has rained. The colours are much more vivid."

The garden's few anachronistic elements do not quite break the spell of its beauty, but they do cause some cognitive dissonance. Despite hiring the best Suzhou artisans to bring Liu Fang Yuan to life, The Huntington still had to acknowledge the safety and building codes of California.

"Almost every Chinese artist or scholar that visits remarks that the stone lantern in our lake is too large, that some of the rockeries appear too artificial, and that the balustrades of Jade Ribbon Bridge are too high and solid," Mr Bloom says. "They are right."

Yet, clunky handrails notwithstanding, the garden has an undeniable allure of millennia of Chinese refinement.

"There is no more pleasurable way to learn about Chinese culture than by strolling in a beautifully designed and expertly constructed classical Chinese garden, splendidly filled with a variety of trees and flowers native to China," writes Chinese scholar and Liu Fang Yuan adviser Wan-go HC Weng in the foreword to Another World Lies Beyond, a book devoted to the creation of the garden.

"This is total immersion, with sights, sounds and fragrances enticing you to reach deeper into the art, literature and way of life of this ancient cultural tradition."

The garden has been drawing people young and old. On any given day, you can see Liu Fang Yuan's wooden benches lined with millennials, sketching, painting, reading, writing on their laptops, or just hanging out and enjoying the views of the lake.

The garden represents the soft power of Chinese culture — and it could not have manifested at a better time, with China's image in the world having taken a severe beating from the pandemic.

As Mr Bloom puts it, Liu Fang Yuan stands as a leafy and floral reminder that "China is more than just a place where the coronavirus was first identified.

It alerts visitors that people all over the world and all through time have taken joy in plants and gardening, even though their gardens have necessarily assumed culturally and historically specific forms.

"I hope visitors leave the garden with the sense that people everywhere love gardens," he adds. "In China, the love of gardens has been infused with literature, art and architecture in really interesting ways."

The garden has already become an integral part of many people's lives: Some Huntington members stroll in the garden every morning; others come every week to listen to music; others still volunteer their time as docents to help visitors appreciate the garden more deeply.

Ironically, still others come to the open and stunning expanses to leave behind the stresses caused by a year of dealing with the coronavirus. The garden, Mr Bloom says, "has become an entryway into the profound world of Chinese culture for hundreds of visitors each day". SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST