Gardens

As an observation although the Chinese clearly like to look at gardens given the way they live in their cities, anyway, the opportunity to "garden" would have to be between limited and nil unlike in NZ when most home owners have the opportunity - although here in Auckland few really seize on it.

There are a lot of large public open spaces with fairly structured gardens. The example below is from Zhongshan which is known as a garden city. These spaces really get used and I quite of then came upon out door exercise classes, music classes or some lone exponent with the CD blaring.

Chinese seem to have a fear of silence and often these lovely spaces come with piped music which I found a little  disconcerting, not here but elsewhere.

All the older private gardens now open to the public (for a fee) are very very structured and certainly I never saw anything resembling western gardens and especially nothing looking like a rambling perennial border.  However I did find them very tranquil. 

 Garden views framed by structures 

 Water with its reflections are strong features in all the gardens we visited although some were frozen over !

For the most part we saw the gardens in "winter" except as below in "Autumn"