The Paper's reporter Chen Yue
What should a pocket park look like, with open green spaces, flower trails, and seating?
Shanghai offers a wealth of answers. Tongfu Garden (formerly known as Heather Greenland) is one of them, located in the southwest corner of the intersection of Shimen 1st Road and Nanjing West Road, it is like a small courtyard in the downtown, and a few "screens" isolate the hustle and bustle.
Tongfu Garden. The pictures in this article are all pictures of the surging news reporter Chen Yue
Facing the subway entrance of Nanjing West Road, close to commercial spaces such as Xingye Taikoo Li, backed by historical buildings such as The Tongfu Building, the intersection where the Tongfu Garden is located is always busy. Passers-by will find a special presence – a small garden surrounded by huge green walls, a lilac space with lush vegetation, abundant flowers, babbling water and landscape stones.
The garden has three entrances, located in the three directions of Nanjing West Road, Shimen 1st Road and Wujiang Road. No matter where you enter, the first thing that catches your eye is the water curtain wall, the water flows quietly from a high place, evergreen plants such as Kanemori Privet and Paved Cypress and grass flowers such as star flowers, geraniums, longevity flowers, blue snowflakes, and begonias of the four seasons spread along the green wall, and red maples, chicken claw maples, and feather maples are distributed throughout the courtyard.
The 5.5-meter-high vertical green wall separates the noise of the street entrance, but it is not completely closed, and the scenery inside and outside can still be seen through the gap between the green walls. Most of the passers-by passing through Tongfu Garden passed straight by, and there was no shortage of curious people who stopped to play with this space and pulled out their mobile phones to leave a few photos.
Why is there such a small garden at the intersection? The staff of the Jing'an District Greening Management Center told the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) reporter that "the original intention of setting up a vertical green wall is to cover municipal facilities", because there is a substation underground, the ground is a 3.5-meter-high substation entrance and exit building, affecting the street style, and the growth space of plant roots is limited, and the idea of creating a vertical green wall came into being.
"The combination design of the vertical green wall creates a rich spatial transformation, forming a dual space inside and outside, the outside is a street corner space with an artistic green wall as the background, and the interior is a light and exquisite urban courtyard." Greeners said. In addition, the surrounding new and old buildings are intertwined, the style is mixed, the higher floors have a strong sense of spatial oppression on the site, and the small garden uses a large number of Morandi's purple perforated aluminum plates, and cooperates with the overhead line into the ground and the closing rod remediation project to hide various boxes and coordinate the surrounding environment.
Considering that the surrounding area of the site is dominated by commercial office land and there are fewer green spaces, the emergence of Tongfu Garden also conforms to the public's demand for nature. The greening department said that it provides a public place for surrounding residents and pedestrians to pass, rest and relax, creating good conditions for improving the image of the city, enriching urban functions and promoting the coordinated development of the region.
In winter, Tongfu Garden remains colorful and vibrant. According to the greening department, due to the restrictions of the underground growth environment, the courtyard is mainly planted with small trees, shrubs, grass flowers, ornamental grasses, etc., and the three-dimensional green landscape wall and the grass flowers in the courtyard are replaced six times a year, which are reflected with various colored modeling plants such as weeping plums and feather maples in the courtyard.
Editor-in-Charge: Gao Wen
Proofreader: Liu Wei