It’s hard to believe I posted this nearly 8 years ago. Sigh, lol……Time’s pageantry is motoring along on its own while we celebrate small victories and horrible losses, almost like it doesn’t even care!  😉

Needless to say, this gorgeous Garden has evolved further over time. This garden has been stupendously maintained by very diligent crew from Day One – a position of much regard from this corner. It has become more peaceful, more necessary and more existentially perfect as each year has passed. It is rapidly moving up as a Bucket List sort of destination. The incredible craftsmen, designers and organizers of this gorgeous and serene bit of soulful peacefulness in the middle of a raging and rather wealthy city I am happy to say I knew well enough to have worked side by side during it’s construction. No one gained more than me from all that.

(The images expand – these are among the few remaining gigantic images I have retained in this blog, owing to the hoggish nature of the bandwidth required. A left click on the picture will isolate it – some of them expand yet again by clicking one more time).

Enjoy.

I have no idea who she is and I hope she doesn’t mind terribly but her head sure did fit real nice into the hole in that rock. If you enlarge it, you’ll see what I mean. That rock and many others are among many features abounding at Portland’s Chinese garden – a small urban Wonderland of lushness, quiet natural and man made beauty, set right smack downtown in the midst of it all.

Well-maintained and elegant, some phenonomenally gorgeous plantings adorn the garden, from this well-trained Pine to the Weeping Willow behind it whose Spring and Summer look adds dramatic softness – if such a thing can be said – to the ambiance. The building we see in the picture above is “The Boat Shaped Pavilion” or “Painted Boat in Misty Rain” – an altogether appropriate title for a city that gets the Winter rainfall of Portland. I got lucky this day on mid February, catching some good solid sunlight and thoroughly enjoying every second of it.

I was able to get close pictures of some of the things I like best about the garden, especially including this roof line of the “Waterside Pavilion”, with another gorgeous Pine framing it. Because of the protecting nature of the walled Garden and the closeness of the buildings, Palm Trees are allowed some growth inside. They barely eke out an existence – if at all – in Portland, proper, but they make a fabulous and very rich addition to this landscape. In Summer, the Banana Trees also show up, spreading proudly and looking every bit as lush. At this time of year in the garden, they are pretty much just stumps.

Here is yet another look at “The Boat”, featuring more water this time. I will now commence to including more pictures of water, the essential completing element to this Garden, especially inasmuch as it occupies a full one third of the grounds. Prior to this – in my other posts – I stuck to some details, but the pictures to come will illustrate a more total picture of this charming place and the role water plays in it over all.

Here’s where the water “begins”, cascading down this very recessed waterfall and into the large pond below. I love the inset provisions of the falls, especially since I know, as a maker of these sorts of waterfalls and creek, the incredible amount of piercing noise running water can make. By recessing the falls, it serves a couple of functions:

1. It does keep the noise down, protected as it is by those protruding sets of columns on either side.

2. It does not overwhelm in any sense – aural or visual – from the natural peacefulness of the Garden itself.

In itself, it is not particularly striking, although it has its own gorgeousness by virtue of the surrounding rocks. In the picture below, the waterfall is recessed, to the left, barely discernible.

In the next picture, we are standing mere feet away from the falls but toward the other side, Westward. As you can see, there are essentially large columns surrounding the recessed falls, allowing huge gaps or holes to vent some of the sound and fury of the rushing water.

Naturally, the falls serves to purify and aerate the recirculating water nicely, as well as to provide a very legitimate, yet not overwhelming point of interest. It was exceedingly well-designed in my opinion, for the reasons listed. Everything in this garden most definitely works as a whole. While outstanding in its own right, any feature here blends with the others to simply give one an uplifting sense of elegance and congruity. It is organic and full of vibrancy, resonating before you catch your own handfuls of wonder. This is the work of the professional’s professional – and it stands as a virtual teaching aid for the intention and meaning of Feng Shui.

Looking back now at “The Hall Of Brocade Clouds” – the main “meeting hall” – we see the pine once again framing the building and surrounded by water. Another look below at the Hall, some water and seen above the hand-carved granite railings and bridge, constructed in China and sent over for assembly by the artisans who actually made them:

Those granite railings and that bridge lead to pretty much my favorite spot in the Garden, “The Moon-Locking Pavilion”, a wonderfully-named gazebo-like structure set in the middle of the lake and offering a spot to see the moon’s reflection in the water around it. There are always people there when I visit and kids flock to it. Notice as well, we have blooms! The very early Citisus plants are popping open some early yellow. In fact, there was a bold and adventurous Forsythia I somehow missed getting a picture of, dangit, but now that I think of it, I do have a gorgeous Camelia to look at following the Moon-Locking Pavilion. Let’s hurry now.

Camelias! OK, I’ll grant you they are not overwhelming or magnificent on their own. What they DO represent for this Winter-weary soul is the obvious – flowers and the coming Spring.

A closer look a desperate man can love:

So, I was excited about the whole darn thing, you betcha. After all, I helped make the place. It is quite an event any time I go, reminiscing about small items of construction, seeing the development of plants, and sometimes answering questions because people are curious about small items of interest. Once engaged, people tend to hang on a while, asking a few more and enduring my own distinct loquaciousness which plagues me owing to my love of people. It’s a true fault. 😉

As the American Indians liked to say: “It was a good day.”

The Pathways

(click on images to enlarge)

Once inside the Garden, the unfolding commences – it is truly amazing that there are so many little vistas packed inside of what is in reality just a city block’s worth of a Chinese Garden. From the original “wince” at the new price of admission (it went up to $8) and the newer economic realities, it is still fine enough to set reluctance’s aside and to perhaps concentrate even more on what the garden offers. Complex and entertaining from a strictly architectural perspective, what has been built here is quite remarkable by any standards. The purity of concept and design has imported the principles of the classic Chinese Garden virtually intact. Whereas a Japanese Garden informs us within the spaces between events and invites the imagination to struggling heights, the Chinese gardens are better able to assault the senses in tasteful yet plentiful method. There are little “miracles” abounding. Let’s use walkways as an example:

Complex patterns composed of a wide variety of stones are inset with a very specific depth in mind, better able to “massage the feet” during the walk – a humorous but apt statement (and intention!) made by the designer of this Garden in conversation with me during the construction of it. Ironically, the City, in its wisdom, declared a rather large swath of the pathways to be “failures” in terms of building code, requiring them to be destroyed, then replaced. The problem was handicapped access and the 1/4″ depth the small stones were set at – they were deemed “too deep” by their reckonings. They required them reset to 1/8″ deep, so as to allow smoother passage by wheelchairs. Interestingly, while a setback, this was done post-haste with most of the grumbling coming from those of us who watched the men work with our own version of intense respect and admiration. The dudes laying the stones smiled and moved along, unperturbed. Then they asked me for more cigarettes. I was The Man. 😉

Their constant jabbering was a memory of pure pleasure.

The smiles of the workers were my most lingering image of these crews and of the overall Zeitgeist of the entire project. Good-natured to a fault and well aware of their roles and of what they were constructing, they were hard-working and pleasant – true professionals at their extremely unique craft. As you can see from these pathway pictures, they were also very, very good at what they did.

These sinuous ribbons for traffic are like these magical transports, easy to follow and containing their very own integral element of whimsy and delight in and of themselves. The remainder of the garden looks as sleek as a thoroughbred race horse and maybe more interesting. But it is here – at the most very basic level of what propels one around the park – that the intensity of interest serves as a motivating engine for the more whole body and soul experience. When you are walking on Heaven, the rest of it all just falls into place and your expectations rise. Here’s the deal – you never get disappointed.

I adore the detail, myself.

Always surprising, the paths change in pattern without your own attention even considering where it took place. It is some mysteriously-designed process of inserted surprise, tucked away in detail so remote you have to go back to try and locate the pattern transitions. I swear, a pathway fanatic such as myself could spend hours here just inspecting the path itself – no, wait! I did that. For days, during construction, in fact. I did learn something extremely worthwhile, by the way: Yes, you can do this at home. I’m being serious, actually. Granted, while the labor is such that any bids I made for installing something similar were too rich for the clients I plied with the idea, I may have just found the wrong folks to try it out on or possibly chosen the wrong materials. But I can guarantee this: I would do this in a New York Minute for anyone who would pay for this enduring and fascinating surface. Sigh, maybe when I get rich, I’ll do it for myself.

It truly never ends here. It is one constantly absorbing and totally relaxing venture into one of Man’s greatest conceptual achievements, modest yet complex and amazingly abundant. And this post has dealt merely with the walkways!

Next, we’ll visit the buildings and plantings and see what the 33% of the place composed of water itself provides a viewer. Here – below – is a small hint of what a building and it’s cozy and intimate views can provide – and bear in mind, another angle of viewing is just as remarkable, from the same vantage point: