news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Liu Ming, a young man born in 1985 from Wenchuan,

35 years old, not working, not married,

Over the past decade, he and his father have

Spent all my savings,

On their own homestead

A beautiful and magical botanical garden was built.

The porcelain garden designed by Liu Ming himself covers an area of ​​500 square meters

The homestead plus the surrounding wasteland,

The botanical garden covers a total area of ​​6,000 square meters.

More than 2,000 native species have been collected.

Among them are many rare species and unconfirmed new species.

There are also giant anthropomorphic plant sculptures in the garden.

The shape is strange, lively and vivid.

It's like a simple rural version of "Park Güell".

A corner of the botanical garden

Liu Ming accepted an interview with Yitiao

After the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake,

A large area of ​​houses in the village collapsed.

The ecological environment has been severely damaged.

This pair of "flower-crazy" father and son,

Determined to build a sanctuary for the wild plants in western Sichuan.

Due to financial constraints,

Currently, only one-third of the planned botanical garden has been completed.

In early August, Yitiao visited the Wenchuan Botanical Garden.

Liu Ming talked about his dream of plant cultivation and was very determined:

"When the time comes, we will build a large plant ship and a mosaic plant house here..."

"Our ultimate dream is to create a fairy tale world of plants."

Editor: Han Jiaqi

Editor: Chen Ziwen

Liu Ming in the Botanical Garden

The botanical garden of Liu Ming and his son is hidden in the canyon of Minshan Mountain in western Sichuan. It is only 13 kilometers away from the epicenter of the "5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake" and is also the starting point for entering the western Sichuan Plateau.

On the way to the park, the mountains are endless, the sky is low, and the clouds seem to be within reach. In the evening, wild monkeys in the mountains often appear around the park.

The entrance to the botanical garden is shaped like a book, with the words "Plants Change the World" inlaid in irregular mosaics. In this village where even takeout cannot be delivered, the concept of "world" seems huge, but it can also be very specific. Plants participate in the daily lives of villagers, from oxygen, food to daily necessities, which are all visible and tangible.

The 3-meter-high "Eight Immortals of the Plant World" at the entrance

Pagoda (left), Pagoda grows in plateaus above 4,000 meters above sea level and blooms only once in its lifetime

As soon as we entered the garden, the 3-meter-tall "Eight Immortals of the Plant World" guarded the two sides of the road, looking quirky and cute. "Each immortal has a plant magic weapon, just like the Eight Immortals crossing the sea," Liu Ming led us in. The colorful tile path led to the mosaic sculptures in the form of plants - the Lily Pavilion, the Gentian Pavilion, and the Pagoda Pagoda. "You can imagine yourself as an insect visiting flowers."

The walls of the park are composed of dozens of mosaic collages of plants, and each plant has become a "spirit": Tianshan Adenophora grows legs, irises are bright dancers, and Jade Phoenix transforms into white doves flapping their wings. These mosaic landscapes are just the embodiment of some of Liu Ming's fantasies.

The Jacaranda in the Botanical Garden (left) is made into an anthropomorphic mosaic pattern (right)

Aerial photo of the Botanical Gardens

Liu Ming was born in 1989 and is 35 years old this year. He is thin and speaks slowly and gently. He joked that there are very few "left-behind youth" like him in the village. Most of his childhood playmates have settled in the city and have several children. He is neither married nor in a relationship.

Plants have become his only companions in daily life. During the day, he takes care of the plants, watering, pollinating, sowing and propagating them. After dinner, he looks up information and compiles a catalog of introduced species. Plants cannot speak, and Liu Ming does not need to speak either, so language has become unfamiliar to him.

The botanical garden preserves 2,000 native species, most of which are plateau plants introduced and bred by the father and son, and are stored in two greenhouses in the park. Among them are many rare plants and new species that have not yet been published.

Green-tailed silkworm moth (left) and butterfly (right) in the botanical garden

Glechoma longituba in the botanical garden

In the mosaic garden, native plants from western Sichuan embrace the sculptures, including Buddaria, western Sichuan cherry, stinking peony, Yunnan stone peach, thin house orchid, and jujube... Small animals also visit frequently. Red-billed blue tit prefers the pyracantha fruit in the garden, and squirrels steal wild cherry pits in autumn. In the corners, there are often sneaky mantises, gorgeous dragon lizards, and color-changing Emei tree frogs.

On days with good weather, the cloud shadows wander leisurely in the garden from morning to night.

The village after the "5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake"

Building a botanical garden was a dream that the father and son had cherished for ten years. After the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the village was reduced to ruins in an instant. Rocks of all sizes rolled down from the surrounding mountains. The National Highway 213 in front of their home was cracked half a meter deep, and the house had four or five cracks. The father, Liu Xianyou, recalled: "The sky and the earth shook, the roads were completely cut off, and everything collapsed."

What was most heartbreaking was that Liu Xianyou's rare orchids covering more than 1,000 square meters were almost completely destroyed in the earthquake. In the early 21st century, the market value of these orchids soared to tens of millions of yuan, and a single seedling of some varieties could be sold for 200,000 yuan. This was the period when the family was closest to the "wealth myth".

But the myth was shattered by an earthquake. When the earthquake occurred, Liu Xianyou was purchasing a special fresh-keeping bag at the flower, bird and fish market in Dujiangyan, and Liu Ming was an apprentice in a hair salon in Chengdu. The only road connecting the village to the outside world was blocked, and Liu Xianyou could only walk back to his hometown from Dujiangyan, climbing over mountains and ridges with a bamboo pole. Three days later, he stood on the hill opposite his home and saw the tempered greenhouse in the garden shattered. The orchids in the ruins were like scattered corpses, dying of exhaustion, and his tears fell.

Wild flowers photographed by Liu Ming

After the family spent three months in the temporary resettlement site, Liu Ming accompanied his father to the wild to photograph plants. He saw the devastated mountain ridges, and species were completely destroyed where landslides and mudslides passed. He felt strongly about the "passivity" of plant survival: "In the face of disaster, people can help each other, but plants can only stay where they are."

From then on, Liu Ming and his father planned to build a shelter for the plants. If these plants could be transplanted from high-altitude mountains and fields and adapt to low-altitude areas, they might have more chances of survival.

Liu Ming performs daily maintenance on plants (left) and conducts field research in the mountains (right)

Western Sichuan belongs to the Hengduan Mountains, with an altitude difference of up to 4,000 meters and extremely rich species. In the small Wenchuan County, there are 8 different climate zones and more than 4,000 species.

The botanical garden of the father and son is located at an altitude of 1,000 meters, which is a transition zone between high altitude and low altitude, and is very suitable for the transitional domestication of alpine plants.

The longevity bamboo in the botanical garden (above); Epimedium brevifolium (below)

Liu Ming explained: "If you directly introduce alpine plants from an altitude of 2,000 to 3,000 meters to the plains, 99% of them may not be able to adapt. But if you can domesticate them at an altitude of more than 1,000 meters, and then transplant them to the plains after a few years, the survival rate will be greatly improved."

Liu Ming grew up surrounded by wild flowers and weeds. In his memory, the riverbanks were dotted with Bletilla striata and in summer, large patches of wild lilies grew on the cliffs.

The journey to the village school was long, and in order to kill the long time, Liu Minghui and the young man picked a kind of small blue flower and sucked the honey inside. Later he learned that this small blue flower had a poetic name, called Minjiang Blue Snow Flower.

My father Liu Xianyou's obsession with plants is well-known throughout Aba Prefecture. On TV, a host gave him a resounding nickname - "Aba Flower King", and when he walked on the street, some villagers jokingly called him "Playboy".

In the 1990s, my father Liu Xianyou was with foreign friends (left); Liu Xianyou photographed plants in the wild (right)

Liu Xianyou was born in 1968, and is only about 1.5 meters tall. His thin figure makes him move lightly and agilely. During the filming, he climbed up a tree four or five meters high to "test the wind" for everyone. There was a cliff diagonally below the tree. After the heavy rain, the sound of the Minjiang River's waves shook the canyon.

In the 1990s, Liu Xianyou became a plant guide, taking researchers and foreign friends from all over the country to investigate species in western Sichuan. Liu Xianyou vaguely felt that the wild plants in the mountains were "worth viewing". In order to collect money to buy a camera to take pictures of plants, he went up the mountain to collect fungus and medicinal herbs, and then exchanged baskets of wild medicinal herbs for banknotes, and finally collected 1,000 yuan to buy a camera.

Most of the photos of plants taken by my father Liu Xianyou were destroyed in the earthquake

"Few people in Wenchuan County use cameras," Liu Xianyou later bought a tripod. Every time he goes out, he carries at least five or six rolls of film in his bag. In 30 years, he has taken nearly 100,000 "portraits" of plants.

In 1999, at the turn of the century, Liu Xianyou began to try to grow orchids. In less than two years, the orchids he grew were sold at a sky-high price of 10,000 yuan. A group of people from Yunnan ran to Liu Xianyou's orchid base and pointed a gun at him, trying to steal his orchid seedlings. He quickly took a kitchen knife from the kitchen and confronted the other party for more than ten minutes.

Watching his father create his own "legend", Liu Ming began to rebel against the traditional path of "studying and going to college".

At the age of 16, Liu Ming dropped out of school and traveled around

Liu Ming dropped out of school in the second semester of his senior year. He dropped out on a whim. It was the eve of the division of liberal arts and science. One afternoon, he dropped all the books in his desk onto the table to create the illusion that he was there. The moment he escaped from the school gate, Beyond's song "No More Hesitation" rang in his mind, and he felt that his life suddenly became clear.

After a year of traveling around aimlessly, Liu Ming went to Chengdu to study hairdressing. As an apprentice in a barbershop, he did not have the freedom he imagined in society. From morning to night, he could only shuttle between heads, curling hair, mixing dye, washing and massaging hair. He got up at 6:30 in the morning and returned to the dormitory after closing at 11 o'clock in the evening.

Six months later, the Wenchuan earthquake destroyed his hometown, and Liu Ming returned to his hometown. Compared with the vast and fantastic nature, the city life dominated by consumption was empty and boring, so Liu Ming decided not to go out anymore and resumed his old dream of planting with his father.

A corner of the mosaic garden

Before building the porcelain garden, Liu Ming watched a lot of garden documentaries. His favorite was the rock garden in India, a surreal world built entirely of garbage.

Liu Ming's fantasy gradually took shape. He wanted to build a fairytale park with local characteristics. But the problem of money followed. The two or three years after the earthquake were the most difficult period for the family. The savings of tens of thousands of yuan soon ran out, and the botanical garden dared not start construction.

During an inspection trip, Liu Ming discovered that Pengzhou City in Sichuan Province is rich in liquor. There are many wine bottle factories in the county town, and colorful discarded wine bottles are piled up at the door all year round. These wine bottles are defective products with defects during firing and cannot be used normally. Liu Ming transported these "garbage" back home at a very low price, and transported 50 tons in total.

Liu Ming and the villagers put up mosaics together

In 2018, the construction of the porcelain garden finally began. Liu Ming called on uncles and aunts in the village who had not gone out to work to build this "whimsical" botanical garden together.

First, we smashed the bottles and sorted the tiles by color. Then we used steel bars to weld the overall structure of the sculpture and covered it with a layer of wire mesh. After the structure was stable, we applied cement and pasted the tiles.

Small patterns are sometimes particularly time-consuming. For example, the alpine plant Meconopsis has tiny velvety thorns on its stems, so the aunts have to use double-wheel pliers to cut the porcelain pieces into small pieces, and then use tweezers to carefully attach the pieces one by one.

Liu Ming's design sketch

Liu Ming had never learned to paint, so he could only use colored pencils to reproduce the "plant universe" in his mind. Although the drawings were crooked, fortunately, the villagers could understand.

There are also some impromptu "masterstrokes" in the garden. During the construction, Liu Ming saw an eye-spotted mantis in the park. There were two round spots on its emerald green wings, like two eyes. Liu Ming gently touched it with a branch and saw that it spread out its inner wings that gradually changed from dark red to transparent, like a queen's gorgeous robe. He immediately decided to make a sculpture of an eye-spotted mantis.

Before artificial pollination, Liu Ming will take a "ID photo" of the plant first

Running a botanical garden requires self-study of many things, including landscape architecture, horticultural construction, and plant taxonomy. Liu Ming started from scratch. His English foundation is weak, and "it may take him four or five days to understand an English paper."

Although he is single, Liu Ming has a growing list of things he is worried about. Before going to bed, he often thinks of a certain plant that is about to bloom. He will immediately get up, turn on the flashlight, and check the shed before he can sleep peacefully.

In order to introduce new species, Liu Ming drives more than 100,000 kilometers every year.

After the botanical garden was completed, children from the village often came to play hopscotch and hide-and-seek, and scholars from research institutes all over the country also came to visit, but the scale of the garden was far from what the father and son had expected.

As for the porcelain garden, the 500 square meters completed so far is only one-third of what the two had envisioned. The giant plant ship, plant castle, flower pandas, etc. have not been started due to tight funds. The number of introduced species and the horticultural varieties developed are also far from the final goal.

Introducing plants also means that Liu Ming and his father spend a lot of time "on the road" throughout the year. From Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Tibet, to Guangxi and Hainan, they travel more than 100,000 kilometers each year and have visited most parts of China.

Anatomy of the orchid of Fritillaria weixiensis

Most of the primeval forests have no roads, so Liu Ming needs to rely on his senses to cross the forest. "Some places may be covered with fallen leaves, and there is nothing underneath. Then I can jump down and jump four or five meters."

Leeches and ticks' "sneak attacks" are common. Leeches are everywhere in the woods. After being bitten, Liu Ming's wound will be inflamed for as short as 10 days or as long as a month. Ticks' invasion is more secretive. He often finds ticks burrowing into his skin when he is taking a shower, forming small red bags.

Liu Ming and his father are cultivating plants

But these episodes were not surprising to his father. Liu Xianyou once experienced severe hypothermia during a field survey. At that time, in Sanchagou, Li County, Aba Prefecture, at an altitude of 3,200 meters, the temperature at night was only 2-3 degrees. A sudden rainstorm made him feel that his brain was lacking oxygen and his muscles were out of control. In an emergency, Liu Xianyou was carried into a nearby cave by two companions. After a bonfire was lit, Liu Xianyou gradually regained his body temperature and consciousness.

There are too many thrilling rumors on the plateau, "Many people really died on the mountain", Liu Xianyou said with fear. Another time, Liu Xianyou fell into a ravine, which was estimated to be more than 5 meters deep. When he was going down the mountain, his lumbar spine was in excruciating pain, and it took him 3 months to get out of bed and walk.

Tibetan coral moss photographed in Muli County, Sichuan Province

Finding the plants they like is the reward given to them by every adventure. Not long ago, Liu Ming saw for the first time a Tibetan coral moss blooming all over a canyon at the border of Sichuan and Yunnan. The survival conditions of this plant in the wild are very harsh, and it is rare to see such a large community. The light purple flowers are like stars in the sky, with more than tens of thousands of plants, which is very spectacular.

There are also some plants that have been searched for for many years, but there is still no trace of them. For example, Epimedium calyx, a plant that has been listed in the Red List of Endangered Species, was last recorded in the 1990s by Japanese botanist Jusuke Ogisu, and the place of discovery was Baoxing County, Ya'an, Sichuan. In the past few years, Liu Ming and his father have been to Baoxing seven or eight times, but still found nothing.

Liu Ming hopes that by hybridizing and selecting new horticultural varieties suitable for plain areas, he can one day make native plants in western Sichuan available to the public.

Liu Ming's goal is to expand the botanical garden's species from 2,000 to 4,000 in the next five years.

The cost of introducing new species and conducting scientific research is very high, and Liu Ming still has no savings. Many of his former classmates have properties worth millions of yuan in the city, upgraded their cars to two-wheelers, and their bellies have grown a little bit because of drinking. Faced with these "temptations in the city", Liu Ming feels "nothing in his heart".

On the Internet, the age of 35 is like a node, triggering endless anxiety. Layoffs, mortgages, second child policies... These topics are unfamiliar to Liu Ming. His intuition tells him that things on the Internet should be an illusion.

Liu Ming firmly believes that "all things are created by nature, and each has its own way". This ancient truth comes from his more than ten years of cultivation experience day after day. The journey of each plant is different, from a seedling to a flower and a fruit, but the earth has never let down any seed.