China Peony Festival Tour April 2009

 

Today we were blessed with such a show of cherry blossoms in both our visits. Everyone loved walking through these gardens.

Yuyuantan Park’s Cherry Blossom Festival
Yuyuantan Park is famous for its cherry blossoms in mid to late April through early May every year. There are about 2000 cherry trees of over 20 different species. Other blossoming trees such as peach are also to be found, as well as tulip flowers. What was also lovely is that they had classical music playing throughout the garden so you could really loose yourself in the sights and sounds. Many of the ladies has these wonderful sprays of cherry blossoms wrapped around their heads and even one of our group did it, so I just had to take a picture of her.

Beijing Botanical Gardens which is situated in the western outskirts of the city between Xiangshan Park and Jade Spring Mountain. The gardens are not
large, only having 3,000 different plant species, but many famous and rare plant specimens are on display.

• The hothouse exhibition in 13 different rooms, is the highlight of the gardens.

• The first room is filled with evergreens and members of the palm family.

• The second room is given over to tropical aquatic plants, including water lilies and flowering taros.

• The third room displays commercial plants and their breeding and propagation. Here, there are
  specimens of the triple-leaved rubber plant, cocoa and coffee trees and the sugar producing sweetleaved
  chrysanthemum which has been introduced into china from abroad.

• There are rooms for demonstrating medicinal plants, aromatic plants and succulents.

• The Peony Garden was open to the public in 1981 and more………..

I could not get over how many trees were in blossom here…I didn’t even take pictures of every type, there were just so many. The botanical garden is a lovely place to visit. Children posing for pictures and I even spotted an old man painting his memories.

We enjoyed a very special Peking Duck Dinner tonight.. Beijing duck is the local flavor of Beijing. The traditional method of preparing Beijing Duck has a history of over a hundred years and boasts a great reputation to this day. (I have personally had Peking Duck prepared 5 different ways now and each was incredible!)

On our way back I took some pictures of the buildings, a bit dark but you can still see the outlines they make in the evening sky.