Staten Island Chinese Garden

Staten Island is one of the boroughs of New York City, a ferry trip from the very bottom of Manhattan Island.  In the Botanical Garden is a complete Ming-style Garden of Poetic Pleasure  寄興園 Jixing Yuan.

It has all the features I enjoy: bamboo and rocks, bridges, cloudform walls, doorways and pebble patterns.

Apparently the crane mosaic includes broken pieces of rice bowls, representing China, and broken beer bottles, representing America used by the craftspeople who built the garden.

This calligraphy is a couplet from a longer poem by Song dynasty poet Su Shi.

In the dense bamboo and deep flowers, birds naturally sing; in clear water, rocks appear and you can count the fish.

   

 

Stroll through the garden in autumn, still shots in autumn.

The garden is a peaceful contrast with the noise of the city, and well worth the ferry ride.  It is considered to have a similar style to the Lingering Garden in Suzhou.  It was completed in 1999, and is sadly already quite dilapidated.