Beijing 2024 - Forbidden City Gardens and Trees

 

Visiting the Forbidden City, I wasn't exactly expecting to see a lot of gardens and trees and parks. I thought those would be more at the Summer Palace. But I was mistaken. There was even a whole area at the back which was the royal garden. But when they said garden, it was a garden of stones and gems, lol. Very Chinese. But around the area here and there, I also saw unique gardens and trees. And this post is about those things. Above is just a cover of an exhibit I took featuring plants :P I just though it fitting for this post.

So here at the royal garden, you could see it was pretty much concrete. But I don't know if those are hundred or thousand year old trees, because they sure looked like it. The metal structures were erected to support the trees from collapsing. It kinda reminded me of the old trees in Japan, but somehow, it looked rather industrial looking here in China due to the metal support.

There were a few unique trees like this one above. I can't tell if it's one tree, or two? They merged in the middle. So are these life size tree bonzai art at play?

At the garden area, there are pavilions where you could sit down and rest, surrounded by the concrete garden. But this cute little tree here caught my eye.

I went closer, and again, it was one of those weird looking one/two tree. But it was rather short and cute, with lush green leaves at the top.

Here is a full view of it. Pretty neat! You could stand underneath it!

there were also normal looking trees lining other area of the palace like here. This empty space just leads to a locked gate, so no one went there except the palace guards. But I though the space looked rather beautiful.

Here are some cool trees giving shades to the people resting beneath it. This one looked just amazing! Like giant bonsai. And the red and green colour scheme looked pretty cool too. Two trees can share so many people! 

Here is my husband inside the cute little short bonsai tree :P