It's a Shanghai show all the way! The business of flowers and the scent of nature

Having long been accustomed to seeing cafes in Shanghai packed with young patrons, I was a bit surprised to find so many elderly customers when I visited a coffee boutique near a riverside park in the Pudong New Area late last month.

They came in groups and most seats had been taken when I finished ordering a cup of coffee mixed with sesame. After finally getting a seat, I found myself sitting close to a group of older women. Even without paying particular attention, I could hear most of their casual conversation.

It turned out that, like me, they had just returned from a visit to the park by the Huangpu River, a sub-venue of this year's Shanghai International Flower Show that ran from April 18 to May 11.

I ran into these senior coffee connoisseurs on April 28, a weekday. I was wondering whether coffee business here was always so brisk even on weekdays.

"We're usually busy on weekends," a young cafe clerk told me. "During weekdays, we mainly serve office workers nearby, but since the opening of the flower show, our business has been expanding, big-time, thanks to the increasing visitor flows."

The coffee shop, which opened only last year, had seats both outside and inside, but you could hardly find one available anywhere. Some nearby shops, serving various delicacies, were crowded with senior visitors as well. These shops are all situated within the New Bund Red Lane, a pedestrian-friendly riverside commercial center that opened last September.

The New Bund Red Lane, in turn, is part of a larger commercial community linked by a 1.5-kilometer-long avenue, which also extends to the riverside park. And not just the park, but the entire avenue became a sub-venue of the flower gala.

The latest Shanghai government statistics published last Friday showed that the sub-venue in Pudong alone had attracted 4.22 million visitors and registered an increase of nearly 22 percent in business turnover compared with the same period last year. Some shops or plazas witnessed even a bigger surge in sales, thanks to increased visitor flows generated by the flower show.

Overall, the 24-day event, which had two main venues at Xintiandi and Shanghai Botanical Garden, respectively, as well as several sub-venues across the city, attracted some 10 million visitors, about 497 percent more than the figure for last year's show. The total exhibition area this year was spread over 390 hectares, while that of last year spanned 100 hectares.

The Xintiandi venue alone attracted 1.03 million visitors, and recorded an increase of 16 percent in commercial sales year on year. I twice visited the show at Xintiandi, and each time I went there I found myself "submerged" in crowds of visitors, including throngs of enthusiastic shoppers and gourmets.

More than consumption

Who would not love flowers? About 10 million visitors flocked to the flower show in just 24 days. That speaks volumes about people's propensity for all things natural and beautiful.

Flowers not only bring consumers to cafes and shopping plazas, they can be money-spinners, too, as is the case with tulips in the Netherlands. During this year's show in Shanghai, more than 100 new breeds of flowers were exhibited in a special promotional event in Sinan Mansions.

But there's more to flowers than their economic value or superficial beauty. As shown in the layout of this year's flower show, the colorful plants help create a low-carbon urban landscape that benefits both man and other living beings.

As soon as I entered the above-mentioned riverside park, I was amazed to find many visitors – young and old – rambling or running around a work of installation art in the shape of a huge beehive. As I drew nearer, I noticed that even the ground on which the "beehive" stood was paved with framed pebbles designed to mimic the hexagonal pattern of beehives.

I scanned a QR code on a signpost in the bee-themed garden and discovered the criteria of the designer – a local municipal facilities maintenance company – in choosing different categories of flowers for the miniature garden.

It dawned on me that a plethora of sunflowers, Spanish needles and cutleaf coneflowers – all important food sources for bees – had been chosen for the garden, and that certain other plants with blue or purple hues, such as larkspur flowers, were added to enrich and balance the garden's overall colors.

More important was the designing company's explanation about why it had decided to create a bee-themed garden. The reason was simple: It wanted to promote public awareness of bees' pivotal role in maintaining biodiversity as well as their survival challenges.

To be specific, the designer explained, bees are responsible for pollinating about 70 percent of the world's crops and wild plants, but urban construction the world over has resulted in a substantial habitat loss for them. Moreover, bee populations also face challenges from pesticides and global warming.

What impressed me most was the designer's citation of the late American ecologist and writer Rachel Carson's popular book "Silent Spring" – widely recognized as one of the most influential publications in the modern environmental movement.

Based on the partial Chinese translation cited here, I browsed through "Silent Spring" again and found the original quote toward the end of the book: "Through all these new, imaginative and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life – with living populations and all their pressures and counter-pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves."

To this I would add another quote from Carson (1907-1964): "The earth's vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place."

The bee-themed garden is just one example of Shanghai's thoughtful efforts to create a better habitat for wildlife as well as a better home for its residents. From the New Naturalistic Bridge in Pudong – a garden in the air indeed – to the "Sense in the City" garden at Xintiandi, one could see how nature has been gradually introduced to the heart of the city.

In an earlier interview with Shanghai Daily published on April 21, British landscape architect Lee Parks, who designed "Sense in the City," said his garden was about biodiversity and he was trying to attract butterflies to the city using different plants. He added that certain species of butterflies had indeed come to the garden and that there were many habitats and plant species to bring nature into the city.

I loved this quote from him the most: "I love to be out in nature. I have to have at least ten to fifteen minutes every single day in a park or in a green space, just to keep me healthy."

It reminds me of a post on the walls near an exit at the Xintiandi station of Metro Line 10, which I happened to discover on May 21 when I visited the former site of the flower show. The post is written in Chinese with an impressive message. It invites us to take a seat in nature and inhale the rich scent of the earth.

So I did, accordingly. I sat down at Xintiandi where some older men and women were taking a walk along forested paths. And unwittingly, I found myself surrendering to a captivating aroma released from the soil and vegetation after a rainfall.

From a distance, I saw that the "Sense in the City" was still there, becoming a botanical oasis that beckoned to many senior citizens. The flower show is over, but the scent of nature stays.