09-2017
Chinese Version

In September 2017, My daughter and I visited Filoli Garden, a California Historical Landmark located in Silicon Valley. Filoli is an acronym from “Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life.” (The first two letters from the first word in each sentence.)

It was a very hot day. There were very few other visitors in the garden and hydrangea, roses, and dahlia flowers were all happily bloom in full there.

I love how there are many scattered chairs under the big trees in the garden. I often sat on one of the chairs, enjoying the garden view while doing some light reading, a unique personal entertainment of mine.

I showed my daughter my favorite chair in the rose garden.

While sitting on my favorite chair, I told my daughter: “This is a very popular resting place. It is rarely unoccupied.”

We saw that a middle aged lady and her parents were coming toward us. After arrived, the middle aged lady asked: “Could we sit next to you? My parents need to sort out their photos, their cell phone has no more memory for more photos now.”

My daughter said in a friendly way: “Sure, we are leaving.”

After we left my favorite chair, my daughter joked at me: “You are just like her parents because you often took too many photos.”

Then we visited the other chairs in the garden and and sat on them too.

I could not resist comparing the chairs in Filoli Garden with the chairs in the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. As California is a sunny state, sunny day is very common here. I can always find a shady chair to rest in, at any time on a sunny day in Filoli Garden. However, I often had to sit on the ground to rest under the shade of trees, in the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, because the majority of the chairs there are directly under the sky. This comparison made me feel that a private garden bears more human interest in mind than a public garden does, in subtle detail like this.

We visited my childhood memory of stinky peony (cashmere plant). I told my daughter, now this plant is very rare in my hometown Zigong. I let my daughter smell my fingers after I had pinched a leaf of the cashmere plant. After smelling my fingers, she commented: “This is a unfamiliar strange bad small I have no words to describe it.” Rarely does one see stinky peonies which really don’t look like peonies at all. It is a very unique flower.

In the garden, my daughter was playing the Pokemon Go game, so she followed the map in the game to catch pokemon and came to the the back of the Filoli main hall, where pomegranate flowers were fully blooming.

I told her, the very bright red flowers all over the trees are pomegranate flowers. She said: “I finally see how bright red the pomegranate flowers are.”

Before we exited the garden, I turned back to see the lily pond and very symmetrical garden with the faraway mountain as the background and I said: “A really marvelous garden.”

Courtyard

Dignified Beauty, Delicate

Background

Faraway Mountain, Verdant.