above water gardens

Over the Easter weekend, it has been necessary for me to attend the Jockey Club clinic in Sheung Shui (‘above (the) water’) for treatment because the Fanling clinic has been closed. Naturally, we don’t simply just travel there and back. we’re on unfamiliar turf, so we want to take a look around.

On the first day, a short distance from the clinic, in the angle between Jockey Club Road and Lung Sum Avenue, we discovered the prosaically named Sheung Shui Garden No. 1. It was still early in the morning, and a mass dance-a-thon was taking place under a huge permanent canopy:

Some of the dancers appeared to be following a set series of moves, while others just did whatever they felt like. This kind of thing is a common sight in Hong Kong’s parks.

Once we’d walked past the dancers, it didn’t take me long to notice the way this park was paved:

 The pink pavers are granite, while the bluish grey ones are probably a type of slate. The other points of interest in this photo are the gazebo—there are several in this park—and the man asleep on the right. He is resting on a small table between two chairs, and the tabletop has a Chinese chess board engraved on it, which reminds me to advise that you should never play Chinese chess in public, because you will be surrounded by kibbitzers suggesting your next move. And almost all these suggestions will be incorrect!

This is a closer look at the pattern in the foreground of the previous photo:

These patterns occur at regular intervals throughout the park. The whitish central points of the star are another type of granite, while the dark rock appears to be dolerite, which is the shallow intrusive equivalent of the volcanic rock basalt.

This photo shows the reason for our initial foray into the park:

In case you can’t distinguish the male/female icons, just remember that it’s ‘pink for girls, blue for boys’!

On the second day, Paula planned to travel into Kowloon to see her father, so I thought I’d look for an alternative route home. Having noted that the park I’ve just described is ‘No. 1’, I assumed that there must be others. It didn’t take long for me to discover No. 3:

This park is completely out of sight from any road, and it is surrounded by commercial buildings:

The covered walkway in the previous photo has some interesting paving:

There are 1×1, 1×2 and 2×2 blocks, but there would need to be an extra 1×1 block, or one fewer 1×1 block and one more 1×2 block, for this arrangement to cover a larger rectangle completely.

The colonnade in the photo above is the central focus of this garden, although there is a second colonnade to one side:

The pattern that I illustrated above in connection with No. 1 is repeated here, but with a subtle difference:

Notice the eight red diamonds surrounding the central pattern. This photo also shows an exit from / entrance to the park. They are all like this, presumably to deter cyclists!

Sheung Shui Garden No. 2 is located across a road from the exit shown in the previous photograph. Unlike Nos. 1 and 3, it is a narrow strip juxtaposed between roads and a multi-storey car park, but it still has some interesting features. For example, this is the repeating pattern here:

This narrow garden bends through 90 degrees halfway along its length, and there are two gazebos, one on each leg:

I sat on the seat seen in the second photo for quite a long time, because I wanted to take the next photo with nobody in it:

From a distance, the circular colonnade on the corner appears to be utterly nondescript, but it is the location for by far the most impressive paving in any of these gardens:

There are in fact twelve concentric rings of granite blocks, and if you stop to think about it, there must be an equal number of blocks in each ring. The blocks must be wider the further you are from the centre for this to work, and because there are no obvious gaps between the blocks, whoever laid these blocks must have performed some mathematical calculations beforehand. Unfortunately, the central pattern has been damaged, possibly by someone dropping a heavy weight on it.

Although I cannot say definitively that there are only three gardens in this collection, I am assuming that this is the case. However, I will check out the area again, just in case I’ve missed something.