Many people start the Year of the Dragon with garden tours, looking for dragons in classical gardens and watching animals eat New Year vegetables.

Today is the first day of the Lunar New Year. After having New Year’s Eve dinner and paying New Year greetings to relatives and friends, many citizens and tourists will make parks and green spaces the first stop of their trip in the Year of the Dragon.

Compared with the first day of the Year of the Rabbit, which was affected by rainy weather, the weather on the first day of the Year of the Dragon was good, and the number of visitors to major parks increased. However, the Spring Festival tourist peak has not yet arrived, so the overall comfort level of visiting the parks today is relatively high.

Today, the number of visitors to Shanghai Zoo, Shanghai Botanical Garden, and Guyi Garden each exceeded 10,000, with 14,930, 11,652, and 10,047 visitors respectively. The number of visitors to Gongqing Forest Park, Chenshan Botanical Garden, and Shanghai Binjiang Forest Park was 9,110 respectively. Person-time, 5083 person-time, 3380 person-time.

To welcome visitors during the New Year, the parks and green spaces have prepared a wealth of folk activities, full of New Year flavor and creativity.

At the Shanghai Zoo and Shanghai Wildlife Park, the animals happily ate New Year’s dishes.

The animal New Year dishes at Shanghai Wild Animal Park focus on being substantial. Dozens of ingredients are used in one New Year dish, weighing nearly 10 tons.

Hongdou and Pipi, the chimpanzee babies at the Shanghai Wildlife Park, meet visitors in the new "nursery" built for them by the nursery. Their New Year dishes are not only nutritious, but also specially include fruits with "dragon" in their names - dragon fruit and Longan.

Hongdou and Pipi's birthdays were September 1st and October 2nd last year respectively. Although they are not biological siblings, they have lived together since childhood and have a good relationship. The brightly colored purple-red dragon fruit in the New Year vegetables attracted them both, and the juice stayed on their lips, as if they were wearing lipstick.

Dragon fruit is one of the main New Year dishes for chimpanzees this year.

At the Giant Panda Pavilion, the creativity of New Year dishes is mainly reflected in the containers. The traditional food bowls have been transformed into bamboo firecrackers, firework trees, and fruit and vegetable baskets, which are filled with fresh fruits such as bamboo shoots, apples, carrots, sugar cane, and oranges.

At the Shanghai Zoo, the animals’ New Year dishes mainly use their wild imagination in design.

For example, in the raccoon family's "fish every year", ordinary bananas and apples are "cut" and stacked by the nursery, and turned into a "fish" - the bananas are fish scales, and the apples are fins and tails. In addition, there are There are "firecrackers" made of cut fruits and strung together, which are beautiful, have the flavor of the New Year, and are also juicy and delicious.

The elephants who were used to eating fruits and vegetables cut into large pieces were also very happy. The keeper suddenly brought out a "red dragon" shaped vegetable and fruit skewers as the highlight of the New Year dish. If you look closely, you can see that the head of this "red dragon" is carved from a pumpkin, its horns are two carrots, its body is a pumpkin ring hanging on sugar cane, and its scales are bananas draped on its body.

Even ordinary basic diets such as multi-grain wowotou have been played out by breeders. Mix steamed buns with bananas and egg yolks to make a cartoon dragon's face, insert two red dates into the dragon's horns, and have an apple lantern on each side. The lantern spikes are made from shredded carrots.

The breeder said that special New Year vegetables are also a kind of enrichment. The enrichment mentioned in the past refers more to the transformation and improvement of the environment of the animal living and activity areas, enhancing the animals' exploration ability and activity level, and making their lives more interesting. Special New Year dishes can arouse the curiosity of animals more than daily feed. mind, gently stimulating their senses, developing diversity of behavior and avoiding rigid, unnatural expressions.

In the Year of the Dragon New Year garden activity currently being held by Guyi Garden, "The lanterns are first lit, and the lanterns soar into the sky", more than 10 groups of carefully designed Sichuan Zigong intangible cultural heritage lantern landscapes and nearly a thousand lanterns with spring flowers, summer rain, autumn moon and winter snow as the theme are displayed. Themed New Year lanterns are lit up after dark.

Walking into the south gate of Guyi Garden, a group of creative Zigong lantern landscapes are very eye-catching. Plum blossoms, peach blossoms, peonies, crabapples, pomegranate flowers, lotus flowers, hostas, osmanthus, chrysanthemums, camellias, orchids, wax plums... The "Twelve Flower Gods" of Guyi Garden are transformed into 12 cute cartoon flower god character lanterns. Leaning on the "landscape", standing on both sides of the "dragon" and "crane".

Lin Xiaohua, deputy director of Guyi Garden and inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage skill of Nanxiang Lantern Riddles in Jiading District, said that due to differences in regional climate, culture and other factors, the "Twelve Flower Gods" involve many flower and human versions. For example, the goddess of flowers in March is worshiped in some places as peach blossoms and in others as pear blossoms. Each type of flower may also correspond to several characters at the same time, and there are both male and female flower gods. For example, April Peony, some people say it corresponds to Li Bai, others say it is Ouyang Xiu.

In addition to lantern viewing, Guyi Garden also launched a "Dragon Hunting Activity" to encourage citizens and tourists to explore the dragon elements in this more than 500-year-old classical garden.

For example, there are nine dragons painted on the ceiling of the corner pavilion in the garden. One dragon is playing with beads alone in the middle, and there are two dragons playing with beads in the surrounding auspicious clouds. Another example is the dragon-patterned furniture in the Plum Blossom Hall. In the center of the Kowloon screen at the back, there is a fire dragon ball with a diameter of 25 centimeters, and the surrounding clouds and dragons are carved lifelike.

The park and green space management department predicts that with the Chinese New Year holiday getting better and the weather being fine for many days, the number of visitors to various parks and green spaces in Shanghai will increase.