Quantified Vertical Greenery Landscape Pattern Adjacent to Buildings of the Humble Administrator’s Garden, China

The Humble Administrator's Garden, one member of the World Culture Heritage List, is topmost classic private garden south of the Yangtze River in China. Its rich plant landscape dynamics around buildings have active influence on today's living environment. This study adopted coding approach to explore spatial dynamics of building environment. There were 13 sample plots, each of which centered around one building and 12m outward radiation, were surveyed in February and August 2010. There were altogether 53 tree species and 325 individuals which height and location were measured. Then tree height, defoliation, direction (relative to building) and spacing (distance from building) were divided into levels of 6, 2, 8 and 4 respectively. Each level was coded in order. So a tree had a four-digit code of the four factors. With the increase of tree height from level 1(1.0-3.0m) to level 5 (20.1-30.0m), percentages of individual were 30.2%, 25.8%, 17.5%, 25.5% and 1.0% respectively; defoliation ratios (number of evergreen individuals / number of deciduous individuals) were 0.96, 1.70, 0.58, 0.15 and 0 respectively. The Pearson correlation of tree height and defoliation was -0.315. There were 155 kinds of codes, in which ten topmost frequencies showed that 80% of them were below 3m height. We can conclude that both tree number and defoliation ratio will decrease following the increase of tree height. A pattern called 'Layering greening model with upper deciduous and lower evergreen plants' maybe suitable for the district of hot summer and cold winter.