South Korea Adventures: Shingu Botanical Gardens

The other day, Mark and I were driving to Yongsan so he could get a haircut and we could get some food. On the way, not far from our house, we saw signs for Shingu Botanical Garden. I’d seen the signs before but never really cared. On this random day, Mark decided to just drive to it and take a look. So we did. We ended up staying and exploring and it turned out to be really fun. How have we driven past this so many times but never stopped at it?

It was only ₩7,000 which is about 6 dollars each, so not super expensive. We looked around the rooms first where there was some artwork about the history of the Gardens and some artwork of nature. Then we left that area to explore the actual gardens. 

In a greenhouse, we saw these crazy looking lily pad plants that look like they were pre-historic and were actually kind of creepy because they were so big and spiky.

Throughout the park, they had the cutest stuff like little statues, music instrument platforms, bug platforms, tons of little colorful frog statues, a sundial, and a rain measure pot. There may have been more but being in October, a lot of the flowers weren’t in bloom and special gardens were bare. Plus there are these GIGANTIC spiders here that were claiming some of the pathways.

The flowers that were in bloom were beautiful and some I haven’t seen before, which is to be expected since there are probably a lot of flowers that are native to Korea. They also used a lot of Kimchi Pots to plant some of the flowers which were cool since Kimchi pots are such a staple in Korean life. It was also way bigger than we expected! I mean we drive by this once a week or once every two weeks on our way to Yongsan and we never knew that there was this huge Garden right next to the road. 

This was such a great way to get out into nature and take a break from the city life for a while. It really felt like we were in nature, we couldn't really see many buildings and we couldn't hear the noise of the cars - which can be an issue with the inner city parks. It probably helps that we live on the outskirts of Seoul so a lot of nature stuff around is, is actually nature.

Overall, we had such a fun time walking around this place. It took us about an hour just looking at the main gardens. They also had a cute little shop where you can buy plants and decorations for your garden or house, a nice little cafe, and when we got there, they had live music playing. Throughout the gardens they had a quiet classical soundtrack playing. Which I thought really added to the tranquility of the gardens.

See you next week :)
Kylie <3