Garden of Morning Calm

Where it sits. The Garden of Morning Calm occupies a fold of hillside in Sang-myeon, in the north of Gapyeong County, roughly an hour and a half northeast of Seoul and about twenty kilometres from the Bukhan River resorts that dominate the area's tourism. The site covers some 330,000 square metres of slope beneath Chungnyeongsan, and the ground itself does most of the design work: paths follow contours, beds are cut into terraces, and views open downhill across planting rather than across lawn. Around five thousand plant species are grown here. The name borrows the old European nickname for Korea, the land of the morning calm, which was coined abroad but has been adopted at home with some affection.

Built by one family. The garden is not a municipal project or a corporate showpiece. It was conceived in 1992 by Han Sang-kyung, a horticulture professor at Sahmyook University, who bought the land in 1994 — a barren stony lot exhausted by slash-and-burn cultivation — and designed and built the garden largely with his wife and their own labour. At one point, short of money, the couple sold their house and lived on the property in a small dwelling while the work continued. It opened to the public on 11 May 1996 with ten themed sections; more have been added almost every year since, reaching twenty-two by the mid-2020s. That history explains the garden's unusual coherence: it grew as one continuous idea rather than as a series of commissioned phases.

A Korean garden argument. The stated aim is to show Korean gardening and artistic ideas rather than to copy the English border or the French parterre, and the difference is legible on the ground. Symmetry is avoided; curves are preferred to axes; existing rock and slope are incorporated rather than levelled. The Sunken Garden is the signature composition, a bowl of massed planting best read from above. The Hometown House Garden sets a thatched-roof farmhouse among vegetable beds and clay jars. There is a bonsai collection, a wild-flower meadow, a hydrangea walk, an area planted for evening scent, and a pond garden that reflects the ridge behind it. Roses, lilies, chrysanthemums and hostas each have their own season and their own festival. The collection also serves a working horticultural purpose, holding native Korean species that are difficult to see assembled anywhere else, and the labelling is thorough enough to be useful to gardeners rather than decorative.

On screen and in the neighbourhood. Gapyeong has become the standard day-trip circuit for screen tourism outside Seoul, and the garden is one of its three fixed stops. The others are Namiseom, whose tree avenues carried KBS's Winter Sonata in 2002, and Petite France, a French-village theme park built in 2008 a few kilometres south at Cheongpyeong, which appeared in MBC's Beethoven Virus in 2008 and then in two of SBS's biggest hits — Secret Garden in 2010 and My Love from the Star in 2013. The tour buses run all three in a loop, which is why a visitor to the arboretum will often be sharing the path with people working through a drama itinerary. The garden itself has long been a favourite of broadcasters for seasonal programming, and its winter illumination is filmed and photographed relentlessly.

Light in the cold months. The lighting festival is what keeps the place busy through a season when nothing is in flower. From early December until late March the trees, terraces and structures are strung with millions of bulbs, the Sunken Garden becomes a bowl of light seen from the upper path, and opening hours extend well into the evening. It has grown into one of the largest winter illuminations in the country, and on Saturday nights in December the car park fills by mid-afternoon. Snow on the beds under the lights is the image the garden sells, and in a normal winter it delivers. The rest of the county fills out a day around it: the Bukhan River resorts, the rail bikes on the disused Gyeongchun alignment, and Jara Island with its jazz festival each autumn.

Getting there and timing. The Gyeongchun Line runs from Seoul to Cheongpyeong and Gapyeong stations in around an hour and a quarter, and the Gapyeong city tour bus connects both to the garden gate, though the last services back are early enough to catch out anyone lingering for the lights. Drivers reach it in about ninety minutes from central Seoul. Late April into May is the fullest flowering; October adds chrysanthemums and hillside colour; the illumination runs the winter. Admission is charged and rises modestly for the lighting season. Main routes are paved and manageable, but the site is a hillside, several of the best viewpoints involve steps and gradients, and independent wheelchair use is restricted to the lower loops.