Red soil Park

The Greenland Red Earth Park in Nanchang is a natural park built around a Quaternary plinthitic red-earth "badland" of dramatic red hills and masson pine forest, designed by Waterstone Landscape Design's Second Studio, Third Office for Greenland Group's Jiangxi division, at 160,000 square metres in Anyi County, Nanchang, in 2018. The brief was to protect the red-earth heritage, ecologically repair the eroded slopes, and open the site in a limited way for geological science and nature education, so that visitors can understand both the wound in the earth and its beauty. The site faces soil erosion and an imbalance in plant and animal diversity, and its ecology is fragile, so the design adopts three lows - low intervention, low maintenance and low cost - to minimise disturbance to the existing geology and vegetation. A forest-stand conversion and water-harvesting strategy addresses the sparse vegetation and runoff, while strict design control keeps new works light. Rustic aesthetics, rammed-earth craft and native miscanthus planting reduce long-term management costs. Working across ecological restoration, public education and natural experience, the team repairs large areas, threads them with linear routes and punctuates them with small programmed nodes, producing a park that combines earth-art landscape, nature experience, ecological repair and popular science. Since completion, the site has drawn attention from local residents, schools and government to the plinthitic red-earth heritage and become a model of how, with reverence for nature, landscape architecture can respond to the carving of time on the land.