Portland, Ore. ? Bats are everywhere in this garden, if you take the time to find them.

They hover with stone wings unfurled over arching gateways and peer out from terra-cotta tiles, carved wings tucked under like so many tiny curlicues. They lie disguised in the delicate latticework of a whitewashed window, and masquerade as spade-shaped picture hooks, with bronzed bodies and pointed heads.

The bats  a symbol of good fortune in traditional Chinese culture  are one of many hidden treasures that greet alert visitors to Portland’s Classical Chinese Garden, an oasis of ancient tradition transplanted into the bustle of a modern city.

“Every single time I come here I find something new. There’s that sense of discovery,” says Maria Duryea, a garden tour guide. “This garden shares its secrets, but it’s not vulgar about it. It requires that you develop a certain sense of intimacy.”

The Garden of the Awakening Orchids  or “Lan Su Yuan” in Chinese  has been a story of sharing from the start.

It was built in Portland’s tiny Chinatown two years ago to commemorate a 15-year-old sister-city relationship with Suzhou, a city of 6 million along China’s central coast known for its beautiful gardens built by retired civil servants as early as 900 A.D.

Portland’s garden stands on a city block that once held a parking lot. It is surrounded on all sides by the hum of the city, with buses and commuter rails rumbling past, but inside the only sound is the bubbling of water.

From a hillock within its walls, visitors can make out the tops of the city’s tallest buildings, so-called “borrowed views” designed to highlight the contrast between city and tranquil garden.

Nature advances

Traditional Suzhou gardens strive to re-create nature in the smallest of spaces  often a courtyard attached to the family’s living quarters  by blending water, plants and rocks with the manmade beauty of poetry, bridges and pavilions.

A maze of hidden courtyards, secret turnoffs and twisting mosaic pathways enlarge the space, while open-air windows between walls leak glimpses of what lies beyond.

Portland’s garden, which opened in September 2000, is the largest and most complete Suzhou garden in North America, said Jin Chen, the garden’s coordinator and Suzhou garden design expert.

In its first year, Portland’s garden attracted 258,000 visitors  nearly three times its designers’ expectations  and volunteers logged 10,000 hours giving tours.

“It’s phenomenal how wide interest has been,” says Gloria Lee, executive director. “It’s more than just plants and dirt: It’s the buildings and the architecture. People are just so intrigued by that.”

Riddles to solve

From the smallest plant to ceiling-high carvings of flowering plum and bamboo, nothing in the garden is without meaning.

The garden begins its riddles even before visitors pass through the thick double doors into the first narrow courtyard.

A large white rock stands to the left of the entrance, its fragile surface eaten away by carefully orchestrated erosion in the waters of Lake Tai near Suzhou. Pocked with holes and creases, it looks more like a cloud than limestone. It is labeled “Crescent Cloud” in Chinese  just in case visitors missed the visual suggestion.

Passing the door, the garden unfolds itself slowly, opening from a narrow courtyard hemmed with a wall and towering trees to a jade-colored lake spanned by arching bridges and overhung with sweeping pavilions. In summer, the lake is dotted with lotus flowers, symbols of scholarly learning, and the bamboo  a sign of resilience and flexibility  casts shadows against the white walls.

Deep inside the maze of courtyards, another Lake Tai rock labeled “Entering the Clouds” reminds visitors of its whimsical counterpart at the entrance.

But visitors need not understand the significance of every plant and carving to get something from the garden.

“The people who go on tours always leave amazed at how much there is to learn,” says Lee, the garden’s director. “I tell the tour guides that if every visitor leaves understanding the symbolism of five different things in the garden, I’ll be happy.”

Ancient and modern

Yet, for all its success, Portland’s $12 million Suzhou garden could have withered at any step along the way.

Garden designers shipped 500 tons of rock from China  from the massive Lake Tai limestones to quarter-sized paving stones  and wrestled with how to make traditional Suzhou-style architecture comply with modern-day American building codes. They scoured regional nurseries and local neighborhoods for the 500 plant species now in the garden  all of which are native to China.

About 40 American construction workers labored alongside 70 artisans from Suzhou, communicating in sign language and puzzling over blueprints labeled in Chinese characters. The Americans stood amazed as pavers worked from what they considered a “new” construction manual  one updated in 1617.

“It was quite a different time scale entirely,” says John Williams, project manager for Portland’s garden and senior project manager for Schommer & Sons. “They’ve been building those types of urban gardens in Suzhou for easily five times as long as our entire country has existed.”

Williams says crews eventually inserted 4-inch steel beams in the wooden pillars to satisfy seismic requirements and used 900 gallons of silicone to secure the triangular tiles that cover the roof.

With all the concessions to modern technology, the Garden of the Awakening Orchids remains simply a place of discovery, a quiet retreat that reveals something more with every visit.

“The beauty I find in any single spot in the garden is the feeling I get from the garden as a whole,” says Duryea, the guide. “In any corner, in any plant, in any paving stone, in any shadow  it’s like the whole garden is revealed in that one spot.”