Objective  Chengdu is located in the hinterland of the western plains in Sichuan. Known as the “Land of Abundance”, Chengdu is featured by humid climate, numerous rivers and streams, and beautiful flowers and trees. In ancient times, Chengdu was famous for its lush greenery, famous trees and all-season flowers, which laid the foundation for Chengdu to become a poetic city. As described in a famous poem, many poets with important influence in history ever entered Sichuan, leaving behind many famous poems. Under this historical condition, a large number of poetic texts describing Chengdu’s plant landscape were produced, constituting an important part of the Tianfu culture. Chengdu comprehensively promotes the construction of Park City, laying out high-quality green spaces across the city, and creating a high-quality and balanced urban park system. The poetic foundation of Chengdu makes it possible to incorporate flower and tree poetry landscape scenes into the construction of Chengdu Park City. It is of great significance to deeply excavate the botanical resources in plant poems and refine the artistic conception of plant landscape to highlight the cultural heritage of Chengdu’s plant poetry and give its plant landscape more profound regional characteristics.

Methods  This research searches the Internet for relevant poetic texts using the keyword “Chengdu Poetry”, while taking the two books Chengdu Poetry Throughout the Ages and Chengdu Bamboo Branch Songs as supplementary sources. A total of about 4,000 pieces of poetic texts were collected, from which 326 pieces of poetic texts that are most closely related to Chengdu’s flowers and trees are screened. In order to form the research material for the semantic analysis of Chengdu’s flower and tree poetry landscape scenes, the research translates the collected poetic texts based on the standardized processing of entries and the supplementation of important semantic entries. By virtue of Rost CM6 (a text mining and analysis software) and quantitative research, the research conducts a word frequency analysis on poetic texts describing Chengdu’s plant landscape. Moreover, the research also adopts the semantic network analysis method to summarize the grouping characteristics of the classic flower and tree species and their corresponding environmental elements, and to analyze the artistic conception of plant landscape in plant poetry. Through the above analysis, the research summarizes the grouping characteristics of the classic flower and tree species and their corresponding environmental elements, and analyzes the connotations of plant landscape in flower and tree poetry.

Results  The results show that plum blossom, Malus spectabilis, peony, hibiscus, bamboo, willow, peach blossom, pine and cypress are most frequently perceived by the ancients, and are the most distinctive flower or tree species placed at the core of all kinds of clusters in the semantic structure map. In addition, Jinjiang River, Dufu Caotang, Huanhua Creek, Danjing Mountain, Wanli Bridge, Wuhou Temple, Qingyang Temple and Maha Pond are some of the famous attractions that appear more frequently in relevant poems. High-frequency evaluation phrases such as bright-colored, luxuriant, fragrant, delicate, verdant, flourish, fresh and green, magnificent and lofty are proof of Chengdu’s floral splendor in ancient times. By analyzing the connections and qualities of each category, a total of 8 clusters are finally obtained, from which the research summarizes and extracts 8 kinds of plant landscape scenes: Sea of Plum Flowers, Garden Full of Malus Spectabilis, Peony Blossom State, Brocade Town Full of Hibiscus Flowers, Willows Surrounding River Bank, Green Bamboos Surrounding Dwellings, Peach Blossoms Drifting into Water, and Cypress Trees Shading Against Ancient Temples. On this basis, from the macro-application perspective of characteristic flower and tree varieties in urban construction, and the micro-application perspective of flower and tree quotations in the spatial expression of form and meaning, the research proposes the following method for expressing poetic plant landscape scenes: 1) Strengthen the application of characteristic plant species to reproduce the vivid and poetic picture of “Blooming flowers overwhelm Jincheng”; 2) explore the expression path of plant poetry to enhance the poetic atmosphere of Park City.

Conclusion  This research provides a complete research path from the analysis and extraction of plant poem text to the expression and application of poetic plant landscape in Chengdu Park City, which may be referential for the construction of plant landscape scenes in other park cities. Due to current data limitations, this research only focuses on the construction of traditional flower and tree poetry landscape scenes, and still fails to incorporate GIS to visualize and analyze the landscape information in relevant poems. Therefore, future researches are suggested to focus on cultural heritage, and break through the limitations of historical scenery, space and sites. The research reflects deeply about how to make full use of the existing resources in combination with specific time and space conditions, thus eventually building a city-wide flower and tree landscape network system with the characteristics of Park City.