The Highways Department's drive to integrate the Kong Sham Western Highway into the surrounding countryside got a seal of approval when it won two top landscape awards.

The department has carefully transformed the road into a 'green ribbon', melding Tuen Mun's cityscape with Yuen Long's rural landscape, Senior Highways Engineer Robert Chan told news.gov.hk.

Back to nature: Senior Highways Engineer Robert Chan shows how the Kong Sham Western Highway was transformed into a green ribbon with lush vegetation and a man-made wetland. Photo Gallery

Local characteristics

Formerly known as the Deep Bay Link and opened in July 2007, the 5.4km elevated three-lane dual highway runs from Yuen Long Highway in the south to Shenzhen Bay Bridge in the north, connecting Hong Kong with Shenzhen.

The 'green' area amounts to 170,000 square metres, about a quarter of the size of the whole project. The environmentally friendly measures accounted for only 1% of the link's total construction cost.

"Our work is not as simple as planting trees along the route. We want to make full use of the varied local characteristics and bring out the 'green ribbon' theme through a coherent design and construction," Mr Chan said.

"As there are both towns and countryside in the vicinity, a comprehensive landscape greening design plus various special features, such as constructed wetland, valleys and rivers, fit in well with the nearby Castle Peak natural environment."

Double happiness

That attention to detail helped the project win a pair of awards for landscaping.

The Leisure & Cultural Services Department's annual Best Landscape Awards judges projects' visual and landscape quality, sustainability, improvements to the environment, and users' participation and interaction.

Presenting an outstanding theme and concept, the link beat 39 other entries late last year to take both the Grand Award of Excellence and the Gold Award under a new public projects category.

"The department's landscape architects and I went to the contractor's Guangzhou nursery to choose suitable plant species for the project. To achieve the best result, the landscape design has been revised several times to meet the site characteristics and nearby villagers' requests," Mr Chan said.

Taking the Tuen Mun section as an example, a vast number of trees and shrubs are growing under the route covering nearly 29,000 square metres - the size of a large park.

Students take part

More than 100 students from the Tuen Mun Government Primary School and Hing Tak School planted almost 1,000 saplings near the site where a small village school once stood.

The original school had been resumed to make way for the highway, replaced by the better-equipped and bigger Hing Tak School.

"Those students who experienced school relocation have jumped for joy when they returned to the old school site," Mr Chan said, adding they were keen to help beautify it.

Afterwards, each student was given a potted plant to take home, to help spread the green consciousness.

Mr Chan said the decision to have a full-scale greening along the route was made after careful review. Plants underneath the elevated highway grow hardy and luxuriant, exposed to extra long hours of sunshine from both east and west due to the highway's south-north alignment.

Before the road was built, there were valleys and fish ponds in the area. To recapture the natural landscape, the department re-created an eco-fish pond nearby with plantations resembling the original eco-system.

Mr Chan said the former valleys and tree-covered hillsides had left an impression on him. With his team's efforts, their original appearance is gradually being restored.

Trees have been widely planted along the highway, on the centre strip and adjoining slopes. A colourful flowerbed has been planted where the link joins the Shenzhen Bay Bridge. An earth mound made of recycled materials and vertical noise barriers on which plants can easily flourish have also been introduced.

More than 40,000 trees, 700,000 shrubs, climbers, flowers and mixed forest trees - 66 species in all - have been planted to create the highway's fresh new look.