Leng, a Singaporean, has moved to Beijing with her husband and her daughter for 20 years. She had worked in advertising industry and had been creative director of 4A advertising company. She won numerous awards in London Advertising Festival, New York Advertising Festival, and Cannes Advertising Festival etc.

Under enormous work pressure of the advertising company, Leng occasionally found that plants could help her to decompress, and she enjoyed the tranquil and the beauty of flowers and grass when she was playing with them, and so she was slowly falling in love with plants.

Compared to the flourishing city life, she began to yearn for a pastoral life with flowers and grass. Mr. Leng, her husband, is an architect and a painter, like Ms. Leng, he has a yearning for art and pastoral life too.

With the support of her husband, Leng went to London to study flower art and started MOSS flower workshop in 2002. MOSS had become a flower art supplier of some famous brand such as Dior, Tiffany&Co and SOHO China etc. And then, her daughter also started work in MOSS flower shop.

The development of her flower business was getting better and better, the yearning for idyllic life of a family of three was becoming stronger and stronger. In order to live a real idyllic life, the Leng’s family spent 2 years looking for an ideal place around Beijing.

Finally, in 2012, the family found a land of 5000 sqm outside the 6th ring road, in the suburb around the Great Wall in Pingu, and built little by little a self-owned garden with the stones gathered from the nearby mountains.

The Great Wall in Pinggu, built on the basis of the Great Wall of North Qi in the Ming Dynasty, is now open to the public as Pinggu Jiangjunguan scenic spot, where the Leng’s family selected is surrounded by mountains, and forests are all over the mountains.

"I just wanted to have a place on the weekend to plant flowers, grass and vegetables, to have a pastoral life. The house covers a land of 400 square meters, plus gardens and orchards, total is about more than 5000 square meters, and it took 2-3 years to finish off and on".

The amount of stone of the stone house is more than 3000 cubic meters, including fence and terraced fields behind the house. It was all piled up piece by piece by Leng and her husband.

Leng did the flower design, the garden landscape, her husband did the architectural design, the interior decoration. They made use of their respective strengths, cooperated with each other, in line with the principle of "the plant first, the scenery first", let the house go around the trees on the ground and become irregular, and built a house which is integrated into the environment and the mountain scenery.

"We changed while we did, the more the stones were piled up, the thicker the walls were, and the wrong way led to become a house which is warm in winter and cool in summer."

The Leng’s family divided the building into "phase 1" and "phase 2".  "phase 1" is for her family to live, "phase 2" is to entertain friends and guests, and the overall style tends to "country retro".

When Leng was young, she liked to buy old furniture in Southeast Asia. Many of the furniture in the house were her own dowry when she got married. In addition, the couple also received more than a dozen wooden chairs which were eliminated by a textile mill, and TV and some hot water bottles of the 70s which were also eliminated by some friends. These items were all bearing the traces of life, and they were naturally melted into the stone house. 

In order to achieve the true meaning of pastoral life, the Leng’s family, self - cultivated, self - sufficient, planted a lot of plants and vegetables in the yard. A family of three every day pick fruit, tidy garden and cook with their own vegetables in the vegetable plot.

Leng, as the founder of MOSS, is a full gardening control. Taking care of the flowers and plants in the yard is an easy job for her. What seeds should be planted in front of the house and behind the house, when the branches will spit out, when to prune and irrigate, no one knows better than her.

Leng also planted a lot of flowers on the outside of her home, such as lilacs, peony, narcissus, and a whole wall of roses. In the early spring, the flowers in the courtyard and outside the courtyard bloom, which makes the stone house in this mountain forest a real big garden.

In addition, Leng is also a good collector, farming tools, baskets, shoes have their own position. In order to prevent the situation that is difficult to find things because of large space, Leng also asked her husband specially to make a tool wall using the old bed board.

Leng's husband is good at painting, and all the paintings at home are from her husband's hands. According to the shape of the stone, he drew them into hedgehog, rabbit and other small animals, or wrote some simple sentences on it.

Friends know the heart of the Leng’s family to the stone house. Every time they come, they bring special plants, or stones collected from all over the country, and gave to them as gifts.

Her daughter inherited his parents' artistic talent. She likes to pick up some beautiful dead branches on the mountain, or the moss and fungi on the dry wood branches, and she uses these to do some decorating to the house.

When friends come, Leng and her daughter will lay on the season's flowers, and the ornaments picked up on the mountains, with the wine made from the hawthorn in their own orchard.

Even if there is no friend coming, a family of three will also lead a day to a poem, a sunrise and a sunset. Although they look at the view of the whole mountain , they do not feel lost time.

Leng said in the evening after farm work, the family always liked to chat and drink beside the fire place, which is our favorite part of the day.

Here, the four seasons are much more distinct than that in the city. After having the stone house, the travel time of the Leng’s family has shrunk by half. They no longer base their poetic life on distance. Compared to see the mountains and rivers outside, they are more worried about missing the time of seeing and picking the flowers at their own home.

The so-called ideal of life is like building a dream home with bricks and tiles, just like the Leng’s family. Flowers, grass, fish, worms, fruit, vegetable and trees are planted and picked by themselves.

It is better to live a day a poem with our own hands rather than to stake the poem on distance.