HANGZHOU/PARIS, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- Along France's Loire River, the morning mist has yet to lift. In the woods of Chaumont Castle -- "Chateau de Chaumont" in French -- a 25-meter-long white serpent begins to stir.

Its body glitters with 3,500 biodegradable mycelium scales, moving like breathing armor that swells in the damp air. Around it, Hangzhou chrysanthemums sway with French lavender. Here, an Eastern legend takes root in French soil.

Inspired by China's "Legend of the White Snake," the garden was created by French designer Clementine Bory and her team. It is a dialogue across time and culture, where Eastern mythology meets Western healing herbology.

The legend is immortalized in the Leifeng Pagoda and the Broken Bridge of the West Lake Cultural Landscape, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains one of China's most beloved tales.

Today, the story has found new artistic life at another world heritage site -- Chaumont Castle in the Loire Valley.

The garden was born from Bory's encounter with Chinese culture at West Lake. Years ago, Bory and her partner worked in architecture firms in Beijing and Shanghai before founding their own studio in Shanghai.

"Through travel and exploration, we realized how deeply we loved this country and wanted to work here," she said. Since then, they have traveled widely across China, fascinated by the evolution of local traditions.

In 2020, at the Leifeng Pagoda in east China's Hangzhou, Bory first read the classic Chinese folk tale about a white snake spirit who hides away for centuries to transform into a human woman and falls in love with a mortal man, Xu Xian.

"The shift between woman and serpent was fantastic, yet poetic," she said. "My Chinese friends called us French people romantic, but I realized the Chinese are just as romantic." That moment planted the seeds of the project in her mind.

From April to November, Chaumont Castle hosts its International Garden Festival, which is an annual event that was inaugurated in 1992. Out of hundreds of designs, the White Serpent Garden claimed this year's Prize for Design and Innovative Ideas.

The 2025 festival invited fairy-tale-inspired creations. For Bory, the Chinese legend fit perfectly. Its hero, Xu Xian, was a traditional medicine herbalist. "That inspired us to design a healing garden," Bory said.

Walking through the garden feels like entering a story in motion. Gridded beds of medicinal herbs bring to mind Xu Xian's identity as a herbalist, and a sinuous white snake sculpture coils in and out of view, embodying the elusive heroine Bai Suzhen.

The undulating sculpture, winding paths and layered plantings mirror the characters' turbulent love, culminating at a circular pool -- a symbolic West Lake, where sculpture and foliage meet in reflection.

"We want visitors to experience the rise and fall of the story as they wander," Bory said. "It's a progression shared by both Chinese and French garden traditions."

The garden also tells its story through plants. About 50 medicinal species, from sage to thyme, blur the line between Chinese and French pharmaceutical traditions.

"The same plant can appear in both, just used differently," Bory said, citing the history of Silk Road exchange. Her aim was less to mark differences and more to create a shared botanical language.

Mycelium scales -- biodegradable, alive, and slowly morphing -- echo the white snake's fate while pushing sustainability. "It was beautiful, utterly novel," said Chantal Colleu-Dumond, director of the Chateau and International Garden Festival of Chaumont-sur-Loire.

The garden extends the festival's long-running conversation with China. In 2012, the castle presented the Hualu Garden and has since hosted pavilions for leading Chinese designers like Wang Shu, Colleu-Dumond noted, adding that the festival was built on such cross-cultural grafts.

"We're proud to host a Chinese garden," Colleu-Dumond said. "In a world growing harsher, every exchange, every borrowed idea, every surprise from abroad matters. We need gardens, we need culture, we need to see the other."

Gardens have served as fertile ground for Sino-French cultural dialogue. In 2004, Chinese designers created the Yili Garden outside Paris, and it has since hosted dragon-boat festivals and moon-viewing nights.

In 2017, the castle's own parterres were re-created stone for stone in the Museum of Chinese Gardens and Landscape Architecture.

Last year, as the two nations marked the 60th anniversary of their diplomatic relations, the "Wandering in the Gardens of Jiangnan" exhibition opened in Versailles, deepening the cross-cultural conversation.

"Both countries are teeming with talent," Colleu-Dumond said. "Any collaboration that puts those artists in the same room -- and keeps them there -- will tighten the knot between our peoples."

Bory said her team is planning to bring the White Serpent Garden to Hangzhou. If approved by West Lake Scenic Area authorities, the design will unite French healing philosophy with Chinese mythology by the lake's willows. ■