Mao Jinchang first picked up the hobby of growing boxwood, a classic garden shrub, in 1981, when he was still driving trucks for the Chongming Agricultural Grain and Oil Co.

The decision to do so was purely driven by an interest in gardening. Mao says that looking at the evergreen plant also makes him feel happy.

Today, growing boxwood in his village in Chongming, an island district of Shanghai, has become more than a source of joy－it is the source of his windfall.

"I started taking this hobby more seriously when I retired in 2015. Back then, I had about 600 square meters worth of boxwood," Mao says.

"Today, I have 1,000 boxwood trees in a field measuring more than 2,500 square meters."

A regular boxwood tree grows around 1.5 meters high and is shaped like a sphere. But the ones that Mao cultivates are taller and have more branches, each of which is pruned into a small green ball.

In the first half of this year, the 66-year-old retiree earned 200,000 yuan ($28,600) from the sale of more than a dozen boxwood trees.

Mao is not the only person selling boxwood in his village, which is called Yuanyi Cun, or horticulture village. As the name suggests, nearly everyone in the village is involved in the horticulture business one way or another.

"I am just a small, independent farmer. There are people in our village planting boxwood in an area that is five times larger than mine," he quips.

Previously a horticultural farm founded in 1958, Yuanyi Cun got its name when it merged with a nearby village in 2004.

Dong Hui, Party chief of the village, says more than 85 percent of the 790 households in the village cultivate around 66 hectares of boxwood trees and 20 hectares of flowers.

The villagers started planting boxwood trees back in the 1990s when the Shanghai government was building the Pudong New Area and needed a large quantity of boxwood for street greening projects.

"There was a buyer who wanted 10 shiploads of boxwood trees but the then horticultural farm only had enough trees to fill two ships," Dong says. "The news was later passed down through word of mouth and the villagers soon learned of the huge market demand."

As more people started to plant boxwood, the village earned itself a reputation for being a production hub. The number of customers has been growing since.

According to Dong, the village raked in between 30 to 40 million yuan from boxwood sales in the past few years.

To improve the quality of these trees, the village has organized bonsai classes and invited masters from China and Japan to teach villagers. A museum was also built in the village to showcase its history in horticulture and different kinds of boxwood trees.

QR codes have even been hung on the boxwood trees standing alongside the main road in the village. Scanning these codes reveals the age and price of the tree.

Because of the fame that boxwood trees have brought to the village, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs included Yuanyi Cun in the 2019 Beautiful Chinese Villages for Leisure listing.

Shen Zhongkui, an official of the Gangyan township which oversees the village, says the village's success is partly due to its water and soil, which are ideal for growing boxwood.

Shen says the China Flower Expo has also helped raise the profile of Chongming Island in the horticulture industry, in turn drawing more buyers to the village.

"I have many groups coming from other provinces to learn about the success of Yuanyi Cun every month,"Shen says.

"The village will seize the opportunities provided by the flower expo, the country's rural revitalization strategy and Shanghai's plan of building Chongming into a worldclass ecological island to further develop itself," he adds.