Hangzhou Botanical Garden

The Hangzhou Botanical Garden is a picturesque garden located at the foot of Jade Spring Hill. This is found towards the northwestern end of West Lake. The garden covers a total area of more than 230 hectares or approximately 568 acres, and thus offers guests plenty of sights to feast their eyes on.

The garden is mostly an exhibit of beautiful and exquisite plants and flowers, but it also has a research center that conducts studies on the cultivation of plants and the protection of the natural environment.

The Hangzhou Botanical Garden boasts of one of the most beautiful sceneries in the area, so visitors who go there will never run out of things to see and sights to behold. The environment is also clean, airy, and is ideal even for children. The air is also fresh thanks to all the verdant flowers and plants around.

Aside from the plants and flowers that fill up the area, it is also dotted with various kiosks and pavilions that give visitors a respite and a shade under which they can rest especially during hot days.

The garden contains two major sections: the research section and the pleasure garden section.

The research section is mainly where the cultivation of plants is studied; this section attracts academic visitors and those who want to learn more about planting and gardening. It is also an educational place for kids to visit.

This section offers rows upon rows of lush greenery for guests to take pleasure in.

Due to the large numbers of plants in the garden, the pleasure garden is further divided into different smaller gardens depending on the type of plants they hold. These include the Botany Classification Garden, the Botany Appreciation Garden, the Bamboo Garden, the Garden of Economic Plants, the Plant Resources Museum, and the Medicinal Garden.

The Botany Appreciation Garden is most notable of all due to the Lingfeng Tanmei, an area that consists of more than 5,000 plum trees standing upright. This offers a wonderful sight in the winter when the plum trees stretch all the way up.

The Bamboo Garden is another interesting part of the Hangzhou Botanical Garden as it features a special type of bamboo called the Damaozhu. This bamboo variant grows very fast; it can reach 1 meter overnight. Because of this, the Bamboo Garden usually boasts bamboo that grows as tall as three-story buildings.

The Garden of Economic Plants feature plants that can be used to make fiber, medicine, industrial materials, and herbs and spices.

The Medicinal Garden, also known as Garden of A Hundred Herbs or Baicao Yuan, offers 1,200 medicinal herbs some of which are native only to Hangzhou.

Also, travelers are encouraged to watch out for some special types of flowers, such as the Yulan trees (which are beautiful in spring), the lotus, the hammock, the pines, the bamboos, and sweet-scented osmanthus. The magnolia, the featured maple, the Japanese cherry, the camphor, the pointy cypress, and the dragon cypress trees can all also be found in the garden.