Hangzhou Botanical Garden

Why Hangzhou Botanical Garden is special ?

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.

Source: http://www.chinatravel.com/

What to explore at Hangzhou Botanical Garden?

The Hangzhou Botanical Garden boasts of one of the most beautiful scenery 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.

To experience the Hangzhou Botanical Garden fully, visitors should divide their time between the two sections of the garden. These include 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 education place for kids to visit. The other section, on the other hand, is the pleasure garden, which 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 four most notable are:

• The Botany Appreciation Garden is most notable of all due to the Lingfeng Tanmei, an area that consist 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 of bamboos that grow as tall as three-storey 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, guests 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 feature maple, the Japanese cherry, the camphor, the pointy cypress, and the dragon cypress trees can all also be found in the garden.

The Hangzhou Botanical Garden offers tourists some additional entertainment facilities as well.

Due to all these unique attractions, which are rarely found in other botanical gardens, the Hangzhou Botanical Garden is often hailed as one of the best of its kind in all of China.

Source: http://www.chinatravel.com/

How to get to Hangzhou Botanical Garden?

Bus Routes: Take bus no.82, 15 and 28, and get off at Yuquan Station.

Take bus no.7 and 27, and get off at Quyuanfenghe Station.