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Essential
Architecture- Peking
Beijing Botanical Garden |
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architect
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location
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Beijing / Peking, China |
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date
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1955 |
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style
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International Style |
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construction
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type
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Park |
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Beijing Botanical Garden
The Beijing Botanical Garden (pinyin: Beijing Zhíwùyuán) is a
botanical garden situated in the northwestern outskirts of the Beijing
between Xiangshan Park and Jade Spring Mountain. It was established in
1955. The Beijing Botanical Garden covers about 56.4 hectares. The
gardens include a dozen exhibition districts and halls, such as the tree
garden, a perennial bulb garden, a rose garden, a peony garden, a
traditional Chinese medical herb garden, a wild fruit resources
district, an environment protection plant district, a water and vine
plant district, an endangered plant district, and exhibition greenhouses
for tropical and subfnpical plants.
The gardens cultivate 6,000 species of plant, including 2,000
kinds of frees and bushes, 1,620 varieties of tropical and subtropical
plants, 500 species of flowers and 1,900 kinds of fruit trees, water
plants, traditional Chinese.
The hothouse exhibition is the highlight of the gardens.
The first room is filled with evergreens and members of the palm
family.
The second room is given over to tropical aquatic plants,
including water lilies and flowering taros.
The third room displays commercial plants and their breeding and
propagation. Here there are specimens of the triple-leaved rubber plant,
cocoa and coffee trees and the sugar producing sweet-leaved
chrysanthemum which has been introduced into China from abroad.
There are rooms for demonstrating medicinal plants, aromatic
plants and succulents. The exhibition of ornamental plants is
spectacular with its countless varieties if flowers and grasses. There
are over 300 different varieties of orchid, among them a rootless one
relies on fine hairs to absorb water vapor and nutrients from the air.
Besides the hothouse, there is also a national plant specimen
hall with a floor space of 11,000 square meters. Specimen houses, plant
classification laboratories, research rooms and a lecture hall are
arranged around a courtyard linked by arches and trellises.
The Peony Garden was open to the public in 1981. It covers an
area of 10 hectares and is divided into three sections. The Peony Grove
is the most important, covering an area of 3.5 hectares.
The plant collection includes many rare species. There is, for
example, the met sequoia first discovered in the region of Hubei and
Sichuan by a Chinese scientist in the 1940s. Since it was originally
believed that it had become extinct during the Tertiary Period (65
million years ago), the discovery of living specimens in China came as a
tremendous surprise to botanists.
Other plants in the gardens include specimens of the nepenthes or
“pitcher” plant, which “eats” insects; the golden butterfly orchid with
its lustrous yellow flowers; the American redwood; the Japanese
blossoming cherry, and the famous “botree,” the tree under which Buddha
sat when he gained enlightenment.
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links
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www.essential-architecture.com
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