Shanghai Botanical Gardens (Shanghai Zhiwuyuan) is the city's premier garden opened in 1978 after 4 years of construction and landscaping. The grounds, covering 81 hectares (200 acres), are divided into spacious sectors specializing in magnolias, peonies, azaleas, roses, osmanthus, ferns, bamboo, maples, and conifers. The orchid garden is considered the best in China.
There is a new area, the 'Plant Evolution Section', where horticultural experiments are conducted, and a more traditional garden in which medicinal plants are grown and harvested. The hallmark section is the 'Penjing Bonsai Garden' (requiring a separate admission), with hundreds of bonsai displayed in a large complex of corridors, courtyards, pools, and rockeries. There is an attached 'Rock Penjing' display, as well, in which rocks are carved and glued together to form miniature mountains that are placed in trays of water; this is China's largest 'potted landscape park'.
The Exhibition Greenhouse is a newly developed modern botanical greenhouse. It consists of two smaller greenhouses, one for tropical plants and the other for sand plants, the former focusing on the themes of gardens in which flowers of all seasons are displayed and tropical rain forests, producing a vivid tropical view with flowers competing for beauty, the latter, on the other hand, being a collection of the world's strangely-shaped cactuses and rare succulent plants, vividly displaying the views of tropical plains, which, set off by deserts, camels, and the setting sun, makes people feel as if they were walking in a desert. Tourists can fully feel the mystery and changes of the world of plants. The Exhibition Greenhouse not only provides tourists with guiding services, but also with rooms for science popularization, thus enabling the tourists to acquire knowledge about relevant plants while experiencing the beautiful views.
The garden grounds are extensive, punctuated with restaurants, exhibition halls, vendors' stalls, a greenhouse with 3,500 tropical plants from Southeast Asia, and several children's playgrounds.
