How one Chinese botanical garden conserves 5,000 species in the middle of a city

Biological Diversity / Hefei Botanical Garden / Chinese Academy of Sciences

The tension between urban growth and biodiversity is not abstract in East China. Cities expand, habitat shrinks, and the species caught in between have few advocates with both the scientific capacity and the physical space to intervene. Hefei Botanical Garden, located in Anhui Province at the boundary between subtropical and temperate climate zones, has spent years building a case that a botanical garden embedded in a city can do more than display flowers.

A new commentary in Biological Diversity by Jimei Zhang, Xu Li, Yuhua Ma, and colleagues documents how the garden has assembled a conservation, education, and rural development program that now encompasses more than 5,000 plant species and reaches over a million visitors annually.

4,012 species across 187 families

By 2024, the garden's living collection spanned 4,012 species across 187 plant families and 815 genera. Two specialized collections anchor the program: Armeniaca mume (Japanese apricot) and Nelumbo nucifera (sacred lotus). But the conservation work extends well beyond ornamental species.

The garden has undertaken ex situ conservation — growing threatened plants outside their native habitat — for 73 nationally protected tree species. One notable success: the propagation of over 1,000 individuals of Sinojackia xylocarpa, a second-class protected species in China's conservation ranking system. Growing a thousand specimens of a single threatened species is the kind of quiet, labor-intensive work that rarely makes headlines but represents real insurance against extinction.

Turning degraded wetland into Class II water

Perhaps the most tangible environmental outcome involves water. The garden restored 200 hectares of degraded wetlands surrounding Chaohu Lake, one of China's five largest freshwater lakes and a body of water that has struggled with pollution for decades. Alongside that effort, the garden upgraded 33 hectares of its southern zone. The result: water quality improved from substandard Class V — essentially unusable — to Class II-III, which supports aquatic life and, in some cases, drinking water treatment.

That kind of measurable water quality shift is significant. It suggests the restoration was not cosmetic but functional, rebuilding the biological processes that filter and stabilize freshwater systems.

Plants under forest canopies, income in rural villages

In 2019, the garden established a research base in Changzhuang Village, testing a model its administrators call "Botanical Garden + Agriculture." The approach involves planting medicinal and ornamental species under existing forest canopies — using the shade structure that is already there rather than clearing land. Species trials included Nymphaea rubra, a red water lily capable of surviving winter outdoors in the region, which had not been previously confirmed.

The practical goal is straightforward: give rural communities economically valuable plants that work within their existing landscape. Forest-floor cultivation of medicinal herbs, combined with the visual appeal of ornamental plantings, supports both direct income from plant products and indirect income from ecological tourism. In 2021, the garden introduced rare medicinal and economic plants sourced from across East China to further expand these options.

Whether this model scales beyond a single village remains to be seen. Rural development projects often work well at demonstration scale but encounter logistical and market challenges when replicated. The commentary does not address these questions in detail.

A million visitors and 5,000 plant adopters

As a designated national science education base, the garden operates a Science Museum equipped with augmented reality exhibits and a Nature Education Center. It has trained nearly 1,000 environmental volunteers and hosted more than 10,000 participants in science outreach activities. A plant adoption program has engaged over 5,000 members of the public in hands-on conservation.

These numbers are notable for a regional botanical garden. Annual visitation exceeds one million, driven in part by the garden's status as a National Key Flower Culture Base, which allows it to host large-scale floral exhibitions.

Gaps in coverage and global ambitions

The commentary is not entirely celebratory. The authors acknowledge gaps in germplasm coverage — the garden's collection, while broad, does not fully represent the regional flora — and note that research output has lagged behind the conservation and education programs. Future plans include systematic expansion of germplasm holdings, molecular breeding initiatives, and integration of artificial intelligence and big data into garden management.

The garden also participates in international networks, including Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), and maintains cooperative relationships with institutions such as Japan's Makino Botanical Garden. These connections matter for a garden that aspires to be a benchmark for urban botanical institutions in China — global standards require global engagement.

What Hefei demonstrates, at minimum, is that a botanical garden in a mid-sized Chinese city can simultaneously serve as a conservation facility, a wetland restoration agent, a rural development partner, and a public education center. Whether it can sustain all four roles as the city around it continues to grow is the harder question — and one the authors frame as the work ahead.