Greenhouse of Huizhou Botanical Garden (惠州植物园温室)

Huizhou Botanical Garden, the city's first, is run by the Huizhou Forestry Science Research Institute. In July 2018, after more than three years of preparation, the press announced its trial opening on Gurongshan hill in Xiajiao. The greenhouse was then still a building site, protected by keep-out signs, and was not part of the trial: the newspaper described two glass buildings with rounded edges and sloping facades, 6,900 m² in area, with a 70 m span and a height of 39 m, in which more than 400 species, mostly tropical and subtropical, were to be planted.

After a trial period (since October 2018 according to the 2019 press), the garden's first phase, on 41.82 hectares, was declared fully open on 30 January 2019, with free admission during the Spring Festival. Attendance passed 600,000 visits over the holiday: plants and interactive devices in the science pavilion were damaged, and management closed the pavilion from 20 February 2019 for about two weeks. It put repair costs above one million yuan and considered groups of forty people every five minutes, a cap of 5,000 visitors a day, and even an entrance fee.

In early 2025, after almost a month of work, the rusted and cracked stainless-steel mesh walkways were replaced by a concrete surface on levels 1 to 5. From October to December 2025, part of the facade glazing and its sealing strips were changed, with the greenhouse partly open. In January 2024 the garden was selected among Guangdong's "green and beautiful forest-chief parks".

The building is a steel structure with a glass curtain wall, hemispherical in form and up to 39 m high according to the press of January 2019; it is the garden's largest and most technical construction. A 2018 report saw it as two glass halls with rounded edges and sloping facades. Sources give more than 6,900 m² of floor area and a maximum span of 70 m.

The greenhouse has four parts: a planting hall, the entrance hall, the science pavilion on the fifth level, and the desert-plant hall. Visitors climb from level to level by stairs and an aerial path, and each level offers a different viewpoint. The rainforest includes a small hill, a waterfall, a wooden walkway and a pool, along with a vertical green wall and a water wall. In 2019 management announced an automated control system for the greenhouse and a multimedia setup for the science pavilion, which holds an "evolution path", a 5D cinema and exercise bikes.

The greenhouse presents plant landscapes from the three great tropical-forest groups, African, American and Indo-Malayan, according to the city's official publication of April 2025. It names the so-called "poison-arrow tree", a coffee plant laden with fruit and water lilies. The desert-plant hall lines up cacti of every shape, tall or squat, slender or rounded. In 2018 management planned more than 400 species in the greenhouse, mostly tropical and subtropical.

Across the garden, sources count more than 2,000 species planted, 60 of them listed under CITES; in 2019, many of the most valuable American cacti and succulents were broken or pulled out by visitors. In January 2025 the garden was building up a holly collection, brought to about sixty species.

The greenhouse is the most conspicuous building in the garden and stands beside Pearl Lake, in a park organised into eleven themed gardens, including medicinal plants, rare local plants, crape myrtles, hollies, shade plants, fragrant plants, climbers, a garden for the blind, a children's garden and a bird valley.

The garden forms a landscape transition with the Huizhou West Lake site. Nearby, Pearl Spring, already mentioned in a Ming-era chronicle, is counted among the four famous springs of Huizhou. In spring, according to the official publication of 2025, a wall of flowering bougainvillea draws visitors.