Jindai Botanical Gardens Greenhouse

Jindai Botanical Gardens occupies land that was originally a nursery raising street trees for Tokyo. Opened after the war as the Jindai green space, it was inaugurated as a botanical garden on 20 October 1961, at the time the only botanical park in Tokyo. Since April 2010 it has been managed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Park Association.

The large greenhouse was built in 1984 to house the tropical plant collections. Three decades later the metropolitan government undertook a major renovation: work began in September 2014 and was completed in April 2016, and the greenhouse reopened, substantially transformed, on 12 May 2016.

The project also broadened the scope of the collections. In January 2015 the garden had signed an agreement with the botanic garden of Viña del Mar in Chile, which led to a new section devoted to Chilean flora. The number of species and cultivars on display rose from about 650 before the works to some 1,300 after reopening.

The 1984 building has a footprint of about 2,170 m² and a floor area of about 2,330 m². The 2014–2016 renovation fitted high-insulation multi-layer glazing and an upgraded temperature-control system designed for more efficient energy use, and made the circulation accessible, with step-free routes and handrails.

An extension with a footprint of about 480 m² and some 930 m² of floor space was added to display orchids and begonias. The greenhouse is now arranged as a series of themed rooms, including a room of tropical flowering trees and shrubs, a tropical water lily room, a begonia room and an orchid room, plus a display and rest area.

The greenhouse shows around 1,300 species and cultivars. Brightly flowering tropical trees and shrubs fill one room, while another is given over to tropical water lilies grown in a pool. Orchids and begonias have their own rooms in the 2016 extension.

The renovation strengthened several themes: cacti and other valuable dryland plants, the flora of the Ogasawara Islands, a natural World Heritage Site, carnivorous plants and, since the 2015 agreement, a corner devoted to Chilean plants.

Outdoors, the garden holds around 4,800 species and some 100,000 plants, including a rose garden of about 400 varieties and a large azalea collection.

The greenhouse lies within a park of more than 50 hectares in Chōfu, in the western part of the Tokyo conurbation, about 220 metres south of the main gate. An hour is enough to walk through its rooms, and it closes a little earlier than the rest of the garden. It makes a welcome counterpoint in winter, while spring and autumn draw visitors mainly to the rose garden's 5,200 bushes, the 12,000 azaleas and the roughly 600 cherry trees. The aquatic garden, fed by springs rising below the wooded hills behind Jindai-ji temple, leads the walk on towards that old temple.