Landscape Greenhouse, Wuhan Botanical Garden (武汉植物园景观温室)

Wuhan Botanical Garden, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was founded in 1956. It now has two sites, Moshan in Hongshan District and a second campus in the East Lake High-Tech Development Zone, and grows more than 8,000 species.

The Landscape Greenhouse was completed early in 2006 on the Moshan site. Designed to combine plant conservation, scientific research and public education, it became the garden's landmark building and is described as the largest landscape glasshouse in central China. The account of the project adds that after these works the number of species grown in the garden rose from 4,000 to 7,500, half of the newcomers being native to the Americas, Africa and the Mediterranean.

The glasshouse reopened to the public on 1 September 2020 after a period of closure. The garden has since added a glasshouse devoted to aquatic plants, which in January 2025 hosted the garden's orchid show for the first time.

The Landscape Greenhouse covers a footprint of 3,188 m². Its building materials were all imported from France, and its technical equipment includes automatic temperature and humidity regulators, shading systems and automatic watering. Inside, the temperature is held between 18 and 35 °C.

The space is divided into three rooms with distinct climates: a tropical rainforest room, a room for succulents with a desert atmosphere, and an orchid room devoted to rare species. Besides receiving the public, the building provides working conditions for the garden's researchers, and experimental glasshouses reserved for research stand nearby. The sources consulted give neither the designer nor the height of the glasshouse.

Depending on the account, the glasshouse holds more than 1,500 or more than 1,600 species from around the world: over 1,200 rainforest plants and succulents, and over 400 orchids, its most admired feature. The rainforest room presents tropical forest flora, the succulent room plants of arid lands and the orchid room a concentrated display of rarities.

A glasshouse devoted to aquatic plants completes the ensemble: it recreates alpine marshes, waterfalls and rapids and coastal seabeds, and shows more than 300 aquatic plants from the tropics and other specialised habitats. Tropical orchid shows are regularly staged in the garden in winter; in January 2025 the orchid show moved into the aquatic glasshouse for the first time.

The glasshouse stands on the botanical garden's Moshan site in Hongshan District, Wuhan. Allow about an hour for its three rooms, more if the aquatic plant glasshouse is added. In winter, when the outdoor collections are resting, the tropical orchid shows give the glasshouses particular appeal; in spring and summer the visit is better combined with a walk through the rest of the garden, which grows more than 8,000 species. The experimental glasshouses nearby are research facilities.