Ornamental Greenhouse of Xuzhou Botanical Garden (徐州植物园观赏温室)

Xuzhou Botanical Garden occupies the former municipal nursery, south of Jiuli Mountain and north of the ring road 二环北路. According to the profile from the Chinese Union of Botanical Gardens, the study and cultivation of the region's plants had begun there as early as 1958. The rebuilding was one of the city's major projects of 2011-2012: work started on 20 June 2011, for about 200 million yuan, and the garden opened on 29 September 2012.

The exhibition greenhouse was in the programme from the start. A February 2012 article places, within the science-education zone, which consists mainly of the greenhouse (about 3,500 m²), a multimedia hall meant to show plant growth through sound and light. Before the opening, a local information site reported that three buildings were nearly finished and that more than a hundred tropical and subtropical plants were already installed in the greenhouse.

On 15 December 2012 the city signed an agreement with the Jiangsu Institute of Botany (Nanjing Zhongshan Botanical Garden) to create a Xuzhou branch. In November 2013 a local site described the greenhouse as the largest, and the only, tropical and subtropical plant exhibition centre in the Huaihai Economic Zone, already mentioning an entrance ticket. The city's parks service runs it today: it awarded a one-year maintenance contract on 10 June 2026, and a text from that service, republished online on 4 August 2026, mentions educational panels and study activities in the greenhouse.

The greenhouse is a rectangular hall 72 m long, 48 m wide and 18 m high, giving 3,456 m² of built area (the product of 72 and 48), according to the profile from the Chinese Union of Botanical Gardens. Its frame is steel, clad in clear glass; the profile compares it to a "green box" standing on the axis of the south entrance, which is the garden's central axis.

Inside, five zones follow one another: tropical rainforest, tropical fruit trees, succulents, southern scenery (南国风情) and aquatic plants. A one-way circuit links them, punctuated by small bridges, a stream, a cave with a waterfall and raised walkways, so that the plants can be seen from several angles. The profile also mentions a landscape bridge winding through the air between the trees, from which visitors see the flowers and, in the distance, "mountains" (the word is in quotation marks in the profile), as well as many misting devices that spray vapour as visitors pass. A plan published in 2012 adds a multimedia hall.

The Chinese Union of Botanical Gardens reports more than 850 rare tropical and subtropical species, in several thousand specimens; another passage of its profile speaks of more than 800 varieties. The 2012 plan lists succulents, tropical flowers and aromatic plants, ferns and screw pines, rainforest plants, fruit and energy plants, aquatic plants, cycads and bromeliads, rare plants and palms. The garden's inventory cites 31 palm species "grown in the greenhouse", then 47 orchids, 77 bromeliads and 230 succulents, without saying whether all of these categories are under the glass.

Specimens singled out include an upas tree (见血封喉) over ten metres tall, with a trunk more than 60 cm thick, whose sap was once used to poison arrows; a bottle palm (酒瓶椰子) over ten metres tall, rare in the wild; and a "bare tree" (光棍树) without thorns or leaves. A local guide cites, in the east part of the hall, large fig trees, queen palms (皇后葵) and frangipanis (鸡蛋花) and, in the north-west, an arid zone with succulents two to three metres tall. In August 2026 the parks service highlighted four rainforest phenomena: the fig that clasps a boulder, buttress roots, the strangler fig that smothers its host and the banyan whose aerial roots form a "forest".

The greenhouse stands on the garden's central axis, in line with the south entrance, among open lawns planted with trees. According to visitors' accounts, the garden itself is free to enter and only the greenhouse is ticketed; these accounts allow about an hour for the greenhouse and two to three hours for the whole park. The same accounts recommend autumn for the maples of the Red Maple Valley (红枫谷) and the ginkgos, and May for the roses. Close by, the garden's flower and ornamental-stone market and the reading room "时光里" (城市书房) round off the walk.