Yanling National Flower and Tree Expo Park 鄢陵国家花木博览园

About Yanling National Flower and Tree Expo Park

Yanling National Flower and Tree Expo Park (鄢陵国家花木博览园), also called the Central Plains Flower and Tree Expo Park (中原花木博览园), is a horticultural show park in the new town district of Yanling County (鄢陵县), Xuchang (许昌), Henan. National Highway 311 runs along its southern edge.

Yanling has grown flowers and nursery plants for a long time. Chinese Wikipedia traces the trade to the Tang, says it grew under the Song and peaked under the Ming and Qing, and quotes the saying that Yanling wintersweet leads the world (鄢陵腊梅冠天下). The county government calls Yanling a natural base for acclimatising plants, where southern flowers move north and northern ones move south, and counts more than 2,400 varieties of landscaping nursery stock, bonsai, potted plants and cut flowers. The county has been named China's Home of Flowers and Trees (中国花木之乡), and Yanling wintersweet (鄢陵蜡梅) is protected as a national geographical indication product.

Work on the park started in March 2002 and was completed that September. The grounds cover 1,500 mu (about 100 hectares), stretching 600 m north to south and 1,600 m east to west, with Provincial Road 219 on the east side. The overall design came from the School of Landscape Architecture of Beijing Forestry University (北京林业大学), which divided the park into 13 functional zones; the park combines plant display, trading, eco-tourism and research. It is a national AAAA tourist attraction (国家4A级旅游景区).

The park has its own expo exhibition zone. The second and third editions of the yearly Central Plains Flower and Tree Expo (中原花木博览会) took place here in 2002 and 2003, the second under the theme 'Green, Nature, Life'. Between them the two fairs received more than 800,000 visitors from China and abroad, and close to 400 flower businesses and organisations came to view stock and negotiate deals.

What to look for

• The wintersweet culture zone (蜡梅文化展区)
• The bamboo zone (竹类植物展区) and the conifer zone (针叶植物展区)
• The tropical plant zone (热带植物展区)
• The bonsai culture zone (盆景文化展区)
• The demonstration zone for famous and fine nursery plants (名优花木示范区)
• The flower-viewing zone (花卉观赏区) and the ecological science zone (生态科普展区)

Location & getting there

Getting to Yanling National Flower and Tree Expo Park

• Search for 鄢陵国家花木博览园 with 许昌市 and 鄢陵县.