The Central Botanical Garden with 60-odd-year history is located at the foot of Mt Taesong in the suburbs of Pyongyang.

Covering over 160 hectares, the botanical garden is called the herbarium of Korea as it preserves and tends over 1 400 species of plants growing in the country.

It has the Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia greenhouses equipped with modern facilities, a gift plant greenhouse, botanical museum and botanical specimen hall where hundreds of thousands of plants and their seed specimens are preserved.

The Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia greenhouses house the original seeds of the Kimilsungia presented by Indonesian President Sukarno to President Kim Il Sung by naming the flower of an orchid bred at the Bogor Botanical Garden after him in April 1965 and those of the Kimjongilia sent by Kamo Mototeru, a Japanese horticulturist, in February 1988 on the occasion of the birthday of Chairman Kim Jong Il, and growers take sincere care of the immortal flowers named after the great men to grow them bigger and more beautifully.

Growing at the botanical garden are over 3 000 species of gift plants presented by heads of state of different countries, prominent foreign personages and overseas compatriots to the great leaders and the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un. Among them, more than 1 750 species of greenhouse plants are cultivated in the gift plant greenhouse.

More than 200 kinds of tropical, temperate and subtropical plants can be seen at the botanical museum, including date palm, Fagraea ceilanica and banana.

Rare plants of the world can also be found in the botanical garden.

Plants grow in the sections of arboretum, flower garden, orchard, medicinal herb garden and plant-classification garden, and each section is classified into different sections according to species and characters of plants.

According to lecturer Kim Sun Sil, the botanical garden has a 500-year-old Sabina chinensis var.horizontalis sent by a family in Nampho after hearing the news about the construction of the botanical garden in the capital city in the late 1950s.

The tree is 1.8 metres tall, 11.4 metres in diameter and 20 square metres wide at the crown. It is now under good protection as a living monument as it is the biggest of its kind in the DPRK.

The botanical garden introduces and acclimatizes gift and economic plants and has an institute which is engaged in the research work for utilizing plant resources comprehensively. And research hits are issued through a periodical.

It conducts exchanges of seeds and plants and science and technology in close contact with many foreign counterparts across the world.

Nowadays, it is visited by many working people, youth and students every day.