Olympic city decorated with 40 million potted plants

22 July 2008

BEIJING – The Chinese capital has placed some 40 million potted plants along main roads and near hotels and Olympic venues in preparation for the Beijing games in August, officials said on Tuesday.

"The planting and care of flowers in the city has become one of the important parts of Beijing’s greening," Wang Sumei, vice director of the Beijing Landscape and Forestry Bureau, told reporters.

"We picked up over 20 kinds of heat-resistant flowers from more than 500 species of seasonable flowers to decorate the city, including chrysanthemum and salvia," Wang said.

In preparation for the 8 – 24 August Olympics, Beijing also used more than 30 million shrubs and rosebushes to cover a total area of 8,800 hectares since 2000, she said.

City workers have planted 22.7 million trees and turfed 46.5 million square metres of grass verges over the same period, Wang said.

The potted plants and flower beds are concentrated around the Olympic Green; Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of Beijing; and along Changan Avenue, the main east-west route which runs along the northern edge of the square.

An earlier report by the Beijing Olympic organizers, BOCOG, said the total area of flower petals around the Olympic Green would cover about 100,000 square metres, the equivalent of some five million potted flowers.

BOCOG said it would keep some 1.2 million potted flowers in reserve "ready at any time to replace wilting plants or to refresh the scene a bit".

[dpa / Expatica]