A garden with a memory

Yuh Siang Garden was founded in 1972 by botanist Dr. Lim Yuh Siang, who began collecting Asian species at a time when regional floras were being documented faster than they were being preserved. What started as a researcher's plot grew into a 14-hectare collection organized into themed valleys — orchid ravines, monsoon forest, medicinal terraces — and is now cared for by its third generation of the founding family and its horticultural staff.

The living collection

This is not a display garden with labels for passing admiration; it is a working collection:

• Thousands of documented Asian species, each with provenance records going back decades — where it was collected, by whom, and how it has fared here.
• A continuously indexed living herbarium: voucher specimens matched to the growing plants, so identification can always be checked against a physical record.
• An open-access seed exchange serving registered botanists and horticulturists worldwide, run under proper collection and permitting discipline.
• Themed valleys designed both for conservation value and for the visitor who wants to understand a plant community rather than glance at one.

Who we serve

Serious horticulturists, landscape architects, researchers, and committed plant lovers form our core audience. Students and researchers use the collection and its records for study; gardeners come for cultivation knowledge grounded in decades of growing these species in this climate. We welcome curious visitors too — every pathway is designed to teach something real.

Half a century on, Yuh Siang Garden remains what its founder intended: a living museum of Asian horticulture, where plants carry their history with them and every seed tells you exactly where it came from.