Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden — botanical garden
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Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden

  • 1 min read
  • 12.767° N 100.933° E

Interesting facts

  • The land Pisit and Nongnooch Tansacha bought in 1954 covered about 1,500 rai, roughly 240 hectares, intended for coconuts, mangoes and oranges.
  • Its formal French Gardens, modelled on Versailles, opened in 1998 on soil dug out when the garden's lakes were enlarged, in a valley once planted with sunflowers.
  • The Italian Garden, with its marble statues imported from Italy, was the very first garden Nongnooch Tansacha created on the estate.
  • A Stonehenge replica was built here in 2000 from stones brought from Prachinburi province, one of them engraved in honour of Nongnooch.
  • Dinosaur Valley opened in 2017 after a single Triceratops model in the cactus garden proved so popular that more than 180 replicas followed.
  • Nine Bhutanese prayer flags, gifted by Bhutan's embassy in 2018, are replaced every six months in a ceremony as they fade.
  • Giant arapaima from the Amazon, among the largest freshwater fish in the world, live in the lakes on the garden's eastern side.
  • The garden's cycad gene bank, an important refuge for this endangered plant group, is run by the cycad specialist Anders J. Lindström.
  • Covering around 500 acres, Nong Nooch is often described as the largest botanical garden in Southeast Asia.

Why it is worth it

Nong Nooch started in 1954 as a fruit plantation, bought by Pisit and Nongnooch Tansacha with no botanical ambitions at all. It was Nongnooch's travels that changed the plan: inspired by ornamental gardens she saw abroad, she replanted the estate as a flower and palm garden and opened it to the public in 1980. Her son Kampon took over management in 1983 and pushed the collection well past decorative planting into serious botanical territory.

That shift shows most clearly in the cycads. Since the garden's botanical program formally began in 1991, it has built one of the largest cycad collections anywhere, anchored by a dedicated germplasm bank holding more than 500 endangered cycad species — plants from a lineage so ancient that some varieties have barely changed since the age of dinosaurs. Conservation organizations treat the living collection as a genetic insurance policy for species disappearing from the wild.

The scale behind the cultural shows and topiary displays most visitors come for is easy to miss: the accession records run past 19,000 individual plantings representing over 12,000 species, alongside a claimed title of the world's largest living palm collection. What looks, from the entrance gate, like a tourist park is, on the botanical side, a working conservation institution.

Getting there

12 km from Sattahip. U-Tapao–Rayong–Pattaya International Airport (UTP) is about 12 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Thailand 24The Most Beautiful Botanical Gardens 10The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232

From the encyclopaedia

Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden, also called Nongnooch Pattaya Garden, is a 500-acre (2.0 km2) botanical garden and tourist attraction in Chonburi Province, Thailand. Located on Sukhumvit road, it can be reached via bus, taxi or private land transportation. It is also a major scientific center dedicated to cycads, with its own Cycad Gene Bank.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

12.76667, 100.93333per Wikidata