Lowveld Botanical Garden, Mpumalanga

One of the main reasons to visit Nelspruit, the Lowveld National Botanical Garden lies just outside of town, a beautiful 159 hectare space dominated by rugged, rocky river scenery, and home to over 600 naturally occurring plant species, and a further 2000 that have been introduced to the garden.

The Lowveld Botanical Garden is all about the two rivers that run through it; that fashion the garden with a unique quality of its own. The Crocodile River enters the garden with a tremendous rush, gushing through a narrow, pot-holed solid rock gorge, whilst its counterpart, the Nels River, cascades down a waterfall from the west - the two content to merge in a somewhat more gentle pool. The river banks are dominated by evergreen forest belts, and the eastern bank of the Crocodile River is a tropical African rainforest, representative of the rapidly diminishing rain forests in central and west Africa, and a world first for the Lowveld Garden.

Aside from this, the Lowveld Botanical Garden is alive with trees and creates a wonderful haven for visitors. Around 650 tree species indigenous to South Africa dominate the garden, interspersed with ancient cycads and a variety of shrubs. The garden is dominated by a vegetation type known as Sour Lowveld Bushveld that is a link between the true Lowveld and the escarpment, due mainly to the garden’s altitude. There is rarely a dramatic contrast between winter and summer on the Lowveld because of the evergreen nature of trees and shrubs, especially in the riparian zones on the banks of the two rivers.

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