The Ministry of Construction recently issued a circular naming 34 cities as 2007 "National Garden Cities". Guangzhou is included.

In recent years three fundamental changes have been made to Guangzhou's roads. First; the landscape plants are left to grow naturally, instead of being sheared stiffly to various kinds of shapes, such as bars, squares, round, etc. Secondly; open spaces have been decorated using not only lawns and shrubs but also lofty evergreen broad-leaved trees. And thirdly; more trees have been planted in local areas.

Since 2004 Guangzhou has carried out a campaign to replant trees on roads, the largest such program in the last 20 years. Today, Guangzhou has become one of China's cities with the most overpass greenery and the best landscape effects in the nation. As of December 2007, Guangzhou had completed greening and grooming about 92 kilometers of roadway and of 123 pedestrian bridges, intersections and viaducts.

At the same time, Guangzhou has finished such Pearl River bank greening projects as Datansha Trans Island Green Belts, Riverside Recreation Belt at the Liwan Section of the Pearl River, Road Greening on the Pearl River Banks, among others which form the landscape of the tourism sections of the Pearl River. And, additionally, Guangzhou has built 55 new parks and expanded 10 others, 11 of which are classed as comprehensive parks.

Editor: Yan