The first and foremost purpose of the botanical garden is purely its scientific and educational. The garden of medicinal plants, comprised of a building with an office, herbarium and seminar rooms for pharmaceutical education, is located at the foot of the hill, Hino, in Fushimi-ku, Kyoto. The garden was established in 1968.
The garden has an essential collection of about 1100 species of medicinal trees, shrubs and other plants labeled and put in order for visitors to view. The same policy is followed in the conservatory in which tropical plants are grown. In the garden, narcotic plants are carefully cultivated for pharmaceutical education, especially for the administrator when he needs to see the Papaver L. and Cannabis L. species for his own professional reasons.
The herbarium has approximately 20,000 sheets of specimens, seed samples of about 300 valuable species, 4,000 crude drug specimens, and photographic collections of natural vegetation and other botanical records from all over the world. This garden was specially prepared for research in medicinal plant science.
Work on medicinal resources and flora in various parts of the field in Kyoto has continued for many years with the aim of preparing an ecological database, in addition to an ethnological inquiry of traditional medicinal plants. Furthermore, in recent years, various attempts have been made at the garden to preserve plants and their genie resources. Some of which are on the verge of disappearance from the earth due to environmental pollution and destruction.