A HALF-MILE long botanical garden inspired by Britain’s five centuries of collecting plants from around the world is to form the green centrepiece of the 2012 Olympics.

The riverside rival to Kew Gardens will be divided into four geographic zones, representing Europe and the Mediterranean, the Americas, Asia and the southern hemisphere. Together, they will contain thousands of species, many of them brought back by British explorers and horticulturalists.

The project has been drawn up by Sarah Price, 28, one of Britain’s foremost garden designers.

It will form part of a park, designs for which will be unveiled this Thursday by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) for the site of the games in Stratford, east London. The park, which will remain after the Olympiad for local residents to enjoy, will be about the size of St James’s Park, near Buckingham Palace.

The buildings at London 2012 will not be able to compete with the spectacular venues of Beijing 2008, such as the bird’s nest stadium and the water cube aquatics centre. The parkland, however, drawing on Britain’s world-leading horticultural traditions, is likely to be a cut above the municipal-style layouts at the Chinese Games.

In addition to Price’s gardens, the park will include flowering meadows, thousands of native woodland trees and several hills, similar to Henman hill at Wimbledon, on which spectators will be able to watch events on giant screens.

The ODA and its landscape designers have sidestepped television celebrity gardeners such as Charlie Dimmock or Alan Titchmarsh.

Instead, they have signed up Price, a rising star of the gardening world based in Brixton, south London, because of what they call her “painterly” approach. She does not use decking or water features but instead is a plantswoman in the tradition of great British gardeners such as Gertrude Jekyll or Vita Sackville-West.

Price won a first-class degree in fine art in 2004 and became an under-gardener at Hampton Court to make a living. Soon she took up designing and quickly gained a reputation, winning gold and silver medals at Hampton Court and Chelsea flower shows for the past three years. Her concept for the Olympics, she says, is complex but simple in its impact. “It’s really a giant painting in three dimensions,” she said.

The four zones of the 2012 garden will be separated by bridges across Waterworks River, a branch of the River Lee, which has been made navigable to large barges. It will take visitors through four periods of garden history, inspired by the great British plant collectors.

People will be able to walk from western Europe and the Mediterranean in the 14th-17th centuries, via America in the 17th and 18th centuries, through plants from Australia, South Africa and New Zealand in the 18th-19th centuries, and finally Asia and the Far East in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Britain’s great plant collectors, who followed the country’s trade and empire around the world, included John Tradescant, who gathered fruit trees from the Netherlands in the early 17th century, and his son, also called John, who brought back magnolias and tulip trees from North America.

Joseph Banks, the botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the Pacific, brought back hundreds of species, including the caper.

Price is the youngest designer responsible for a major project at the Olympics. She is to oversee the planting under the overall direction of the American landscape guru George Hargreaves, who also designed the open spaces for the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

Price’s 21st-century botanical garden is understood to be costing £5m of the £200m price of the whole park.

It will run along a widened branch of the river on either side of the park’s main entrance. It will be between the main stadium and the striking aquatic centre designed by the architect Zaha Hadid.

“We have a great tradition of landscape design and garden design in this country,” said John Hopkins, the ODA’s parklands director.

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