The latest edition of our monthly newsletter News Shoots is now available in the password-protected Friends Area of the website. It will shortly be distributed to Friends by email, and print copies will be on the way to members without email addresses.

Thanks to Pete Tomlin for a fascinating online session this morning about the Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust’s ‘Nature Counts’ system, which lets us as members of the public contribute to the larger environmental picture by recording our wildlife sightings. You can view a recording of Pete’s talk is in the password-protected Friends Area of our website.

Sadly we have had to cancel our first planned public tour of the Gardens in February, owing to the continuing Covid restrictions. We hope we may still be able to offer the March tour, which will have a special focus on Spring blossom, and will take place at lunchtime on Tuesday 23rd March.

We’ve added some new items to our online shop - a Friends tea towel and tote bag, and two lovely winter greetings cards, produced from beautiful watercolour paintings of the Gardens.

We have some exciting online lectures available for Friends over the next few months. Recent additions to the programme include talks by John Grimshaw, Director of the Yorkshire Arboretum, and historic parks expert Paul Rabbitts.

We’re delighted that top garden designer Jo Thompson will be giving an online lecture for the Friends next Tuesday, 19th January. Given Jo’s popularity, we are offering a limited number of places to non-members at just £5.

The January edition of our monthly newsletter News Shoots has been distributed to Friends by email, and is also available in the password-protected Friends Area of the website. Print copies are on the way to members without email addresses.

2020 was a difficult and frustrating year for our garden volunteers, with little or no work possible during lockdown and limited numbers allowed back into the Gardens as a result of the Coronavirus regulations. So we are delighted to record that, despite all the challenges, garden volunteers managed to work 1,484 hours in total during the year, and the plant propagation team contributed a further 1,939 hours.

Christmas Day is the one day of the year when our gardeners get some well-deserved time off, and so the Gardens will be CLOSED on Friday. Between Boxing Day and 2 January closing time will be an hour earlier than normal at 3pm.

Along with a number of Sheffield green spaces, the Botanical Gardens are lit up for the festive season, with changing colours in the glass pavilions and lights on the mulberry tree in the Four Seasons garden.

We are proud to hold three National Plant Collections at the Botanical Gardens, including the only collection of Diervilla, a small deciduous North American shrub, grown for its yellow flowers that are very attractive to bees. You can now explore…

Our lecture organiser has been busy booking more speakers for our Zoom lectures for the first part of 2021.

We’re delighted to be welcoming multi-award-winning garden designer, Jo Thompson…

The December edition of our monthly newsletter News Shoots has been distributed to Friends by email, and is also available in the password-protected Friends Area of the website.

For National Tree Week we’ve launched a new digital trail of some of the trees in the Gardens.

Our tree experts have selected some of the most beautiful and interesting specimens to view in a leisurely hour’s stroll, accompanied by an audio guide.

Volunteers Peter and Trish Kohn have filled one of the greenhouses in the Gardens with over a thousand of their seed-raised plants for safe-keeping over the winter. Most are from South Africa, representing almost 250 different species.