The easing of Covid restrictions sadly hasn’t come in time to save our planned Spring Blossom tour, which had been due to take place in March, but we do hope to launch a series of monthly public tours of the Gardens as soon as the regulations allow. Look out for news of the dates and themes of each tour on our Talks and Tours page and in our Events Calendar.

Our next online lecture should be a corker. It will be ‘Plants, Gardens, People’ by the director of the Yorkshire Arboretum, John Grimshaw. Access to the live lecture and the recording will be free for Friends. Members of public are welcome to join us for the live-streaming of John’s talk on Tuesday 9th March. Registration is easy and costs just £5.

Thanks to Simon Olpin for an excellent lecture this morning on his Sheffield garden. He explained how the site evolved into the small slice of suburban jungle that it is today, with hardier exotic shrubs and trees creating a permanent tropical effect, and all managed without chemicals. A recording of the lecture is available on the password-protected Friends Area of the site.

Simon Olpin's exotic jungle garden in Sheffield featured on BBC Gardeners’ World a few years ago. We’re delighted he’s giving an online lecture for the Friends next Tuesday on the garden's evolution and its plants. Members of the public are welcome to join us.

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…