Happy new year! We hope you had an enjoyable festive season with your loved ones and friends.

You’ll notice that we’re enjoying a little more daylight every day – by the end of the month, we’ll be enjoying a whole hour of extra light – and the gardening team will take advantage of every additional minute.

January is one of the coldest months, but the gardening team will keep warm by doing their regular outdoor exercise of cleaning paths of leaves, and of snow and ice if there is any.

At this time of year, we can’t blame visitors for dwelling a little longer than usual in the warm glasshouses. There will be plenty to feast your eyes on this month, too: hibiscus, pelargonium and sparrmannia are just a few of the colourful exotic plants in flower now, reminding us of warmer days ahead.

Step outside into the brisk fresh air, and there are more beautiful specimens to enjoy. The wonderfully scented winter shrubs, such as hamamelis (witch hazel), Daphne and sarcococca (Christmas box), flower throughout January, and you can find these in the Wilson border, the aviary winter bed and the winter border.

There’s every chance you’ll also start to spot the promise of spring as the leaf buds of early flowering bulbs will start to poke through the soil in the borders. Every day, we spot new ones peeping out and just that hint of the colourful yellows and whites of narcissi to come makes your heart sing.

It’s not just your eyes you need to keep peeled this month – your ears will also be in for a treat as you walk around the Gardens. It’s January we usually hear the song thrush singing and the woodpeckers “drumming”, as both mark their territories before the spring.

And if you’re lucky, you might also see the shy redwings from Scandinavia, stripping the red berries off the hollies in the woodland walk.

Whenever you visit, we hope you enjoy a few hours of tranquillity in the wonderful grounds and glasshouses – and if it’s cold, you can always warm up with a hot drink and a bite to eat in our tea room.

We’re looking forward to another exciting year after a great 2022, and we hope you’ll be able to visit us this year or even become a member. 

Perhaps you received a membership as a Christmas gift – if so, we look forward to your regular visits here.

Many people are surprised to learn we are an independent educational charity that receives no regular public funding. Instead, our income comes from generous public donations and grants, as well as conferences, weddings and other events. We welcome everyone – and you know you by coming to visit, you are also helping to preserve this fantastic Grade II listed space. 

We also love to see your photos and videos. If you pay us a visit, please keep posting them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and let us know what you have enjoyed in particular on your visit here. We look forward to seeing you all this month.

Can you believe we are almost at the end of another year? And what a year it has been at the Gardens!

We have been awarded £590,814 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to restore our four historic glasshouses and have also secured £40,000 from Veolia Environmental Trust via the Landfill Communities Fund to build new, environmentally sustainable composting facilities.

We hosted the Queen’s Baton Relay for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games in the summer, took part in the magnificent PoliNations event in the city centre, and earlier in the year, also welcomed a new chief executive and a new chair of trustees.

And we have welcomed thousands of visitors, once again, to this wonderful heritage site, who enjoy the tranquil space, the greenery and the beautiful floral displays that the team create every season.

As Christmas approaches, the work continues for the gardening team.

The drought-tolerant planting for the car park beds continues this month. These permanent displays will include pollinator-friendly shrubs, including Juniperus ‘Blue Star’, Salvia ‘Royal Bumble’, Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’ and Ulex europaeus ‘Flore Pleno’ and will provide a colourful welcome for all.

We’ll continue to rake up the fallen leaves to help minimise the risk of diseases and to reduce the number of pests, and we’ll also prune shrubs and hedges while they are dormant.

Of course, we’re fully in the festive mood now: four fabulous Christmas trees greet visitors, with a 15ft specimen in the car park and three others in the shop, gallery and front entrance.

Have you got tickets for the gorgeous Luminate winter light trail? It’s enchanting visitors and runs every evening at the Gardens (except Christmas Day and Boxing Day) until Monday, January 2.

If you are visiting in daylight hours, there is still much to enjoy at this time of year, but one of the highlights is the scented witch hazel (Hamamelis), which shows off its citrus peel-like flowers. Do make a beeline for it – just follow your nose.

If you can spend some time in your garden, there are a few jobs you can do this month: it’s the best time to plant bare-root roses, ornamental trees and shrubs, and we also recommend moving potted plants to sheltered spots in your garden to protect them from the coldest temperatures.

You can prune back climbing roses between now and February and don’t forget to feed the birds over winter – they’ll thank you for it.

If you’re struggling to buy that discerning friend or relative a gift this Christmas, don’t forget about our wonderful garden gift shop, which is free to access via the reception.

You can also buy a gift voucher, redeemable against membership, admission and events or for the ultimate gift, we couldn’t recommend membership to the Gardens more! From just £30, you can treat a loved one to a whole year’s access to the Gardens.

We’re open all over the Christmas and New Year period, except for Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and remember that we’ll close at 3 pm on Christmas Eve. We hope to see you soon, whether you want to enjoy the green space or are intent on walking off that Christmas pudding and brandy butter!

Whatever your plans for the festive period, we in the gardening team wish you a very happy Christmas and a wonderful 2023.

It may only be November, but we are preparing for Christmas.

If like us, you love the festive season, you’ll be pleased to know we’ll be taking delivery of our Christmas trees on November 15.

As usual, we’ll be placing a stunning 15ft-high tree in the car park to welcome visitors and we’ll place smaller ones in the front entrance. We promise they will be a sight for sore eyes and will help to get you in the festive mood over the following few weeks.

Talking of Christmas, we’re hosting a fantastic winter trail from November 26. Luminate is an almost mile-long trail of gorgeous lights, light plays and ambient music that will weave through the Gardens. It will be a fabulous experience for all ages and will run every night until January 2 (although we are closed for Christmas and Boxing Day). Make sure you pre-book your tickets for this seasonal spectacular.

The work continues for the hard-working gardening team throughout November. We’ll finish moving tender plants from the grass garden and the cacti from the Loudon Terrace, tucking them away safely in the nursery over winter.

We’ll also complete the task of planting dozens of polyanthus around the bandstand and in the car park. We’ve also looked again at how we can include permanent, drought-tolerant planting there, so we will be adding favourites such as Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’. These will also help to provide all-year interest for our visitors.

The main job for the team will be collecting the leaves that are falling on the paths, borders and lawns. This is a huge job every year, but a really important one. As well as keeping the team fit, it keeps paths safe for everyone and it helps to keep the grass healthy. Leaving leaves on a lawn smothers the grass, which encourages fungal disease, attracts pests and restricts nutrients. If you have ponds, it is really important to clear leaves, too.

Of course, collecting the leaves and bagging them up also means we will get wonderfully rich leaf mould that will be used to enrich the soil in about 18 months’ to two years’ time, when it is fully broken down. We strongly encourage you to do the same in your garden, too. You will not regret it.

It’s also the time of year when the horticultural team can indulge themselves by scouring the new trade catalogues for new plants and ideas for next year’s summer bedding. We’ll discuss planting schemes, go over the available budgets and put in our orders.

If you’re planning to spend some time in the garden, preparing everything for winter, here are a few key tasks to carry out this month:

Finish planting your tulips, daffodils and crocuses for a wonderful spring display.

Top up those bird feeders – our feathered friends will appreciate the calories.

Protect any tender plants, such as tree ferns and cannas, that you cannot move indoors. You may need to wrap them in specialist fleece or bubblewrap.

There’s still time to add winter flowers to beds, planters and borders: pansies, wallflowers and violas all add welcome colour over the coldest months.

Did you know the Gardens is an independent educational charity that receives no regular public funding? Instead, our income comes from generous public donations, grants as well as conferences, weddings and other events – plus entry fees and memberships. By supporting us, you are helping to preserve this historic Grade II listed space in Birmingham.

There is also a great opportunity this Christmas to send a membership to a friend or family as a Christmas present!

We also love to see your photos and videos. If you visit us, please keep posting them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and let us know what you have enjoyed in particular on your visit here.

We look forward to welcoming you in November.

We hope you saw the coverage of the Gardens hosting the Queen’s Baton Relay for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games last month.

It was a spectacular occasion. We were able to showcase this wonderful heritage site to media from all over the world, and we also welcomed dozens of VIPs and guests who enjoyed the buzz of this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The gardening team and volunteers always work hard, but they pulled out all the stops to ensure every corner of our 15 acres looked spectacular for the relay event.

If you visit us this month, you can still enjoy the vibrant bedding scheme on the Loudon Terrace, which have a blue, green and yellow colour scheme – the colours of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Continuing the Games theme, we have also created a wonderful Commonwealth trail for visitors as part of the city’s celebrations. There are two trails: one with 54 national flowering and shrub plants and another with 54 national crops of the Commonwealth.

Grown inside the display glasshouses and relevant garden areas, they include Mozambique chilli plants and Tuvalu’s peachy plumeria flowers, plus watermelons from Sierra Leone and Samoan ginger roots, as well as more unusual plants such as the pigeon pea flower from The Bahamas.

With the school summer holidays underway, why not get your children to find as many of these plants as possible? We also have other activities for your young ones to enjoy while they are here. Afterwards, you can reward them for their hard work with some time in our playground and even an ice cream from the café.

We’re really proud of the herbaceous border looks this summer – it is a riot of colour. We’re holding a guided tour of the herbaceous border on Thursday, August 25, where you can learn all about how to plant a spectacular display. Tours are included in your ticket price, so just turn up at reception at 1 pm if you’d like to join one of our expert gardeners for the hour-long tour.

Another must-see this summer is the Butterfly House, which is packed with beautiful specimens from all over the world, while the grass garden is starting to fill out nicely with its jungle-like foliage and colour. Think grasses are boring? A visit to our grass garden should change your mind!

If you haven’t visited the Gardens before – or you’ve not been for a while – we’d love to welcome you. You might not realise we are an independent educational charity without regular public funding. Instead, our income is from generous public donations, grants, conferences, weddings, and other events.

We love to see your photos and videos, too, so if you do visit us, please keep posting them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and let us know what you have enjoyed on your visit here. We look forward to seeing you all this month.

 

Want to visit the gardens with your family? Check out the top 5 things to do with your family in Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

At last! We’ve seen off another winter and are starting to enjoy more hours of daylight. You never know, it might start to feel like spring soon, too.

As any gardener will tell you, March is when the seed sowing starts in earnest – and here at the Gardens we’ll be doing just that as the team head to the plant nursery.

We’ll be sowing bedding plants for beautiful summer displays, annual herbs and vegetables, as well as new plants for our Tropical House.

Winter has been fairly mild and, of late, quite wet, so we’re looking forward to getting the mowers out towards the end of the month to give the lawns their first cut of the season. If you are planning to tidy up your lawn later this month, make sure you set the blades fairly high and don’t be tempted to give the grass a short cut as this will only weaken it and will also encourage moss growth.

If you’ve visited us in the past couple of weeks, you’ll no doubt have seen the wonderful display of snowdrops again in the woodland walk. As they come to the end of their flowering this month, we’ll be dividing the clumps and using the divisions to fill any gaps. You should do the same in your garden because the best time to move snowdrops is straight after flowering while they are “still in the green”.

Daffodils (narcissus) are the flower of the moment and are looking stunning on our west lawn opposite the playground. Speaking of daffodils, be sure to pay a visit to our brand new Daffodil Society Show at BBG over the Easter weekend (April 16-17). It’s going to be amazing!

We’re enjoying hosting events and welcoming back old friends, so make sure you check our what’s on pages to see what’s coming up.

Don’t forget it’s Mother’s Day on March 27 – our garden centre has wonderful plants and gifts for the most important woman in your life. You don’t even have to visit the Gardens to gain entry to it; just turn up and head straight in (although we’d love for you to stay awhile and enjoy the Gardens).

We hope to see you in the Gardens this month, enjoying what the early spring weather has to offer. It’s such a wonderful space in which to while away a couple of hours or more, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to you about gardening.

The shortest day is behind us and the amount of daylight we can enjoy is slowly increasing – we can expect about an hour’s extra daylight by January 18, which is something to look forward to.

The gardening team will not waste a second of it!

Routine jobs, such as clearing paths of leaves, and any snow and ice that we may have, is one that keeps us occupied at this time of year, but we’ll have many delights to enjoy in the gardens that will help to raise our spirits.

Head to the Wilson border, the aviary winter bed and the winter border and you’ll be rewarded with wonderfully scented winter shrubs, such as hamamelis (witch hazel), Daphne and sarcococca (Christmas box), which will continue to flower throughout January.

January is also the time when the leaf buds of many spring flowering bulbs just start to poke through the soil around the gardens. It’s heartening to see these pop up out of the soil and if you visit the gardens a number of times over the month, you’re bound to notice them all, too.

It is usually this month that we start to hear the song thrush singing and the woodpeckers “drumming” – both signs of the birds marking their territories before the spring. If you are lucky, you will also see the shy redwings from Scandinavia stripping the red berries off the hollies in the woodland walk.

One mammoth task for the gardening team this month is putting out the 700 plant labels we have ordered. This will prove to be a significant plant identification test and a great test of our horticultural knowledge!

Enjoy whatever you can do in the garden this month – there’s usually something that can be done, unless the weather is very bad. So even if you manage just 10 minutes of pottering and tidying, it’s a great way to switch off from the stresses of our everyday lives.

If you’re visiting us this month, and spot something you love, have a question about a specific plant or just want to highlight your trip, please tag us or post to our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages. We love to see what our visitors enjoy when they spend time here. We hope to see you all soon.

The clocks have gone back, we’re getting less daylight and the weather’s turning colder – thank goodness for gardening, which keeps our minds occupied and our bodies warm!

Whatever time you can spend outside in your garden, it is never wasted: even a few minutes of tidying up, cutting back and deadheading can make all the difference to the look of the space and to how you feel.

We’ll be continuing the big job of scooping the leaves up. As you can imagine, this is a huge job but we ensure nothing goes to waste. We collect the leaves and bag them up and wait. Patiently. Every year we are rewarded with hundreds of bags of wonderful leaf mould that have been developing over the previous one or two years.

It never ceases to delight us that we can get such a huge quantity of fantastic soil conditioner from our generous trees that we use to enrich the borders.

Now the grass garden is past its best, we’ll be removing the salvias and cannas, and from elsewhere in the Gardens, we’ll be saying goodbye to the dahlias, which do such a great job to cheer us up during September and October.

As always, we’ll take the tubers to the dry store in the nursery for the winter, so they can conserve their energy until next year when we’ll replant them for another display.

In their place will be hundreds of polyanthus and spring bulbs, such as tulips and daffodils. These will be planted on the Terrace and in the car park.

There’s no lack of colour, though, and if you head to our Mediterranean House, you’ll see that the chrysanthemums and coleus are looking splendid.

We had some unusual guests last month (and they’re here until November 7) – 50 dinosaurs that have been enjoying a high vantage point over the Gardens. We know visitors have enjoyed the spectacle, but as soon as they leave, the gardening team and our fantastic volunteers will be tidying up so you’ll never know they have been there.

In their place – just one, though! – will be another giant installation: the 15ft tall Christmas tree. This will take pride of place in our car park, as it does every year, to help our visitors get into the festive mood.

Have you ever thought about volunteering at the Gardens? As a charity, we rely on our volunteers a great deal and we are immensely grateful for all their input. If it’s something you’d like to find out about, we’re holding a volunteer recruitment day on Wednesday, November 17 from 11am-3pm.

We have a variety of roles – from front of house to the shop, from gardening to our education department. Whether you can spare a couple of hours a week or several days a month, we’d love to hear from you. You can register your interest here.

We’re hosting one of our wonderful guided tours on Thursday, November, 25 between 1 and 2pm. This month’s theme is on autumn colour, winter twigs and berries. These are always popular and there is always something new and fascinating to learn on these informative, fun talks. You don’t need to book – just come to the main reception area. The tour is free, but visitors have to pay normal admission fees (unless you’re a member of the Gardens, of course).

We love to see your social media posts of your visits to the Gardens. If you spot something you love, have a question about a specific plant or just want to highlight your trip, please tag us or post to our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages. We hope to see you all soon.

October is one of the busiest months of the year for the horticulture team at the Gardens.

The first job of the month is to start bringing in all tender plants to overwinter in the nursery glasshouses before the first frosts arrive.
We’ll be moving the dahlias from the terrace glasshouse beds and all the tender plants from the Totally Tropical beds on the Loudon Terrace, on the car park and in the grass garden, and they will be kept dry and in optimum condition, so they can be replanted next year.

We’ll also move the cacti and other succulents from the terrace, but these will overwinter inside the butterfly house, which has now closed for 2021.

Once the summer bedding has been removed around the bandstand, on the terrace and car park, the planting of winter bedding begins: 4000 polyanthus, no less.

We’ll also begin the task of planting hundreds of spring-flowering bulbs outside around the gardens and in pots inside the nursery, ready for a welcoming floral display early next year.

The lawns will receive their last cut of 2021 to keep them looking tidy over the winter and we’ll also continue to cut the hedges so they look neat over the winter.

Another big job for us over the next few weeks will be collecting the fallen leaves, which will rot down to make leaf mould in 12-24 months’ time. If you haven’t made leaf mould from leaves in your own garden, we recommend it as it takes minimal effort – and the leaves need to be collected anyway. Leaf mould is a great conditioner that enriches the soil, improves water retention and helps to maintain the soil’s crumbly texture.

Simply place the leaves into a bin liner, pierce holes into the bag and tie it up loosely. If the leaves are dry, dampen them a little before tying up, then pop them into a corner of the garden and leave it to rot down.

If you don’t want to use a bin liner, make a frame out of chicken wire and put it a sheltered area of the garden. Fill it with leaves, moisten it if it is dry and leave it until the leaves have rotted. You could cover the top with chicken wire or perhaps some cardboard to stop them blowing away.

There’s always something amazing to see here at the Gardens, and two of the big highlights for this month are the fabulous cyclamen hederifolium and nerines, which are in full flower and bring some fresh colour to the borders.

We’re also hosting four great shows this month: the Cacti Show on Sunday, October 3; the Cyclamen Show on Sunday, October 10; the Midland Bonsai Show on Friday, October 17; and the National Collection of Cyclamen tour on Thursday, October 28. We’d love to see you there!

We love to see your social media posts when you visit us. If you spot something you love (the peacocks are always popular!), have a question about a specific plant or just want to highlight your trip, please tag us or post to our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages. We hope to see you all soon.