Enjoy A Botanic Garden

There aren’t many gardens to visit in the depths of winter, but if you are near a city with a botanic garden, there are some wonderful glasshouses full of exotic plants. Many of these are also our houseplants, so you can see them growing in their natural habitat. Some run gardening workshops and other one-day events at good value prices. For example, the world famous Ness Botanic Gardens near Liverpool (https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/ness-gardens/) has a six-session “grow your own” workshop series for just £65.

I recently visited the UK’S oldest botanic garden, the Oxford Botanic Gardens, where Dan Pearson will be speaking about “Putting gardens in their context” on February 7, and tickets are £15 ( https://www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk/).

Many botanic gardens have a speciality, such as the one at St Andrews which has 8,000 ferns. Or they are keeping an element of historic gardening alive – the National Botanic Gardens of Wales is restoring its Regency Waterpark, a 200-year-old series of lakes, cascades, weirs and other features (https://botanicgarden.wales/).

There are more top botanic gardens at Cambridge, Durham, Leicester, Ventnor (Isle of Wight), Bristol, Sheffield and Belfast. The Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh has four sites: Edinburgh, Benmore, Dawick and Logan (https:// www.rbge.org.uk/).

And, of course, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, has its newly restored Temperate House (https://www.kew.org/), home to the largest collection of temperate-zone plants in the world.