Transforming Birmingham Botanic Gardens in terms of plants, culture, well-being and learning - with Sara Blair-Manning

In this episode of the HortWeek Podcast, Matt Appleby speaks to Sara Blair-Manning to discuss the ambitious Growing Our Green Heritage project at the Birmingham Botanic Gardens. Facing the dual challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, Blair-Manning outlines the transformative £25 million “Growing Our Green Heritage” project, aimed at restoring the historic venue while ensuring 21st-century sustainability.

At the heart of the project is the massive challenge of temporarily relocating over 10,000 plants to allow for glasshouse restoration. Sarah describes this "museum of plants" as a living collection that carries inherent jeopardy, as plants, unlike static museum artifacts, react unpredictably to being moved. To mitigate this, the horticultural team has spent years auditing the collection, setting up specialised nursing glasshouses, and actively propagating backup plants to ensure the gardens' global botanical legacy is safeguarded.

Simultaneously, the physical footprint of the gardens is being redesigned to vastly improve the day-to-day visitor experience. The current, echoing UPVC entrance building, which she jokingly refers to as the "swimming pool entrance" due to its extreme seasonal temperatures, will be replaced by an extended, fully accessible visitor centre. Existing architectural footprints will be reused rather than demolished to lower carbon impact. Additions include accessible facilities including a prayer room, changing places facility and a significantly larger cafe run in partnership with Medicine Bakery. The new layout will allow locals to access the shop and cafe without buying a garden ticket, a move expected to better integrate the gardens into the local community. "Education by stealth" will be delivered via multi-layered digital interpretation.

The curation strategy is also shifting to meet modern environmental and cultural realities. Rather than relying on high-maintenance, water-heavy municipal bedding, the gardens are transitioning to drought- and pest-resilient perennial plants better suited to extreme weather:

"We've changed the approach in terms of areas of planting to go to a drought-resilient and pest-resilient perennial framework of planting that is more sensible given the extremes of weather that we're getting," she says.

The gardens are also moving away from traditional, colonial-era botanical narratives toward a co-curated model. By partnering with Birmingham’s "hyper-diverse" communities, the gardens are incorporating multicultural knowledge about the plants' origins and implementing multi-layered interpretation, including digital tools like Bloomberg Connects, to ensure that history, science, and cultural relevance are shared transparently with every visitor.

As Blair-Manning says, "I've always believed that if you can get the values and behaviours right of the organisation and the people working or volunteering for the organisation, then everything else will follow."

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