Marvellous garden spaces: Sheffield Botanical Gardens

Take a tour around the stunning Sheffield Botanical Gardens and learn about the fascinating history of the garden.

Transcript

00:00You can go back almost 200 years to 1833. That was the year after the cholera epidemic

00:11hit Sheffield and also the year after Sheffield sent its first MPs to Parliament. A group

00:18of 85 wealthy gentlemen decided that Sheffield should have a botanical gardens. After all,

00:26Liverpool, Hull, Manchester and Birmingham have got them. So why is Sheffield dragging its feet?

00:32So they sent a petition to the master cutler who held a meeting and it was agreed that we

00:40would have botanical gardens and that meant that they had to rush around getting shareholders.

00:46They were selling shares at 20 pounds each. Well that doesn't sound too much in today's money

00:53but if you move it, it's almost 2,000 pounds. So you know these were not that cheap and the

01:02benefits to the shareholders were not financial. They were the exclusive use of the gardens for

01:09six days a week dot sundags. The Rose Garden has been on this particular site from the beginning.

01:21But we know that it was laid out in this very squirly Victorian pattern back in 1850s by the curator

01:32John Law at the time. Now it stayed that way for loads of years until the Tower Council took over the

01:41management in 1951 where they dug it all up and they instituted a very rectangular Italianate pattern

01:50and planted a yew hedge all the way around it. Now that was okay. Lots of people liked it but unfortunately

01:58as the yew hedge got thicker and thicker it became a trap for all the fungal spores and also caused frost

02:07pockets and a lot of the roses died and so when we did the restoration program it was decided to

02:14reinstate the swirly Victorian pattern that we have today. The centre is marked by this lovely little

02:22statue of a pan spirit of the woods.

02:33Bear fit dates from the beginning of the garden. It wasn't there before. It was specifically requested by

02:40the committee of management and it was opened in 1836 and its first occupant was a black bear, a black

02:51American bear and he was given a pole to climb up but he wasn't very exciting so some of the youngsters

03:00were a bit disappointed and within three years it decided that the roaring and stench was not appropriate

03:09for a botanical garden so poor old Bruin had to go. So after that it became a lumber storage area

03:17and a fern garden and then in 1856 Sir Henry Hunluck of Wingamoth Hall near Chesterfield he had a man he had a

03:27menagerie and he he knew the curator and he presented two brown bears to the gardens so again we had bears

03:36and guns and they had a pole to climb up.