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When our glasshouses are fully repaired, we will be able to grow Theobroma cacao (the cocoa plant) in the Tropical Corridor. Cocoa will be one of the star plants in our repaired glasshouse and visitors will be able to learn all about its history here at the garden. Right now, we do not have many healthy living cocoa plants and so we need to grow some from seeds.

If you visit the Garden this month you will be able to see a big change. We have dug a great big hole in the lower lawn. Don't worry the hole won't be there for long. We have dug it as part of our work to make the Garden more sustainable. 

Restoring our glasshouses is hard for lots of reasons. One of the reasons is that when we fix a glasshouse we need to take all the plants out of it. The problem is that there is a reason that the plants live in a glasshouse. These plants like things to be a certain way. They like it when the temperature stays the same and when the water in the air and soil stays the same. The Garden doesn’t have any spare glasshouses that the plants can live in until their homes are fixed. This is why as part of our Glasshouse Restoration Project we have built a temporary polytunnel.

As part of our Glasshouse Restoration Project we will be making a new audio guide for the Garden. The audio guide will tell people about the Garden and its plants. We want the new guide to represent the many stories the Garden has to tell.

A big part of the Glasshouse Restoration project is getting lots more people to enjoy our glasshouses. We really want young people to visit the glasshouses and the Garden. This is why over the next two years we will be doing lots of activities for them. This month we were very excited to work with young people on our Plants have Secrets: digital youth project.

When we fix our fernery (a special greenhouse that is perfect for ferns to live in) we will need to take all the plants out of it. Before we do this we need to make sure we know exactly what we have inside it, so that we can put the right things back. We call this a plant audit.

Before we repair our glasshouses we want to make sure there are plants to put in them when they are fixed. Not all the big plants will live when we move them. It will be hard to keep plants that are planted terrestrially (planted in the ground, not in pots) alive. We have taken cuttings from these plants and are growing clones of them. This is a process called propagation. By cloning these plants we keep their DNA. They might be a little smaller, but they are still the same plant.

As part of the Cool Fernery restoration, we have started to decant some of the larger of the 400 plants, having already propagated 30 specimens to protect against plant loss.