A guide to the Botanical Gardens

The private estate of the wealthy Vivian family is bought at auction by the Swansea Corporation for the sum of £90,000 for use as a public park.

The new Singleton Park is “thrown open to the public on a Sunday”. Park Superintendent Daniel Bliss, who trained at Kew Gardens, began his ambitious plans to oversee the transformation of the park and garden.

The Educational Garden officially open to the public on May 25th as a “collection of economic plants and British flora”. 

Part of the Garden is turned over to growing vegetables for the Dig for Victory campaign. In 1944 over 1500 American troops were billeted under canvas in the wider park. After training on local beaches the troops left for the D-day landings on Omaha Beach, Normandy.

By the sixties, the Educational Gardens employs 6 gardeners and 2 apprentices to tend to the increasingly important collection of plants.

After sixty years the original wooden glasshouses had become unsafe.  Over the next few years they are demolished and replaced with aluminium structures which survive to this day.

A superb ornate eighteenth century pond and fountain dated from 1773 is moved from Castle Gardens to this site.

The Educational Gardens are renamed as the "Botanical Gardens"

Run by a group of volunteers, the Friends of the City of Swansea Botanical Complex , FCSBC, is founded with the aim of supporting the work of the Botanical Complex.

With financial help from FCSBC, Tŷr Blodau building is opened. This purpose built education and visitor centre hosts a programme of activities related to horticulture and wildlife as well as being available for hire.  

FCSBC raises funds and opens an extension to the Botanical Gardens. The Wellbeing Garden is the latest page in the Gardens’s story – it is a “little slice of wild” created among the more formal setting of the traditional Botanical Gardens.