About us

At the University of Leicester Botanic Garden and Attenborough Arboretum, we focus on the importance of global biodiversity. You can see and learn about a wide range of plants that grow in our extensive collections from around the world.

Our mission is to:

• Maintain the most diverse garden in the region, in terms of plants, conservation collections, landscape features, and historically and architecturally important buildings
• Underpin scientific research and teaching at the University
• Devise and provide education programmes aimed at all age groups, reaching out into the wider community to demonstrate the contemporary

Botanic Garden

The Botanic Garden was founded in 1921 with the assistance of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society, and was established on its present site in Oadby in 1947. It comprises the grounds of four houses: Beaumont, Southmeade, Hastings and The Knoll  which were built in the early 1900s and are now used as student residences or for the Garden education programme.

The four once-separate gardens have been merged forming sixteen acres of cultivated grounds and greenhouses displaying a variety of features and environments. These include a herb garden, woodland and herbaceous borders, rock gardens, a water garden, a meadow and an arboretum area. Our four greenhouses display tropical plants, warm temperate, alpines and succulents. The formal planting centres around a restored Edwardian garden.

The plant collections and landscape features make this garden one of the most diverse in the region. It is the perfect place for a pleasant walk and there are benches for those who simply wish to relax and admire the surroundings.

Attenborough Arboretum

The Attenborough Arboretum is a satellite facility of the Botanic Garden. Opened on 23 April 1997 by Sir David Attenborough, it occupies about five acres in the old village of Knighton, and forms part of the land that used to belong to Home Farm.

Now part of Leicester, the Arboretum features  planting scheme is designed to display our native trees in the sequence in which they arrived in this country following the ending of the last ice-age. The Arboretum includes two large boards with a board-walk, a classroom and one of the few surviving examples in the city of medieval ridge-and-furrow field.