SINGAPORE - The Singapore Botanic Gardens has programmed months of events to mark a clutch of milestones, coinciding with the country’s diamond jubilee, or SG60.
The calendar, which kicks off on July 19 with the annual heritage festival, will feature special exhibitions and activities that pay homage to the Gardens’ role in Singapore’s vision of a “city in nature”, said the National Parks Board (NParks) on March 27.
This year is the 10th since the Gardens’ inscription as a Unesco World Heritage Site - the only tropical botanical garden to make the list.
It is also the 150th anniversary of the Singapore Herbarium and the Gardens’ Library of Botany and Horticulture, the first of their kind in Malaya at the time of their launch in 1875.
Add to the mix, the 30th year of the National Orchid Garden, the celebration of which will see the return of the Singapore Garden Festival Orchid Show for the first time since 2018.
Highlights of the festivities include a live viewing gallery to watch the Herbarium’s most ambitious digitalisation project to date unfold, as it creates an online database of 800,000 specimens.
The archive’s collection of preserved plant and fungi samples from Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia and wider South-east and South Asia is the world’s biggest, and the public will get to observe the meticulous work of making an online repository, said NParks.
When completed in 2027, this digitalised catalogue will be the largest in South-east Asia to date, it added.
Other activities for the year include a new stamp booklet that can be filled with unique chops placed at stations along the Gardens’ trails, a weekend marketplace in July, and an exhibition on the plant life in Singapore’s desserts.
Collection for public submissions of personal memories of the 166-year-old Gardens will also open from April 4 online and at designated booths in the Gardens, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its Unesco inscription.
Submissions are being called for the “Planting Memories - Singapore Botanic Gardens Through the Eyes Of The Community” show that will run from July 2025 to January 2026.
Stories, photos, audio recordings or video clips are welcome, said NParks. More details can be found on https://go.gov.sg/sbgmemories-opencall.
For updated information on the full list of events, visit https://go.gov.sg/celebrating-sbg.
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