Who are we?  The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is the UK’s foremost gardening charity dedicated to promoting gardening and advancing the knowledge of horticulture. 

We believe that gardening and horticulture enrich people’s lives and we are committed to bringing the personal and social benefits of gardens and gardening to a diverse audience of all ages.  Our goals are to help people to share a passion for plants, to encourage excellence in horticulture, and to support long-term environmental improvements. Our charitable work is funded through the members’ subscriptions together with donations, sponsorship and income from our garden operations, flower shows, shops and plant centres.

Our shows such as the Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace Flower Show and the Tatton Park Flower Show are world famous, receiving enormous coverage in the press and on TV. But that is not all we do. We encourage learning for all ages, especially the young, and encourage horticultural training with a view to students making careers in this field.

We aim to educate and inspire people, to develop their appreciation of the cultivation and creative use of plants.

What we do - Facts and figures:

• RHS Education offers an extensive range of formal and informal opportunities to learn, through:
• Our gardens (with over 1 million visitors p.a.)
• Shows (over half a million visitors and millions of viewers of dedicated TV programmes)
• Hundreds of events, structured formal training courses and qualifications
• Our school programme supporting over 5,000 schools i.e. over 400,000 pupils:

-     Over 4,200 schools benefit from membership of our free Schools Membership scheme

-     Around 12,000 school children visited RHS Gardens on free school trips in 2006

-     Last year we provided over 600 teaching days across 20 schools under the RHS outreach education programme (Flourish). Flourish works direct with schools and colleges to engage young people in the benefits of gardening. The RHS is working to deliver growing in schools as part of the ‘Open Future grow It, cook It’ initiative, with other partners, supported by the Helen Hamlyn Trust.  

-      We work to attract a full diversity of schools, particularly to encourage disadvantaged children, and focus upon schools which do not currently make use of their local RHS Garden as a source of inspiration and learning, to ‘get growing’ 

-       We are developing exciting materials to support the secondary school science     curriculum on plant science

• New facilities for learning.  We are increasing the number of schools and adult learners who can benefit from access to our gardens through innovative new facilities. 
   
  • In summer 2007 the new Glasshouse opens at Wisley which will provide new exciting spaces for hands-on learning through a teaching garden, growing lab, and flexible learning space (that includes cooking facilities); an underground “root zone”, exhibition and awe-inspiring display space in the glasshouse with desert, dry temperate and tropical zones.  This will enable us to support at least 14,000 schools in 2007 and 16,000 in 2008. 
  • We plan to extend our facilities at our other RHS gardens in a similar vein.
     
• Campaign for School Gardening – We are enhancing our schools membership scheme to become the more active ‘Campaign for School Gardening’.   The Campaign will mark achievement in schools that make progress in developing children’s experience with plants and gardening.  This launched in February 2007 with a competition to “get schools growing” – schools complete a questionnaire to show how their school uses (or plans to use) growing to teach a host of subjects.  When the questionnaire is completed the schools have a chance to win great prizes including a day with Blue Peter Gardener Chris Collins to help develop a new school growing space.  The scheme will open in September 2007 with a host of curriculum resources for schools.
   
• We are extending our online resources to support secondary schools science as well as enhancing our resources for primary schools linked to all aspects of the curriculum.  The Virtual Glasshouse will offer secondary science curriculum resources and bring plant science to life, available in September 2007; first phase goes live in March 07