Hortis Community 2025: A Year in Bloom

Hortis Community 2025: A Year in Bloom

On 18 December, we hosted our final Hortis Community webinar of the year, a moment to pause, celebrate, and reflect on everything 2025 has brought. To make it accessible across time zones, we ran two live sessions and were delighted to welcome participants from around the world.

The webinar featured four inspiring stories from gardens across three continents, each sharing their unique journey, challenges, and achievements over the past year. If you missed it, or would like to revisit the discussions, you can watch the full recording via the link below.

Voices from the Global Garden Community

We offer our sincere thanks to our guest speakers, who generously shared their experiences and insights:

• Brian Quinn, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Australia
• Rob Stewart, Shoalhaven Heads Native Botanic Garden, NSW, Australia
• Matthew Murgatroyd, Holker Hall & Gardens, Cumbria, UK
• Lisa Gordon, Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center, West Texas, USA

Hearing directly from gardens of different sizes, climates, and missions was a powerful reminder of both the diversity of our community and the common goals that connect us.

Achievements and Lessons from 2025

At Hortis, our core mission remains unchanged: to make professional plant record-keeping tools accessible to botanic gardens worldwide that find traditional systems too expensive or too complex.

In 2025, we were proud to surpass 150 member gardens, with a clear path toward reaching 200+ gardens in 2026. This growth has enabled more gardens to build reliable collection data, unlock greater value from their living collections, and actively participate in local and global conservation initiatives.

Throughout the year, we visited numerous events across the USA, the UK, continental Europe, and Australia. At every venue the conversations we shared reinforced several themes that continue to resonate strongly across the community:

• The growing importance of accurate and reliable data.
• The fact that many conservation challenges can only be addressed through collaboration.
• The significant impact of grassroots, locally focused conservation efforts.

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the regional networks and professional associations whose dedication creates a fertile ground for sharing ideas and building long-lasting relationships across our community. If you are not already a member of a regional network, we strongly encourage you to get involved.

We would like to give special recognition to the organisations we collaborated with throughout 2025: the American Public Gardens Association, the Association of Zoo Horticulture (USA), PlantNetwork (UK), the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), and Botanic Gardens Australia and New Zealand.🙏

What’s Top of Mind for Gardens

Across our discussions—both at events and through ongoing support conversations—three priorities consistently emerged. Gardens are focused on:

• Safeguarding institutional knowledge.
• More effectively sharing their biodiversity stories with the public.
• Finding new and better ways to utilise their living collections.

To close the webinar, we also addressed some of the most frequently asked questions submitted through our support channels, offering practical guidance and clarifications based on real-world use.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone who joined the webinar and to the wider Hortis community for your continued engagement and trust. As our community grows, so does our ability to better support you and continually improve our services.

We wish you a peaceful holiday season and a prosperous New Year—and we look forward to another year of growth, collaboration, and shared impact in 2026.