The stories we've gathered this week are on the theme of botanic gardens and glasshouses around the country.
The National Botanic Garden of Wales, Carmarthenshire, is a relatively recent addition to the horticultural scene. It only opened in May 2000, and is now the most visited garden in Wales with an amazing collection of over 8000 different plant varieties.
The Barbican Arts Centre in the City of London is a rather mysterious place - hidden amongst an extensive (and expensive!) estate of flats, with labyrinthine bridges, lifts and walkways that give you little sense of how high or low you are, or in what direction you are travelling.
The Eden Project, a haven of botanical delights nestled in a huge crater near St Austell in Cornwall, has got to be one of the horticultural wonders of the world. Two huge Biomes there house thousands of plant species - including the largest indoor rainforest in the world.
Founded in 1670, the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh was the second such institution to be established in the UK, after Oxford's, which was created in 1621, and well before the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which date from 1759. Just a mile from the city centre, it is one of Edinburgh's historic gems.
A small, square glasshouse was designed specifically at Kew Gardens to showcase the giant Amazon waterlily (Victoria amazonica) - a natural wonder of the age, when it opened in the 1852. It is now a listed building, brimming with aquatic plants and tropical fruit, where you can surround yourself with colourful waterlilies, ferns, papyrus and hanging gourds in this tropical corner of the Gardens.
The University of Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest botanic garden in Great Britain and one of the oldest scientific gardens in the world. The garden was founded on July 25th 1621 as a physic garden growing plants for medicinal research.
