Hi Bulb Buddies,

I want to say a big thank you to all of the participating schools who worked hard planting bulbs for the project. Together we planted over 18 thousand bulbs across the UK and from the photos I’ve seen, it looks as though everyone had great fun doing it! 

All schools taking part in the project will be collecting weather data from the 3^rd of November until the 27^th of March. They will be uploading these records regularly to the Amgueddfa Cymru website, along with comments and weather observations. We'll be learning a lot together over the school year!

Step 4: Keeping weather records (November - March)

Resources are available on the website that explore different aspects of the project, including ideas for additional experiments and guides to making short videos for the Bulbcast competition!  

Step 3: Optional hands-on weather and gardening themed activities

Bulbcast competition

I'll be sure to share more photos and comments from schools to the Blog in the coming weeks. 

Keep up the good work Bulb Buddies,

Professor Plant

It’s Planting Day for 178 schools across the UK today!
More than 18,000 bulbs will be planted by over 7,000 primary school scientists as part of this exciting outdoor investigation exploring how a changing climate affects the flowering dates of spring bulbs.

Follow the project and the experiences of our Super Scientists through this blog or on X at @ProfessorPlant.

Project team members are visiting several schools today to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Planting Day, and we look forward to receiving updates and photos from schools across the country.

Competitions and Creative Projects

Schools are invited to share their photos and creative media for our Planting Day Photo Competition. We’ll showcase the winning entries here next month!

We’re also running the Bulbcast Competition, where participating schools create short videos highlighting their favourite parts of the investigation. Resources to support this can be found here.

And for this special anniversary year, we’re thrilled to launch a Name the Daffodil Competition! Participants can suggest names for a brand-new daffodil variety commissioned to mark the 20th year of the investigation. You can see what our daffodil looks like in the attached image and find inspiration and guidance in the resource linked here. We can’t wait to see your entries!

A Special Display at St Fagans

The fantastic Gardening Team at St Fagans National Museum of History have been joining in the celebrations too! They’ve planted a commemorative display and created a beautiful woven planter for the project, which you can see in the attached images.

Get Involved

Feeling inspired? Why not plant some bulbs this October and share your images with us!
We’ll also be hosting free planting activities for families at St Fagans National Museum of History and National Museum Cardiff, where visitors can learn about plants and adopt their own baby bulbs. Find out more about how to join these sessions on our website.

Once schools have adopted and planted their bulbs, they will set up outdoor weather stations. From 3 November, they’ll collect daily weather readings every day that they are in school and upload these weekly to the Amgueddfa Cymru website. You can follow their progress here.

We’re so excited to get this year’s project underway and to share the journey with you all.

Here’s to another year of discovery, teamwork, and blooming science!

Professor Plant & Baby Bulb

My name is Anna Watson and I’ve been volunteering with the National Museum of Wales since November 2024. I volunteer every week as a collection care assistant in the conservation department. I have enjoyed the experience immensely as every week is different, so I am always learning something new and developing my skills. I began this volunteering role after finishing my MSc in Care of Collections with Cardiff University and this opportunity has been fantastic for putting the skills I gained from that course into practice. So far, I have been able to help with exhibition maintenance in the art galleries and natural histories department, microclimate maintenance in archaeology, collection audits in entomology and have helped clean and relocate the fluid store (pictured here)! The opportunity to work in multiple departments and meet so many different curators, conservators and technicians who are all specialists in their fields has been invaluable and each week I am excited to see what we will do next.

Earlier this year, I took the helm at the National Waterfront Museum, and as we enter the Autumn it already feels like we’re catching the wind in our sails. From my very first day, I’ve been inspired by the passion and expertise of our team, who love and breathe the extraordinary stories held in our collections. Their insights, and the warm welcome I’ve had from Swansea itself, have convinced me of one thing: this museum has the potential to be a destination that surprises, delights and connects people in new ways. 

Anchoring Our Story

One of the first challenges we’re tackling is how we tell our story. Visitors often arrive and are unsure of where their journey should start. With three different entrances and meandering routes, it’s easy to lose your bearings. Add to that an expectation (based on our name and location) that the museum is about the sea, and Wales’s maritime stories, and you can see why some visitors leave a little puzzled. 

Visitors are often curious about the story behind our historical warehouse. What was it built for? Why is it here? And for too long, we realised, we hadn’t been telling the story behind this remarkable building. 

The Warehouse stands proudly in its original setting, where it once overlooked a bustling dock alive with ships, dockworkers, and the rhythm of industry. Here, the Warehouse played its part in the great exchange between Wales’s heavy industries and the wider world across the sea. 

It is that story that inspired us to turn our gaze seaward, to let the sea guide how we tell our stories: the sea really is at the heart of our vision. It’s the thread that ties everything together – industry, art, archaeology, and the lives of communities from across Wales. From coal and copper exports, to the journeys of families who crossed oceans, the story of Wales is a story shaped by the sea. 

And what better place to tell this story than in our historic Warehouse? Built in 1900 beside South Dock – now Swansea Marina – the building itself still whispers of its industrial past. Rail tracks run through its floor, the Harbour Trust office and Pump House still stand nearby. This is history you can see, touch and feel all around you. 

Opening the Doors to the Sea

We’ve already begun small but powerful changes. Shuttered windows in the Warehouse are now open again, letting in light and reconnecting the space with the Marina outside. This simple act has transformed the atmosphere, and it feels like the building is breathing again. We’ve also removed bulky exhibition structures that block the view, making the Warehouse’s historic environment part of the visitor experience once more. 

The Weston Hall, which links the New Gallery to the Warehouse has already seen some changes as well. We’re stripping back the clutter and reimagining it as an inspiring space of welcome and orientation. Here, visitors will encounter stunning focal points – objects that stop you in your tracks and give you that WOW moment!

Picture this: the 1842 South Bishop Lighthouse optic, restored to working order, its top glowing each day when wound by hand. Or a historic railway van positioned on the historic tracks, making the Warehouse’s industrial past visible at a glance. These aren’t just exhibits, they’re the beacons of our identity and conversation starts about safety at sea, Swansea as a City of Sanctuary, and the deep connections between Wales and the wider World. 

Coffee with a View

Our café is also likely going to move. We’re scoping to relocate it upstairs to make the most of our balcony overlooking the marina. Imagine sipping your coffee with a panoramic view of the waterfront. It will also help us transform the Marina Entrance into a true front door to the museum, ready to welcome the growing number of people who pass by.

Fresh Horizons for Exhibitions

Until now, temporary exhibitions have been held in the Weston Hall, a space which was never designed to host exhibitions. This resulted in compromises and limits on what we could show. That’s about to change!

We’re expecting to create a dedicated temporary exhibition space on the mezzanine of the New Gallery. This fresh, flexible area will allow us to host high quality, ambitious exhibitions that surprise and inspire, giving visitors more reasons to return again and again. 

Looking Further Ahead

The journey ahead is an exciting one for us as a museum and for Swansea. We plan to redevelop the New Gallery and Warehouse displays in line with modern exhibition standards, placing communities and inspiration for all at the heart of what we do. Over the coming months, we’ll be shaping the details, working with communities and our visitors, mapping out how to tell Wales’s story through the lens of the sea. 

Until then, expect small but powerful changes – unexpected moments, joyful encounters, and new perspectives that highlight how the sea has shaped life across Wales. 

A Living Museum for Everyone

I’m incredibly grateful to the team here, whose ideas and enthusiasm are steering us forward. Together with the people of Swansea and our visitors, we’re making the Waterfront a place to be explored, enjoyed, and celebrated – a living museum, full of hands-on, joyful experiences for everyone. 

So come board. The tide is turning, and a new chapter for the National Waterfront Museum is just beginning. 

In June 2025, as part of the Wales REACH project, Amgueddfa Cymru invited applications for two Amgueddfa Cymru Producers to design and deliver a workshop about Pride. Here’s what James, one of our ACPs, had to say about the experience:

For pride month, Amgueddfa Cymru invited myself and Kleo to organise a workshop alongside Innovate Trust: a charity dedicated to helping adults with learning disabilities. We provided the materials, inspiration, and a brief history lesson so that people could create signs to carry at the Cardiff pride parade held on the 21st of June.

Part of my role was scouring the museum’s collection for some inspiration and the catalogue did not disappoint. I was surprised by the array of material available; from protest materials of the 1980s, to works by proudly queer artists, works loved by queer people, and private family photographs. Protest materials included t-shirts, banners, and badges, many of which were aimed against Section 28 in particular. This was part of the law put in place by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government that saw any mention of homosexuality in schools as an attempt to ‘promote’ the lifestyle. This meant that for over twenty years children in schools had no way to access accurate and unbiased information regarding sexuality or safe sex. Amgueddfa Cymru has a t-shirt with the exact wording of Section 28 printed on it. For me, part of pride has to be about looking back to all of the work done in the past so that we have the strength to look to the future. For museums to include objects like these is so important to me, and a huge step forwards for our communities and cultural institutions. 

My first time at pride was moderately unsuccessful. In either 2018 or 2019 myself and a friend travelled to London hoping to find the kind of community that was out of reach for kids in a relatively small secondary school. On the journey there we overheard a group of people warning each other that pride was on. That they had to be careful because we would all be having sex in the streets. I can safely say that hearing this made me feel infinitely more uncomfortable than anything I experienced at pride. But it still felt isolating. The two of us wandered around London and largely kept to ourselves and it didn’t feel like pride was the sort of thing I’d want to go to again.

On the morning of Cardiff pride this year I was exhausted and found myself sorry to miss the parade. But by the afternoon I was alive enough to walk into the city centre and within minutes it became easy to recognise many of the people that were there for pride or the big queer picnic. The number of families with children really warmed my heart. And I didn’t hear a single bad word about queer people. No warnings that we didn’t know how to control ourselves. No fearmongering about trans people in public spaces. I sat in the sunshine with some friends. I saw dogs dressed up in colourful outfits and silly hats. And it finally felt like a pride event that had done what it set out to achieve, it gave me an overwhelming sense of joy and family. I felt relaxed.

It was an absolute pleasure to work with Amgueddfa Cymru for pride month. Someone once described queer history to me as “cruising” through archives; seeing what or who catches your eye. I would encourage everyone to do the same and to seek out queer joy, whatever the month.

Wales REACH is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. It is a partnership between thirteen organisations and is led by The Open University and Amgueddfa Cymru. It is funded with a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The current phase started in autumn 2024 and is scheduled to run until autumn 2026.