North Wales Festival of Gardens is celebrating its fourth year in 2019. The Festival will take place between 1-16 June 2019 across 17 different gardens in North Wales.
To celebrate, we have arranged a series of specialist guided tours. A special Tree Trail guided tour will be given by John Whitehead on Saturday 1st June at 11am, Saturday 1st June at 2pm , Saturday 9th June at 11am and Saturday 9th June at 2pm. And a special Portmeirion Gardens guided tour will be given by Tony Russell on 16th June at 1.30pm. These events are free to attend, with standard village entry.
John Whitehead is a retired Lecturer in Arboriculture at Merrist Wood college of agriculture, Surrey. He has been responsible for introducing many plants, especially woody species, into British cultivation, and has introduced several cultivars worthy of general cultivations.
The Tree Trail is a celebration of the Champion trees locations in The Gwyllt at Portmeirion. The Tree Trail has been shortlisted for the 2019 Horticulture Week Custodian Awards. To promote the wealth of trees in the large diverse ornamental areas at Portmeirion, we have developed 3 tree trails – Blue Tree Trail (easy access, 1 hour), Green Tree Trail (moderate, 2 hours) Red Tree Trail (long uneven slopes, 3 hours). Guidebooks are available for £3.99 from our Welcome Centre.
Tony Russell is widely regarded as one of Britain’s leading authorities on trees and shrubs. Tony studied forestry and horticulture at Newton Rigg, Cumbria and went on to work as Head Forester of Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire from 1989 to 2003. Over the past fifteen years, he has presented many gardening, horticultural and countryside programmes for both TV and radio and is a noted garden writer of nineteen books, who regularly writes for magazines and newspapers.
Portmeirion boasts 70 acres of sub-tropical woodland which provides the perfect environment for a rich diversity of exotic plants. One of our most popular plants is the Portmeirion Red Rododendron, the Gwyllt King. The beautiful rich red late flowering rhododendron was a hybrid raised at Portmeirion in 1938 and the romantic Welsh name translates as King of the Wildwood. A hybrid between the two attractive species.