The gardens of North Wales will be coming together to host a festival of garden events and activities, set over nine days between May and June.
The festival will run from Saturday 28th May until Sunday 5th June with events happening morning, afternoon and evening each day.
Over 27 gardens will be taking part, including Bodnant, Portmeirion, Plas Cadnant, Plas Newydd, Plas Tan y Bwlch, Conwy Valley Maze and Crug Farm Plants.
There will be a variety of different events taking place such as behind the scenes garden tours, meeting the head gardener or owner walks, gardening workshops – how to prune, plant, propagate, and garden with shrubs, musical concerts, garden visits by vintage steam trains, open-air plays, historical re-enactments and gardening inspired lectures.
Also on the bill are photographic workshops, children’s trails, art and sculpture exhibitions, ‘What’s that plant’ walks, from garden to kitchen talks – how to grow and use your own plants, garden inspired poetry and prose, gardeners’ question times, competitions with prizes, plant sales and themed garden lunches among others.
The festival dates also deliberately coincide with late-spring flowering displays, which will include rhododendrons, azaleas, magnolias, tulips and flowering cherries. This makes it one of the ideal times of the year to visit the gardens of North Wales.
The gardens
The festival is based all over North Wales and in some of the country’s most renowned gardens and estates.
Portmeirion, for example, is an Italianate village, which is best known as being the setting for TV spy drama The Prisoner. The village is also home to a variety of woodland walks, plant displays, castle gardens and brondanw gardens, which are part of the Plans Brondanw estate.
The Conwy Valley Maze, meanwhile, offers a maze covering two acres of the attraction’s ten acre grounds. The maze was designed and created by Giovanni Angelo Jacovelli, and contains several themed gardens including a rose garden – home to two hundred roses - , butterfly garden, Japanese zen garden and a tropical garden.
For more information visit call 01766-771164 or visit www.gardensnorthwales.co.uk.
