Welcome to the Plant Conservation Centre. Today we're going to take you on a unique
behind-the-scenes tour of this unit. The purpose of this centre is to conserve
all the National Trust's rare and unusual plants from their gardens across the country.
This is a biosecure site isolated away from any major plant collections, just to make sure
we don't get any infections of either pests or diseases
which could harm our significant plants that we're propagating on site here.
We're not open to National Trust visitors so this is your chance now to have a look around.
Well I've been propagating plants since I was about 12, so quite a while now.
All that experience has led me to this job in looking after this unique
facility for the National Trust.
We're now inside the Plant Conservation Centre and we're now going to see
Simon Toomer who will introduce some of the unique plants we have here growing that
site and their links to our properties. First impression arriving at the Plant
Conservation Centre is 'wow' what an amazing variety of plants and you know
they're gathered from all our gardens, over 200 gardens all over the country.
So as well as being on mass, they're you know the fantastic site, they've also got individual
stories to tell not just about the plant themselves but also about their particular garden
they come from and this is a really interesting example this is rhododendron falconry one of the
rare rhododendrons from from the Himalayas, the Eastern Himalayas collected in the
middle of the 19th century by very famous eminent botanist called Joseph Hooker who's also the
Director at Kew Gardens and he was a friend of Charles Darwin and he passed a number of these
brand new plants that he discovered to Charles Darwin who often passed them on to his sister
Caroline Wedgwood, who lived at Leith Hill. We think this is a plant one of the originals
that was given by Hooker to Darwin and it's you know it's a fantastic
example it flowers beautifully still and it really illustrates that wonderful period in
the middle of the 19th century when a lot of plants were being introduced to our gardens.
This is another really fascinating plant with an interesting story behind it this time from
Emmett's garden in Kent. It's a kind of azalea as you can see it's a really bright colourful
azalea and it's what gardens often call one of the Ghent hybrids, in Belgium particularly in
the 19th century was a real craze for hybridizing azaleas and this was one that that was grown at
Emmett's and actually everyone thought it become extinct but it was rediscovered growing near the
old tennis courts, just a very sort of suppressed plant and it was sent here as many plants are to
be propagated it was quite difficult because it was a very old plant it was propagated by a
technique called micro propagation and now there are a number of plants alive and many of them have
been sent back to Emmett's, this is this is one we keep here just so that we can propagate more
if we need to. But it's a really good example of where the Plant Conservation Centre has been so
successful in making sure that some of these very rare cultivated plants are conserved.
Many of the National Trust's gardens and parks and outdoor places also have some amazing
individual trees of historical significance.
This is one of them this is the Ankerwycke Yew from Ankerwycke not surprisingly.
These young plants have been propagated from the original which is a really ancient yew tree well
over a thousand years old probably well known not because of its age or not just because of its age
but because it's thought to be the tree under which the Magna Carta was signed all those years
ago and we've propagated it in order to conserve it, a tree that age you know has probably got some
unusual genetic makeup but also we may want to plant it in other places in fact we we will plant
some replicas but also it's a safeguard in case that that tree should ever die.
Most gardeners are aware that in the last few years box plants have been really under
under pressure and challenged by a range of pests and diseases, box blight is one
of the best known but then there's also a little moth called box tree caterpillar and
one of the important components of many of our gardens is a box parterre,
you know when you lose all your your box plants that's not not a great thing.
So what the National Trust's been doing, we've been a combination of trying to conserve
box where it's really important through a number of horticultural methods but
but also where necessary and where it's appropriate actually looking for alternative
species that serve the same purpose and that's one of the important things they've been doing
here at the plant conservation centre is to propagate these different plants that
actually look quite similar to box and we've been trying them in various gardens you can
see a few examples here there's a a Japanese Spindle there's a kind of Berberis and just
behind me we've also got a small leaf privet and they're very successful in many places.
As I say by combining conserving box and trying alternatives you know
we are conserving these historically important parterre.
Thanks very much for all your support in looking after our places
including the Plant Conservation Centre.