Auchgourish Gardens – The Botanical Nursery

The Botanical Nursery was originally established to propagate a wide range of hardy trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants and bulbs for Auchgourish Gardens & Arboretum – Scotland’s Millennium Botanic Garden which is located in Inverness-shire at the heart of the Central Scottish Highlands – the most northerly Botanic Garden in the British Isles.

A very high proportion of the plants we grow are from seeds of wild origin or parents of known wild origin from around the Northern Hemisphere, – Alaska to Kamtchatka in the arctic, boreal, alpine and north temperate regions. Our plants must be hardy as winter temperatures can go as low as – 25C, on June 25th & July 1st 2006 we even had – 2C at night.

Located as we are close to 58 degrees North our latitude is similar to Stockholm, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Kamtchatka and Churchill in Hudson Bay Canada. Our soil is very acid, with a pH of 4.5 and our growing season is the shortest in the British Isles where visitors are rather surprised to find both Tulip and Narcissus species in full flower on mid summer’s eve.

This Nursery is adjacent to Auchgourish Gardens & Arboretum which receives seed from Botanists and others who collect, under licence, from around the northern hemisphere. Initially from each new batch of seed plants are held back to plant out in Auchgourish Botanic Garden usually in groups of three, five, seven, etc to ensure a wide gene base and subsequent gene flow, any plants over and above these requirements are then sold on this site to help support Auchgourish Gardens, which is a privately funded and subsidised facility open to the public every Sunday to Friday [closed on Saturdays] between early April and the end of October. Please feel free to e-mail enquiries at any time. Plants can be collected providing we know in advance when you are coming, otherwise we mainly use TNT carriers as they haven’t lost or damaged anything so far in the last 6 years.

Please click on the heading below to see the detail of what we offer:
ALPINES
BULBS
CLIMBERS
GRASSES
HERBACEOUS
SEEDS
TREES AND SHRUBS
Shipping Costs
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