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Please check with garden owners or their website to confirm current dates open All year; 9.30am - 7.30pm
April - October
Adult £10; Child £6.50; OAP £9;
Festival No.6 on 13,14, and 15 Sept 2013 Check tide times on admission tickets so as not to venture on sands within 2 hours of next high tide.
Hotel Portmeirion
Castell Deudraeth Brasserie
Portmeirion village
Leaving the village to the West, the visitor walks through the rhododendron glades passing the June-flowering Gwyllt King, hybridised here in c.1938 by Caton Haigh. There is also to be seen the largest Dancing tree, Maytenys arboaria, in Britain, together with many varieties of azalea, camellia, liriodendrons, magnolia and eucryphia. The Gazebo, built in 1983 to commemorate the centenary of Sir Clough's birth, stands near the remains of Castell Deudraech, built by Sir Clough's ancestors in 1188.
The stone Temple built in 1993 overlooks the Temple Pond dug out thirty years earlier and surrounded by gunnera and mature rhododendrons with a fine collection of tree ferns enjoying the mild moist climate at the other end of the Pond. The paths through the Tangle Wood are flanked by masses of Rhododendron arborea and lead down to the Ghost Garden, so-called because of the whispering of the wind through the Eucalyptus leaves. A pleasant walk south along the beach reveals, in due course, Sir Clough's folly Lighthouse, before returning via the Shelter Valley, which was cleared of Ponticum in the 1980s and replanted with tree ferns, bamboo, gunnera and phorium. Finally the visitor should not miss the chinoiserie pavilion and bridge, designed by Susan Williams-Ellis in 1992, which complement the Oriental Lake.
The Dogs' Cemetery, still in use, was started by the eccentric Mrs. Adelaide Haigh who preferred the company of dogs to humans and lived in the mansion from 1870 to her death in 1917 as a recluse. The hearse was unable to collect her until a path had been hacked along the drive which had been left to become completely overgrown.
Y Gwyllt - The Wild Place - was acquired from Caton Haigh, a leading authority on Himalayan flowering trees, in 1941. H. S. Westmacott and later Sir William Fothergill Cooke had previously planted evergreen exotics such as Monkey Puzzle trees, pines, hollies, cherry laurels and the then popular Rhododedron ponticum from the 1850s onwards along an intricate network of paths leading to the end of the peninsular, but the gardens were largely developed by Caton Haigh. Sir Clough and, from 1953 onwards, his daughter Susan Williams-Ellis, developed the gardens together until his death in 1978, when she continued the work alone.