Worth Park plants added to national collection

Worth Park has been awarded National Plant Collection holder status for two cultivars of yarrow plants with outstanding qualities it has bred.

The park was recognised by Plant Heritage, whose principle aims are the conservation of garden plants and is the only national charity to ensure the cultivated plants grown now will be available to future generations.

The project was started over two years ago by the Head Gardener at Worth Park, and one of our horticulture apprentices, to adapt a particular area of the park for plant conservation.

The plant collection now holds over 160 plants of 45 different varieties of various cultivars, including their Achillea filipendulina and Achillea millefolium which have been added to the charity’s catalogue.

The yarrow plants now mentioned in the National Plant Collection are ideal for pollinators, drought tolerant and easy to propagate and therefore are a perfect addition to the park’s ethos of sustainability and conservation.

Cllr Chris Mullins, Cabinet member for Leisure and Wellbeing, said: “This is an excellent achievement for two years of hard work by our gardeners at Worth Park and demonstrates the expertise and diligence of the team.”

The importance of this plant collection, and others across the UK, is that the world of plant conservation is constantly changing due to climate change, biodiversity loss and the advance of new plant pests and diseases.

All plant collections are considered a unique gene pool that have adaptive potential to climate change. Because of this, they can contribute to global efforts to halt biodiversity loss and also be regarded as a living resource library for scientific inquiry, recreation, conservation, botanical and horticultural education, public parks landscape aesthetics and seed science.

Worth Park also has the National dispersed collection of Noel Burr daffodils and about nine rare cultivars of camellias under the category of Threatened in Cultivation.