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Special day celebrates amazing daisy
The National Botanic Garden of Wales is paying homage to Asteraceae with a special Daisy Family Festival on Sunday August 24th.
The many members of the huge daisy family will be the focus of attention with a range of events taking place throughout the day.
Acclaimed herbalist and Physicians of Myddfai expert Lara Bernays will be taking a tour of the Garden looking for daisy-based health remedies and then holding a workshop on how to turn these common or garden plants into medicines, such as daisy cough syrup and marigold ointment.
One of the Garden’s Horticultural team, Kristina Patmore, will be brewing up dandelion coffee for visitors to taste as well as her very own home-made dandelion and burdock drink. She will also be exploring the history of the plants in the daisy family, their science and their future use.
As well as tasting the remarkable remedies, visitors to the Garden on the day will be asked to help try and make the world’s longest daisy chain. There will also be special Daisy trails of the Garden and the new National Nature Reserve available to all visitors – with prizes for completed trails – and special Daisy Identification Guides available, too.
Our Wild Bunch rangers will be running a daisy jewellery-making workshop and a series of workshops entitled Close Encounters of the Daisy Kind.
There will be a special Daisy Family Day flavour to the menu in Seasons restaurant and a special daisy focus to the popular horticultural talk in the Double Walled Garden.
As a special tribute to Asteraceae, anyone with name of any plant from the daisy family will be allowed in the Garden free of charge.
So, if your name is Marigold, Lettuce, Cosmo, Marguerite, Margaret, Dahlia or Daisy make sure you don’t miss this fabulous event (please bring some form of ID).
Other well known members of the Asteraceae family are: sunflower, echinacea, chicory, tarragon, mace, feverfew, coltsfoot, groundsel, and globe and Jerusalem artichoke.
Head of marketing and communications, David Hardy said: “We think the daisy plant family gives us all the ingredients for another great event here at the Garden. It is going to be a lot of fun with something for everyone.
“It would be very nice to think that Daisy Lowe, Daisy Sampson or Daisy Fuentes might take us up on our ‘free entry’ offer – or even Daisy Duke and Dalya Raphael.”
For more information, call the Garden on 01558 668768
