I’m a bit of a treehugger… visited Benmore gardens for the big trees at the weekend and the lady in the shop mentioned Kilmun, which I’d never even heard of. Popped down and it’s bloody awesome…

Maybe other tree fanciers will already know about it and what it is but, just in case, it’s a FC research place where since the 30s they’ve planted out blocks of different species just to see what’d happen- what would make a cash crop, what’d die off, what’d do something interesting.

And it’s all on FC scale so they didn’t plant, say, a couple of giant redwoods like you get in a normal arboretum- they planted a field of em, and a field of coasts next door, and so on- blocks of hundreds of trees just doing their thing, that you usually consider to be an interesting specimen in a garden. There’s some paths and maps but it’s run halfway to abandoned and all run on timescales of decades so there’s spots where a species failed or struggled, there’s natives growing all over the place, half-invisible paths to scramble around on… Instantly one of my favourite places

So… I like botanical gardens and ordered arboretums and the like, but is there anywhere else like this, with the sheer scale and less of a garden? I know about Lael up north but that’s the only place I’ve found with googlage. It’s obviously not wild but it’s like the difference between seeing an animal in a cage and in a big enclosure, I suppose. Free range trees.

Never been to Kilmun but Dawyck is worth a visit. Also handy for Glentress if you fancy a ride at the same time.

Yeah, Dawyck is lovely. Though I hardly ever go, because I pretty much have to drive past glentress to get there 😆

Nice trails in the arboretum too! It’s home to the slippery singletrack of doom,
clicky

Rob

Heh, that’s exactly what it felt like trying to walk the black route 😆 I spent a lot of the time around the gardens, kilmun and puck’s glen thinking “this’d be ace on a bike”.

never even heard of Kilmun – looks awesome, so thanks for that
I take you’ll know about The Hermitage near Dunkeld? Fantasic colours in autumn

This page is useful for finding big sequoia (actually quite a lot around, when you start looking for them): http://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/locations.htm
And some interesting trees listed here: http://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/gbr/

Worth a look at Reelig Glen (near Inverness) and Plodda Falls (near Glen Affric). Maybe not quite the same scale (and no redwoods), but plenty of big firs and other interesting trees.

Aden Hall in Aberdeenshire had a small but quite impressive tree collection when I was last there – nothing like what OP described though.

Cheers folks- sounds like my first assumption was right and this exact sort of thing is actually pretty rare… But other good suggestions so cheers! (Dunkeld Hilton is worth a wander around btw, I tripped across this by mistake at the SES race there earlier this year)

There’s redwoods everywhere isn’t there. Tons around here because the old landowners got the conifer craze bad, the view out of my office window is pretty much completely blocked by one of the first in the UK 😆 I keep meaning to send some pics into Redwoodtrackworld, he hasn’t got any of ours.

Reelig Glen

There’s a grove of Coastal redwood at Alice Holt arboretum in Surrey. The rest of it isn’t that interesting though apart from a tiny strip of single track with a few gap jumps.

Oh and a rare graft hybrid Aesculus + dallimorei (if you can find it!).