This talk and all our lectures are FREE for Friends of the Botanical Gardens to attend. Members of the public are also welcome to join us on payment of £5 at the door on the day. Live talks are held in the Education Centre in the grounds of the Botanical Gardens - easily accessed via the Thompson Road Entrance.

For this talk, we welcome back Diane Clement who will share her trip to Japan which took her through a range of habitats including seashore, mountain top, marshland and woodland. She discovered many habitats that were incredibly rich in numbers and variety of species and was interested to encounter many plants familiar to us from our own UK gardens growing there in their natural habitat, such as Hydrangea, Hosta, Weigela, Azaleas and others.

Diane was especially excited to also see some of the rarer woodland plants that she particularly likes to try and grow such as Epigaea, Glaucidium, Shortia, Polygonatum, Disporum, Arisaema, Trillium, Paris, Cypripedium etc

Diane is an expert in alpine plants and has been visiting the Alps for over 40 years, specialising in growing alpine plants for over 20 years.  She is a keen exhibitor and judge for the AGS.  She has a wide range of plant interests, in particular hepaticas, cyclamen, bulbous plants and woodland plants which she grows in cold frames and in her shady garden in Wolverhampton. 

She has given lectures for the Alpine Garden Society, Plant Heritage, Hardy Plant Society, Cottage Garden Society, The Plant School, Cyclamen Society and many local Gardening clubs and Natural History Societies. 

Diane was for many years Director of the Seed Exchange for the Alpine Garden Society, which is the largest seed exchange of its type in the world run entirely by volunteers.