SOUTH Yorkshire’s only Grade I-listed park and gardens will take part in England’s largest heritage festival next month.

Wentworth Castle Gardens, at Stainborough, near Barnsley, will play a role in this year’s Heritage Open Day Festival from September 13 to 15.

The festival explores the challenges experienced by the early plant hunters and how the plants they discovered in far-flung corners of the world, ultimately contributed to the present-day planting at Wentworth Castle Gardens, a site now cared for by the National Trust.

Activities will enable visitors to experience how seekers of new plants collected evidence of their discoveries by using what they carried with them.

Hands-on activities – inspired by the challenges faced by these adventurers – will keep active and creative minds busy.

Ruth Wynters, the National Trust’s partnership and participation manager at the site, said: “In the Victorian conservatory visitors can admire tender plants displayed according to the continent of their origin and learn about the work that is still needed to care for one of the National plant collections nurtured in the gardens.

“Following the route to the top of the garden, as it twists and turns on the upward climb, visitors will discover where many familiar plants originated from, before they were able to root in Barnsley soil.

“We forget that many of the plants that grace the gardens of Wentworth Castle, and our own gardens, were once strangers to these shores.

“The idea that for many centuries people risked their lives and endured great hardship in often openly hostile countries to bring back ‘green treasure’ is perhaps lost on us when we visit a garden centre or swap cuttings with family and friends.

“On September 13 a limited number of places are available for a guided tour of the walled garden including the partly-restored orangery, originally built to protect new ‘exotics’.

“This is a rare opportunity to view the early stages of restoration of an area not usually open to the public.”