Linn Gardens in Cove will soon open to the public for the first time four years.
The renowned gardens on the Rosneath Peninsula have been closed since the death of owner and creator Dr Jim Taggart.
But new owner Matthew Young is opening the site for the Easter weekend following months of work to make it accessible.
“I just want to get people in, as long as people are happy to walk around a very obvious work in progress,” he said.
“There’s a lot of people around here who care a lot about the gardens and the Taggarts and I hope they’ll be reassured when they see what’s going on and that we’re not changing too much.”
Paths have been restored and the work of Jim and his son Jamie, who tragically died on a plant-hunting expedition in Vietnam in 2013, is being restored as much as possible, though parts of the garden have been damaged by deer and falling trees.
“We have changed some stuff – trees die and things disappear,” Matthew said.
“We’ve been forced to start more beds from scratch than I ever thought would be the case.
“Fortunately Jim left his prop beds with things in them, so we’ve been taking those up every once in a while and we’ve ended up with all these plants that he I think intended ultimately to sell, but we’ll use them to replant some of the areas that we’ve ended up clearing.”
The gardens now include the Alastair Wardlaw fern collection – the former head of the British Pteridological Society had known the Taggarts and asked if they could be rehoused there when he left his home.
The gardens will be open to the public on Easter Saturday, Sunday and Monday, then on the Saturday and Sunday of the following weekend and again in July.
Admission will be ticketed with numbers limited to 30 on each morning and afternoon.
The £5 admission will be donated to Scotland’s Gardens Scheme and some to the Scottish Refugee Council.
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