Sisley Garden Tours is a specialized tour design and booking business run by Tony Sissons of Harrogate, England, and Beth Leydon, of Auckland, New Zealand. We are members of the Royal Horticultural Society, the New Zealand Heritage Rose Society, the National Trust and the Garden Writers Association. We are both keen gardeners and between us we have visited hundreds of gardens in many parts of the world.

We started in 1992 in association with the Automobile Association of New Zealand. Tony in the UK made the bookings and I took a wonderful group of gardeners from New Zealand to England and Scotland for three weeks in 1993. We are proud to say we have run garden tours every year since then.

In 1994 we appointed an Australian travel agent and added Australians to our tours. In 1995 we placed garden tour pages in the World Wide Web, which attracted our first American visitor. Since then we have welcomed garden visitors from Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Portugal, Turkey, Taiwan and the United States of America.

We've designed and set up a historical tour of British gardens with a US college alumni association. We have set up two early spring tours for members of the American Rhododendron Society, two tours for friends of a Botanic Garden in Portugal and tours for garden clubs in New England and in California. We have run our own tour in New Zealand in association with a UK Botanical Garden. We have selected UK garden locations and arranged support for an in-coming television drama production and had BBC Television on tour with us.

Our aim is to keep costs to an affordable level commensurate with the availability of the quality of accommodation required in the right locations. We try always to give value for money. We have a comprehensive database which enables us to easily design, make bookings and keep track of tours in the specialist area of garden visiting in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, The Netherlands, northern France, Portugal and New Zealand. We are pleased to include the theatre, theme evenings, river trips, wildlife and other attractions in our itineraries.

We are small, independent and flexible, with an enviable track record and our own compact IT system containing our database of gardens and hotels. We are backed up worldwide by great contacts, registered travel agents and proven suppliers who value our expanding business. Use our service and you gain from our resources, experience, focus and dedication. We are pleased to deliver group tours direct, or through a travel agent.

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