PERSHORE Group of Colleges is celebrating its 50th anniversary and as part of the celebrations students will be designing and building a series of celebratory show gardens as part of their Gold Tour, taking in all the major horticultural and garden shows over the summer.

The Gold Tour started last October at the Pacific Flora Event in Japan, where students designed and built a quintessentially English garden based on the gardens at Hidcote.

They will also have gardens at the Spring Garden Show on the Three Counties Showground which takes place tomorrow to Sunday.

A special feature of the celebratory gardens will be the use of two new cultivars developed at the college's Avonbank Nursery, a golden leafed Birch called Golden Jubilee and a new Caryopteris named Pershore Gold.

"Avonbank Nursery has a strong tradition of developing new varieties and as part of its contribution to the gold celebrations has introduced The Celebration Series of Penstemons," said marketing manager Peter Savidge.

He added: "For 50 years Pershore has encouraged and helped generations to develop green fingers and for the special few these green fingers have now become gold thanks to the Pershore way."

The Pershore Group of Colleges has two main campuses, the other is at Holme Lacy, with specialist centres at Kings Heath Park in Birmingham and the nearby Birmingham Nature Centre at Cannon Hill Park.

Pershore campus provides gardens and conservation areas covering 15 hectares, together with a hard landscape workshop and design studios, crop production facilities, 12 hectares of fruit and computer controlled glasshouses plus a nursery and specialist plant unit. A new Learning Resource Centre houses one of the country's leading horticultural collections of books and journals as well as state of the art IT facilities.

The college has recently invested in a newly opened self-contained Animal Care Centre which houses a collection of exotic as well as small animals for students following courses in animal care, from foundation up to graduate level.

A retail centre, soil and plant science laboratories and a floristry unit complete the range of learning resources.

Recent curriculum developments at the campus has seen the establishment of a Sports Academy currently focusing on football and tennis.