Our fields

Diaplant’s fields lie in Amarante, in a valley that existed long before anyone thought of planting a nursery. The Serra do Marão rises to the east — more than 1,400 metres of granite and schist — and works as a wall between two climates. On one side, the dry, severe heat of Trás-os-Montes. On the other, the Atlantic. Our fields occupy the space between the two: a sheltered pocket where the air stays mild, the moisture lingers and the wind rarely breaks a crown.

It is no accident that we grow trees here. It is geology.

Beneath the topsoil, the bedrock is Hercynian granite — ancient, coarse-grained, slowly breaking down over millennia into what geologists call saprolite and what everyone in Amarante knows as arena. This decomposed granite forms a sandy substrate, with practically no clay, that drains with rare ease. Rain passes through it. Air fills it. Roots advance without meeting resistance, spreading in depth and in width as they never could in a clay soil. When winter pours 160 millimetres of rain in a single month — and in Amarante it does — the water drains away and the roots breathe. No waterlogging. No compaction. No rot.

It is at lifting time that this matters most. When we lift a mature tree, the rootball has to stay whole. In our soils, it does. Saprolite has enough cohesion to hold the fine roots without strangling them. The rootball comes out intact: firm, moist, aerated. What leaves the field is not a tree torn from the ground — it is a tree carried in our arms, with its whole root structure, ready to grow again the day it reaches its destination.

The climate does the rest. Amarante’s winters are long, rainy and cold enough to impose true dormancy — January minimums around 4 °C — without the destructive frosts that kill root tissue. The summers are hot and dry, but without extremes: temperatures in the high twenties, rarely above 35 °C, with almost no rain in July and August. This seasonal rhythm is not gentle. It is a deliberate cycle of abundance and scarcity. The wet winter builds the vascular system, pushes growth, fills the cells with water. The dry summer hardens them. The wood thickens. The leaf cuticles grow thicker. The tree learns, season after season, to tolerate stress — and a tree that has learnt to tolerate stress in the field will tolerate the shock of transplanting in a city three countries away.

Diaplant’s 33 hectares sit on this soil, within this climate, shaped by both. We grow more than 600 species at distinct micro-elevations — from the riverside valleys by the Tâmega, where moisture lingers and shade species thrive, to the higher, more exposed terraces, where cold-hardy specimens are conditioned by wind and frost. Each species is placed where the land already does what it needs.

Amarante is also a place where trees have been grown professionally for more than seventy years. The State forest nursery, the national seed centre — CENASEF — and a group of specialised private operations all work within a few kilometres of each other. The knowledge is local. The plant health controls are European — every tree that leaves our fields carries a Plant Passport, inspected and certified under EU regulations. Germany was Diaplant’s first export market, precisely because it is the most demanding. The standards we built there are the standards we apply to everything.

The road from our fields connects directly to the A4 motorway. From there, our trees travel to homes and projects all over Portugal, Spain and Germany.

But the journey that matters begins in the ground. Come and see where it all begins.

Book your visit to Amarante.