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 acts as a wall between two climatic worlds. On one side, the dry, harsh 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 temperate, 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, breaking down slowly over millennia into what geologists call saprolite and what everyone in Amarante knows as arena. This decomposed granite forms a sandy substrate, almost free of clay, that drains with rare ease. Rain passes through it. Air fills it. The roots advance without meeting resistance, spreading deep and wide as they never could in a clay soil. When winter dumps 160 millimetres of rain in a single month — and in Amarante it does — the water drains away and the roots breathe. There is no waterlogging. No compaction. No rot.

It is at the moment of harvest that this counts for most. When we lift an adult tree, the root ball has to stay whole. In our soils, it does. The saprolite has enough cohesion to hold the fine roots without strangling them. The root ball comes out intact: firm, moist, aerated. What leaves the field is not a tree wrenched from the ground — it is a tree carried in our arms, its root structure whole, ready to grow again the day it reaches its destination.

The climate does the rest. Amarante's winters are long, wet and cold enough to impose true dormancy — January lows 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, drives growth, fills the cells with water. The dry summer hardens them. The wood thickens. The leaf cuticles grow denser. Season after season, the tree learns to tolerate stress — and a tree that has learned to tolerate stress in the field will tolerate the shock of transplanting in a city three countries away.

Diaplant's 33 hectares rest on this soil, within this climate, shaped by both. We grow more than 600 species across distinct micro-elevations — from the riverside valleys beside 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 ground 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 cluster of specialised private operations all work within a few kilometres of one another. The knowledge is local. The phytosanitary controls are European — every tree that leaves our fields carries a Plant Passport, inspected and certified under EU regulation. Germany was Diaplant's first export market, precisely because it was 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 across Portugal, Spain and Germany.

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

Arrange your visit to Amarante.