Five years ago, garden visiting was a wistful memory. We were locked down. All I could do was drive to local patches of anemones, primroses and fritillaries and take the permitted daily walk where I could admire nature’s efforts. Not so this year: the indispensable Yellow Book, the Garden Visitor’s Handbook 2025 of the National Garden Scheme, is on sale for £14.99. It is the handbook of thousands of British gardens worth a trip to visit without any need for social distancing.
It has a foreword by Mary Berry, queen of home baking, an apt president for a scheme whose gardens offer teas and scones to their visitors. The NGS website (ngs.org.uk) has a Find a Garden feature that impels many to set off on the spur of the moment. The Yellow Book is even better. It is not just a guide to all the gardens open, when and why. It is a microcosm of British gardens and their changing styles.
Last year, 3,347 gardens in England, Wales and Northern Ireland opened for the NGS. Paying visitors enabled the scheme to donate £3.5mn to health, nursing and garden charities, a record sum. No other country has a scheme to equal ours, especially if the 400 gardens open under Scotland’s Garden Scheme are added to it (scotlandsgardens.org).
In the US the Garden Conservancy produces an excellent Open Day Directory, but last year it listed only 400 destinations. In France, private gardens are open to visitors as part of the Jardins Ouverts scheme founded by British expatriates. In 2024, 50 such gardens opened across the country (opengardens.eu). A few of them even offered a British transplant, afternoon tea. The scheme donated €22,000 for the care of seriously ill children, but it remains a mini pond compared with the NGS lake.
The Rendezvous Aux Jardins event is much bigger, covering some 2,300 gardens, but they open only for the first weekend in June. Garden openings in the NGS run from March until October. About 1,000 of them now open by appointment, preferably to small groups. Like pre-recorded TV programmes, they are no longer a missed opportunity if you were busy at the main time of opening. This flexibility is a helpful innovation.
The NGS began in 1927. Its scope and the styling of its gardens are an interesting index of social and horticultural change. The scheme is famous for its excellent support of nursing, including Macmillan Cancer Support and The Queen’s Nursing Institute. Early on, some inspired lateral thinking linked an afternoon spent in someone else’s garden eating someone else’s cake or scones with financial help for nursing, the linchpin for us all in adversity. I have just read Christie Watson’s powerful 2018 memoir of her years as a nurse, The Language of Kindness (Chatto & Windus). I will keep it in mind when I do a little bit for nurses by visiting NGS gardens on summer Sundays.
The NGS has now branched into supporting community care gardens too. They are gardens that host mentally, physically or socially stressed participants. The results can be transformative. As one beneficiary says in this year’s Yellow Book, “Gardening takes me out of my misery.” Some of these gardens, Rhubarb Farm in Nottinghamshire, a site for former drug and alcohol misusers and ex-offenders, being one, and the Pakistan Association in Liverpool another, bring diverse participants together where housing often keeps them apart.
Other gardens benefit from NGS funding for individuals’ new projects within them, including the Botanical Brothers in east London, which offers space and company to fathers and male carers to talk and reflect while gardening. Depression and adolescent loneliness are facts of life, but the NGS now addresses them. On June 11 and 18, pre-booked visitors can even visit Kirkham Prison near Preston, whose 150 acres are maintained by inmates in an imaginative and successful use of their time. The gardens are notable and the shop sells produce, including meat from rare breeds.
At an everyday level, offerings tend now to strike a solicitous note. Gardens that provide home teas specify they are gluten-free. Recent gardens present themselves as friendly to wildlife, though dogs, on Sundays, are often prohibited. Wilding and wild flowers proliferate, Dorset being a hotspot for them. At Hogchester Farm near Bridport, Rob Powell has worked with Dorset Wildlife Trust to encourage wild flowers on 75 acres as a “collaboration with those seeking connection with nature and themselves through conservation therapy and the arts.” On the NGS Open Day, July 13 at 2pm, there will be a talk about conservation on site.
At Mapperton House, near Beaminster, Mapperton Wildlands has recently been rewilded on a big scale. On May 29 the remarkable project can be visited by groups accompanied by its “ranger”. Tickets are limited but the event should be memorable. Meanwhile, at the Potting Shed, near Sherborne, a new two-acre Wellbeing Nursery and Therapy Garden is aiming “to enhance wellbeing and tranquillity”. It is “planted organically to encourage all forms of wildlife”, no source of tranquillity in my bitter experience. It opens on September 13 and offers gluten-free and vegan scones.
Active gardeners struggle to find time to take a weekend off from their own gardens and visit others. Only through the Yellow Book have I learnt of a garden in Glamorgan built, like mine, by eliminating dozens of tall conifers. Another, Stow Cottage Arboretum, has been progressing only a few miles from me since 2009 without me knowing. It has been planted with about 650 trees on 15 acres and on June 21 it is open with tea, coffee and cake.
In London, 16 gardens open on June 8, June 18 and July 6. It is hard to time flowery gardens’ peak: when visiting you need to calibrate your expectations. The charm of multiple small gardens opening in one village is quite different to the splendour of huge gardens like Hodnet Hall in Shropshire or Court Lodge near Dartford in Kent, which has evolved over four generations. Stay-at-home holidays are an antidote to seething airports and burning summer heat. Choose to enjoy one with a meander round Shropshire, Yorkshire or the South West, taking the Yellow Book as a guide and looking for big, established gardens.
I asked George Plumptre, chief executive of the NGS, if he would name six bigger gardens that he and his team specially recommend for keen gardeners, but which they may not already know. Declaring it impossible, he has come up with The Dower House in Melbourne, Derbyshire; Hurdley Hall in Powys; The Old Rectory Warbleton in East Sussex; Chilworth Manor near Guildford in Surrey; Cadenham Manor near Chippenham and Littlethorpe Manor near Ripon in Yorkshire. The teas are all good but he rates Littlethorpe a winner for its teas in a big marquee. Chilworth even offers sparkling wine from its own vineyard.
I know none of them. What fun, if weeds and drought permit. I will go to some, adjusting my mind so as not to be selfish. Egocentric visitors look with one question in mind: what is there here for me to buy or copy? Empathetic visitors try to grasp what the owners are trying to do, whether it suits the site and what are the pluses before looking for minuses. Garden visiting is not only an assessment of gardens: it is also a test of us, the visitors.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram