Anne Wareham, editor
I hope this is going to be part of a small series. I’m interested in people’s thoughts, motivations and experiences in relation to opening their gardens, and I’m intending these pieces to emerge from dialogues between garden openers.
This is the first, for which I’m grateful to Alexandra Campbell, famous for her blog, The Middle-Sized Garden and much else besides, and Francine Raymond, famous for chickens, and much more besides. Thanks to them too for the photographs.
I hope to discover about garden opening in other countries than the UK, and for other reasons than opening for charity, which is the predominant way in the UK. (if not for all of us..) If you might wish to contribute such a piece, please get in touch.
Alexandra Campbell:
I’ve recently been talking to Telegraph gardening writer Francine Raymond about opening our middle-sized gardens to the public. Francine used to have a larger garden in Suffolk, which was open throughout the year, with occasional days for the NGS and she now opens solely for the NGS as part of Whitstable Open Gardens (June 14th 2020).
I open my garden (it’s the Middlesized Garden ) for Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day (it’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s call it FOG), an annual event on the last Sunday of June (June 28th, 2020). It raises money for the Faversham Society, a local charity set up to help preserve Faversham’s 400+ listed buildings and historic natural environment.
Both Francine and I are one of the organisers of our respective events as well as garden openers. Faversham usually has around 30 local town gardens open, and Whitstable Open Gardens will have 21 gardens next year. Both are therefore big events, although the gardens in them are small (in ‘proper gardening’ terms – I don’t think they feel small to everyone frantically doing the weeding in the week before the event!).
There are two big pluses to opening your garden – I have one day in the year when it has to look the best it can be. It gives me something to aim for. Francine agrees with me – ‘a lot of my planting is geared towards the open day,’ she says. ‘It gives me an incentive, and I wouldn’t normally go to those lengths if I wasn’t opening.’ We both agree that our gardens drift gently downwards towards dereliction after that, although Francine’s dereliction is much more stylish than mine, with seasonal tablescapes and groupings of pots.
The next plus is that opening your garden as an amateur is as much about your community as it is about your garden. This is where it makes a huge difference to be part of a group. ‘I can sometimes see that my garden isn’t someone’s cup of tea,’ says Francine. ‘But they can go down the street and look at a garden they like better.’ Or they can head off down Faversham’s historic streets or to Whitstable’s beaches. People really love to see similar sized gardens in the same street looking completely different. It gives them ideas. Neither I nor Francine feel that we are competing with grand gardens, with show gardens or even with each other – barring the odd question about ‘how many tickets did you sell?’
Open gardens events show communities at their best and everyone is very, very nice. I’ve had up to 700 people in my garden in one day, without a single piece of dropped litter, damage or rudeness (although a small pot of Jekka’s Thyme vanished mysteriously last year). A friend who opened for FOG was somewhat disconcerted when a visitor said ‘Oh, it’s so refreshing to see a garden that obviously hasn’t been designed.’ That’s about as negative as it gets. Although one man wrote to FOG saying that he’d seen young girls dropping crisp packets outside Morrisons and what were we going to do about it. (Hello? This is our problem because…?)
Our relationships with the charities we support – the Faversham Society and the NGS – run smoothly and their role is important. The Faversham Society sells our tickets, hosts event details on its website and is a point of contact for people asking about the open gardens. The NGS checks the gardens, provides publicity material and – all importantly – includes NGS open gardens in its listings. So an NGS open garden has instant access to the NGS’s massive mailing list and excellent reputation.
But as we talked, Francine and I identified a wider issue around visiting open gardens. She has tried to get more local businesses involved and, in some years, we’ve found it difficult to get publicity in local papers. Francine also notes that the charities who benefit hugely from the money the NGS raises for them never seem to campaign to encourage people to visit the gardens. Both Faversham and Whitstable open gardens get wonderful support from the popular local radio programme, BBC Radio Kent Gardening, which goes out on Sunday mornings. But other publicity can be a battle.
My view is that visiting or organising open gardens is perceived as ‘not important’. It’s partly a reflection of the way people think about gardening and gardeners. When people look for a gardener, they often believe they can pay a minimum wage and don’t value the expertise that a good gardener has. It’s also considered ‘popular with women’, which is often equated with ‘trivial’ – something the fashion industry has battled with for many years. And garden visiting as a hobby is considered something that older women do, which adds an extra layer of invisibility (Personally, I love invisibility as the visibility of youth was both intrusive and stressful but it doesn’t help in publicising open gardens).
But quite apart from the huge sums that garden visiting raises for charity, it also has a wider economic impact. Last year the RHS funded a study by Oxford Economics that showed that visiting major parks and gardens contributes nearly £3bn to GDP. Britain’s gardens are a major draw to tourists. And local open gardens and garden schemes weren’t even included in that. Yet Faversham has 30-40 gardens open on a single day, with a garden market. Nearly 1,500 visitors attend. That has both social and economic effects on the town. But one year, the local paper gave it a few inches of ‘news in brief’ – the same amount of column inches they’d given a few weeks earlier to a single garden open for an afternoon in a nearby village.
Garden visiting brings the community together. Whitstable garden openers range from people in their 80s to those in their 30s. Faversham has historic house gardens and modern estate ones. Garden visitors buy food, drinks, plants and other things. Open Gardens visitors have even been known to move to the town. People come from all over Britain and from Northern Europe.
Ironically, both Francine and I have noted that we are seeing much younger people visiting our open gardens, particularly in Whitstable. Local open gardens schemes tap into ‘health and wellbeing’ trends, they’re part of the debate over environmental issues and they offer Instagrammable opportunities. Open gardens get a lot of response on Instagram, where there are no preconceptions about what should interest any particular age or sex. It’s all about what looks good in a photo. Local papers and businesses could perhaps take note.
Another – slightly sensitive – issue is the perception that opening your garden is for wealthier people. That a garden open to the public must be of a certain size and beautifully designed or looked after. Which means – to be blunt – spending money on it. That’s where local open gardens schemes are so important. We try to get anyone who is interested in their outside space to get involved. FOG doesn’t check prospective gardens beforehand and we have no criteria (except for the insurance-led one of being able to access the garden without going through the house!).
When someone visits an NGS open garden, they expect – quite rightly – to see a certain standard of gardening. But for local open gardens schemes, there aren’t those expectations. If someone loves their outside space and is generous enough to share it with visitors, then they’re in. So FOG has quite a wide range of gardens and community open spaces in socio-economic terms.
Some of the more ‘serious’ FOG gardens – the ones run by knowledgeable and talented plant lovers – also open separately on a different day for the NGS. Although Francine says she thinks that the NGS assessors are less critical for group openings. Personally, I think it’s important that local schemes and NGS schemes have different standards of gardening – I like to think of local open garden schemes as being a seed-bed for NGS gardens, and I hope they see it that way, too.
Whitstable Open Gardens 14th June 2020 ngs.org.uk/
Faversham Open Gardens & Garden Market Day 28th June 2020
Faversham Gardens open for the NGS on June 6th 2020
Alexandra Campbell Books and Blog
Francine Raymond Website and The Kitchen Garden
Now I recognise that gate of Francine’s garden, Anne Wareham! Could I add to this article the role of those who propagate and sell plants, who may, like we do, also open our own gardens for charity and the NGS. The essence of this is the *integrity* and purpose of a garden; the cultivation and propagation of the plants that make it up; the artistry and creativity of the gardener who makes it; and the relationship it holds to the natural and cultural (and botanical) world it sits in. As Alexandra says there is very significant value in this, and energy and effort and imagination; not things to be taken for granted or disregarded.
Thanks Tim!
I rarely visit gardens on NGS days. Crowded, noisy and the birds have flown. If pouring with rain, that’s another matter, and photos become beautiful.
Excellent article. I’ve opened my garden to raise money for the local Church in the past. And I now “open” it for the annual Summer Party of the Tai Chi Group I belong to. It’s a huge amount of work and most of those attending seems to think it looks nice and that I have gardening “expertise”. All I can say is that they are easily pleased. I try to hold the party in mid to late June. After that, if the Summer is hot and dry, it’s often an absolutely thankless task. I agree about my garden descending into “dereliction” afterwards. I’ve almost given up during the last 2 years of drought (except for my veg beds) and admire hugely those who manage to keep their gardens looking good in such conditions. As to opening for the NGS, no chance – much too daunting and my cake baking skills are limited.
Great article. I opened my old garden for the NGS 20 years ago, not just to engage with the community and raise money for charity, but to show off, bask in comments that were always kind and never critical and to feel smug and happy.
That makes you the only one in the world, Kath….
Open gardens are a big thing here in Australia. Spring through to Autumn and are used as fundraisers for local charities and other organisations quite often.
Love the shot of the garden with the lavender either side of the path. Beautiful. Nothing beats an English garden but here in Australia we do have our own flavour through our native plants here.
As far as garnering more publicity for Open Gardens, I might suggest that those who show their gardens be sure there are stellar photographs available for print use, and perhaps some video as well for on-line platforms and perhaps for television. We live in a time with lots of media hungry for fresh content. And if they do not have to produce that content, they may be happy to publish what you can provided if the quality is exceptionally good. For their purposes, it’s critical that people be pictured in the garden or at the very least a scene with seating we can imagine ourselves settling on.
And by all means exploit your garden’s features that might tap into trends that attract a younger generation – like a teaching garden for children – a zen garden for de-stressing – a “scentual” garden for aromatherapy – pollinator eden using native plants.