Individual Gardens or Small Groups

There are two problems with including individual gardens or small groups of gardens on this website:

Firstly - resourcing

We are a small group of volunteers and we already feature some 700+ events (see the exact number here), all of which we keep updated manually. The task is significant, but the vast majority of these entries are town-wide or village-wide events and so the effort to update an event covers many gardens in one go. Were we to accept individual events or very small garden groups, the task would become too onerous for us.

Secondly - quality and scope of event

Some organisers have attempted to add events that were more about fundraising than open gardens. Whilst raising funds for a good cause is very noble, one submitted event clearly featured a back yard (called a "garden") with a few tables containing gifts for sale. This isn't what we are aiming to promote. There are many websites on the web that offer event publicity - we don't want to dilute our site by featuring events where gardens are not the core element.

How do you tell good from bad?

The problem of course is in distinguishing between excellent individual gardens (which we'd love to feature) and ones that are not really about gardens at all. The NGS does this well by having regional co-ordinators who can vet a garden before it's added to the Yellow Book. As volunteers, we can't resource that, so it's a significant problem for us. We're trying to come up with a solution, but for now it's easier to limit our scope to groups of gardens, typically town-wide and village-wide events.

Watch this space ...

When we've come up with a workable solution, we'll update this website.