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Open the gates! The government gives the go-ahead to garden visiting

Vann garden in Surrey - NGS
Vann garden in Surrey - NGS

In a normal year, the last weekend in May marks the beginning of a seven-week period of intense activity for the National Garden Scheme (NGS), lasting until the second weekend in July, after which the school holidays begin. More than 2,000 gardens – over 50 per cent of the annual total – were due to open during this period in 2020, the great majority on the seven Sundays. Without disastrously bad weather, they would have raised in the region of £2 million.

When I first drafted this article we were still in a position of total closure. Last weekend that changed; a quietly posted update on the DEFRA website set out an alteration to the government advice and clarified that it is now permissible to open gardens to visitors in a controlled manner which maintains social distancing and other guidelines.

For those gardens owned and managed institutionally, by organisations such as the National Trust, the RHS and the Royal Botanic Garden Kew, the path to reopening is relatively simple; they own the properties so a strategic decision can be taken to reopen. They are limited only by the need to reboot on-the-ground operations at their various properties and by ongoing government restrictions, as well as a moral need to respect the sensibilities of their employees and volunteers.

The National Garden Scheme is in a rather different situation because the sensibilities of our garden owners will, quite rightly, dictate the pace at which properties begin to reopen. Our unique quality is the fact that NGS gardens are the private domains of ordinary folk, inviting visitors in to share their delights for purely altruistic and charitable purposes. These openings are not commercial events. The decision to open is entirely voluntary and at the discretion of individual garden owners.

Ironically, our model is ideally suited to the challenges of exiting the lockdown; welcoming modest numbers of people to attend a variety of garden venues across a broad number of locations, in order to raise funds for the nursing charities we support. We know from our research that the majority of our supporters visit very locally with a journey of less than 20 miles. This accords with current concerns about journey times and traffic volumes, especially in rural locations. Many of them visit specifically to support a fundraising event for their local community, always a fundamental feature of the National Garden Scheme.

We know that not all gardens will be able to open, for a mixture of practical and personal reasons. But for those that can we have a system in place whereby visitors will pre-book and pay for on our website, a ticket for a timed slot in the garden of their choice. Each garden is providing us with details of how many visitors they can safely accommodate at one time, so as to observe social distancing and these details will dictate the availability to visitors.

Sea View, Cornwall - NGS
Sea View, Cornwall - NGS

Another primary reason for getting gardens reopened is to make available the powerful benefits for physical and mental health that we know they offer. Having commissioned in 2016 the King’s Fund’s pioneering report, Gardens and Health, the NGS is dedicated to our work in this area; the isolation, anxiety and often real tragedy brought by the Coronavirus crisis has heightened demand for access to gardens.

The pandemic has also shone a fierce light on the demands on the nursing charities that are our beneficiaries. They are all on the front line in many different guises; in the community, in hospices or in hospitals. While our gardens are closed we have been running a Help Support Our Nurses campaign. The campaign is built on videos that our garden owners have been filming in their gardens, our Virtual Garden Visits, which we edit and share on our website and social media channels weekly – inviting virtual visitors to make a donation.

Now we hope that some of our garden gates can swing open, so that they too can contribute to the campaign. Welcoming visitors is a primary motivation for our garden owners, but raising funds for our nursing and health beneficiaries is also a powerful incentive – never more so than now. Visiting gardens is a positive pastime that blends gentle enjoyment with individual and public health and wellbeing, a real antidote to these troubled times.

  • George Plumptre is Chief Executive of the National Garden Scheme. To support the Help Support Our Nurses campaign, to view the Virtual Garden Visits and for all other details of gardens, visit ngs.org.uk.