This year, the National Garden Scheme celebrated its 90th anniversary - since 1927, the NGS has opened over three thousand private gardens around the UK and raised £50million for charities, including MacMillan Cancer Support, hospicecare and Marie Curie. Each year, they bring out their "Yellow Book" and, one day, probably in the very distant future, I hope to be opening a garden of my own!
Back in May (May!!!) Mum and I headed to south east Norwich to visit two very different gardens - one lakeside property in Brundall, on a steep slope with woodland areas and meandering paths, and the other in Strumpshaw, more formal with lawns and a vegetable garden.
As soon as we got to Brundall, Mum headed for the patio area and declared she'd like to live there!
The lake was enormous! And seemed to be shared by maybe a dozen properties whose gardens sloped down towards it. Mum and I spent ages sitting and staring at the water, dreaming and imagining peaceful afternoons on a bench, knitting!
This garden was beautiful, so full of different plants and areas - they clearly have help with this garden, I cannot imagine even the most enthusiastic of gardeners would be able to cope with this on their own!
These two gardens were covered by one admission charge and the other property, in Strumpshaw, had the added bonus of selling tea and cake! So we headed off a bit further out into the country for sustenance before a good mooch around this second garden. These gardens were more formal with traditional beds and hedges.
Now I think Mum may very well kill me for posting this next photo, but it's for reference purposes - to show the size of the tree of life!
The fruit and veg gardens were very well laid out, but also quite informal with swathes of forget-me-nots running through it. I can't resist blue flowers!
And this next garden ornament had us stumped, although I loved it. I have since discovered it's called a rain chain and I have one too - a souvenir of our Dorset holiday in July, from Stourhead National Trust shop!
So another lovely garden visiting day - my mission had been one garden visit a month this year and I'm already way ahead of schedule!
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