Goodbye To All That

The National Garden Scheme has been a part of my life since my early teens. My parents first opened our garden in 1970 and I have vivid memories of being dispatched on my bicycle with an armful of the famous yellow arrows to hang on local signposts to entice visitors and guide them through our network of tiny east Kent lanes.

Not long after starting to open the garden my mother was asked to join the NGS’s Kent committee. In those days these county committees ran the charity. There was just a tiny central presence in the form of the wonderful Rachel Crawshay. She was the organising secretary and my predecessor, whose photograph has stood on my desk ever since I started. Returning home after her first Kent committee meeting, my mother’s verdict was “the most frightening meeting I have ever attended”.

Those were the days when many in authority in the National Garden Scheme wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiments expressed in a poem, The Gardens are Open, by Reginald Arkell, which appeared as the introduction to the 1947 and 1948 editions of the NGS’s annual guide (soon after to become the ubiquitous Yellow Book).

“How nice to have a place so large

That you can make a shilling charge

And ask your neighbours in to see

How good their gardens ought to be …”

Such healthy competitiveness had always underpinned the growth of the National Garden Scheme ever since it was launched by the Queen’s Nursing Institute in 1927. The Scheme's purpose was to raise funds for district nursing which, 20 years before the foundation of the NHS, the QNI funded and managed charitably and, some would say, better. In 1925 the QNI’s Patron, Queen Alexandra had died. She was a passionate and much-loved supporter of organised nursing during its formative years, and the QNI Trustees realised they could take advantage of the royal popularity by launching a memorial fund.

One of their number, the redoubtable Elsie Wagg (redoubtable is a word which would appear regularly in any history of the NGS) suggested they could ask people they knew with lovely gardens to open for one day, make a modest charge and donate the funds raised. In 1927, 608 gardens opened, they all charged one shilling and they raised £8,000. A crucial factor in the early success was support from The Times newspaper which published a series of articles through 1927, of which one on 31st May, describing the very first openings, was perhaps the most significant.

“Amongst the gardens one could visit yesterday were those of Hatfield House [home of the Marquess of Salisbury, a political and social grandee]…If experience at Hatfield House should prove to be general, as there is no reason to doubt, this experiment will be successful from all points of view. Those who went to Hatfield by motor-car were allowed to drive through the gates right up to the house and having paid a shilling to a boy at a table, could wander where they liked.”

The reality of access for all that The Timeshighlighted was testament to what would become a quiet social revolution and that principle of accessibility has stayed with the NGS ever since.

Just over a decade later one of Britain's best-known gardeners, Vita Sackville-West described with great affection the visitors who had come to her garden at Sissinghurst Castle which she and her husband Harold Nicolson first opened in 1938. In the New Statesmanin 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, she wrote of her ‘shillingses’ as she called them:

“These mild, gentle men and women who invade one’s garden after putting their silver token into the bowl, these true peacemakers, these inoffensive lovers of nature in her gayest form, these homely souls who will travel 50 miles by bus with a fox-terrier on a lead, who will pore over a label, taking notes in a penny note-book – these are some of the people I most gladly welcome and salute. Between them and myself a particular form of courtesy survives, a gardener’s courtesy, in a world where courtesy is giving place to rougher things.”

Vita and Harold continued opening the garden at Sissinghurst right through the war years as did the owners of a number of other gardens. In a prequel of today’s emphasis of gardens and health, it was deemed good for public health for people to have access to gardens at a time of national crisis. Some 40 years later another distinguished author who opened her garden in Oxfordshire, Penelope Lively, echoed Vita’s sentiments about her visitors: “hundreds of people trooped through, always impeccably mannered, never dropping a cigarette end or a sweetie paper.” She went on to describe one conversation in particular:

“And it was then that I got talking to a Dutch couple who told me that they came to this country every year specifically to do a tour of Yellow Book openings. I assumed that they were keen gardeners themselves. Well, only up to a point, they said; the real value of the tour, for them, was that it gave them such insight into how the English live, the variety of social circumstance, the range of taste and style.”

We can come right up to date with an author of today’s generation, Olivia Laing. In her book The Garden Against Time, published in May 2024, she wrote of her first open day at Magnolia House in Suffolk which had once belonged to Mark Rumary:

“Three days to go, two days to go. There were road signs to put up on stakes sharpened with an axe. Ian made fifteen cakes and forty-eight fairy cakes and insisted on icing them all himself. We borrowed two trestle tables, a big box of china and two tea urns from the village hall and fetched a bag of change from the bank. I mowed the lawn, deadheaded everything in sight, got stung by a bee as my reward…

It was probably the best day of my life; just for the feeling of looking in and seeing the garden so full of people, talking to each other, making themselves at home. It was like a party all day. People came for a minute and stayed for hours.”

There are many things I will miss about the National Garden Scheme, but I think the most treasured – and elusive – is this sense of easy, unrestricted camaraderie, between garden owners and visitors and between different visitors who start as strangers and end up as friends. My cousin Sue told me a few years ago that when she and her husband Paddy first opened their garden in Clapham in London, amongst the visitors was a succession of people she had passed daily on her way to the Tube station but had never spoken to; her garden opening provided the introduction and broke the ice.

These social, community benefits, nearly always without the challenges of rank and wealth which complicate so much of life, have been an integral part of the National Garden Scheme since its foundation. This, and the impressive fundraising which has seen generations of private individuals make their own contributions to a total of nearly £75 million given to the nursing and health charities which remain the beneficiaries, are probably the charity’s two enduring qualities which I am very confident will continue long after I have gone.

There will always be boys riding off on bicycles to put out yellow arrows, and other boys at tables taking the entrance money, and there will always be generous, charitably minded gardeners who want to share their gardens with strangers and together contribute to the public good. It is a pretty winning and ageless formula.