Too good to miss

With gardens that would have been opening for the National Garden Scheme closed this summer, Essex Life decided there were some that were too good to miss, while the charities supported by NGS have never needed our help more

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For more than 90 years, the National Garden Scheme (NGS) has existed solely to raise funds by opening gardens. It started in 1927 as a way to support District Nurses and since then has given away more than £60 million, in 2019 donating £3 million to charities including Macmillan Cancer Support, Marie Curie, Hospice UK, Carers Trust and The Queen’s Nursing Institute (over £185,000 of this coming from Essex).

Until now the gardens have never closed, not even during World War II. Consequently, a campaign, led by Alan Titchmarsh, has been launched to help make up the shortfall in donations which has inevitably resulted from the coronavirus crisis.

The idea behind the campaign is to find alternative ways to share gardens with the many people who regularly visit over the course of a year and also with those who have never visited before. The NGS is doing this with a series of video virtual tours. Lasting from as little as 10 seconds to several minutes, these videos are a way of sharing the hard work of the garden owners and lifting the spirits of the viewers. And it is not just video that enables us to share. Here, we are able to bring you a virtual tour in photos from some of the gardens which would have been opening in June this year across the county.

ISABELLA’S GARDEN