A National Open Gardens Scheme Visit

On Bank Holiday Monday, we decided to head out in the afternoon and visit a local garden that was opening for charity as part of the National Open Gardens Scheme. The garden in question was a small community garden and woodland in another part of the London borough where we live, but that we'd never visited before. I'd read about the garden in our local Open Gardens brochure and it looked interesting.

OH and I got on our bikes and cycled over to the garden. It probably took 15 minutes or so. We were really pleasantly surprised when we got there. The garden is wedged between housing and a local children's playground and you wouldn't necessarily know it was there.

It is a partly walled garden and much of it is divided up into tiny plots for local people to grow vegetables or flowers. It was really interesting to walk around and see the different plots and plants growing. Here are a few pictures:

The site also had a wildlife pond with yellow iris 

and a woodland area you could walk around with an interesting mix of trees and native plants.

In the woodland area, there was also an apiary where they had their own bee hives.

There was a jazz quartet playing on the day, which was very entertaining, a plant stall where I bought a

couple of plants and a community building where your could get a cup of tea/coffee (no cake for us, unfortunately, as they'd sold out). Their resident fox even came out for a special appearance.

He didn't seem at all timid and was wandering around amongst the visitors, until he got bored and went off to sleep.

It was a lovely way to spend a couple of hours on a Bank Holiday Monday. It cost us each £5 to visit, plus the cost of the tea/coffee, which was very minimal, but it was worth it as it went to a great cause and gave us lots of gardening inspiration for the allotment and the garden at home. I'm always amazed to visit these sort of gardens in London, which you might otherwise not get to experience.

I'm hoping that we'll get to visit more local gardens participating in this scheme over the summer, as it's a nice way to spend an afternoon, and I'm inherently nosey about other people's gardens too!