National Gardens Scheme

For those who live in or visit the UK and who enjoy drawing or painting in gardens it's worth keeping an eye on the National Gardens Scheme. The scheme arranges for fine gardens (most of which are private gardens) to open up on one or more days each year for charity.

This scheme's website has a garden finder and also provides details of all the gardens which can be visited. It has a particularly effective database which allows searching by specific dates or ranges of dates and counties. The entry for each garden provides details of what plants can be seen, details of how to get there, what facilities exist and what restrictions there are. See an example for a garden in Kent which is only open one day each year - which is tomorrow in the case of this garden. The NGS days are not likely to be the best days to draw and paint a garden - but it enables people to see what's on offer and which are open for more than one day. Each entry also indicates which are open to private visits by prior arrangement which enables you to find out which might be open to the idea of you painting there - but maybe on another day.

Another site which is new to me and I've not yet explored fully but seems OK from the two or three links I've checked for gradens I know is Gardens Guide. The advantage of this is it takes a global perspective and provide details of gardens in a number of different countries. For example, this is the link to the website map for the Eastern States of the USA.

Technorati tags: gardens