How does your garden grow?

What could be more British than nosying around someone else’s private property while munching on a slice of cake? The National Garden Scheme allows you to do both, opening up people’s back gardens to the public and offering them a lovely homemade afternoon tea while they’re at it. I grew up poring over the pages of its famous Yellow Book of open gardens, envying the fat borders of geraniums and delphiniums in the rural area where we lived. But the NGS doesn’t just do big walled gardens and sweeping lawns; it has a London Yellow Book, too, and while the gardens are far smaller, the plants, the cakes and even the wine that some homeowners offer are no less lovely.

‘Lovely’ really is the best word to sum up the whole scheme. It is lovely to wander through the different rooms that most of these tiny gardens are split up into, finding new planting combinations and cultivars you’d never heard of. It is lovely then buying some of those plants, raised from cuttings by the garden’s owner. It is lovely meeting that owner, who is always glowing, not so much from the heat of the day but from the pride of being told that the garden they’ve bustled around all year in preparation for this day is just, well, lovely. Everyone attending is in a good mood, or even a little excited as they’ve just discovered Campanula ‘Pink Octopus’ (a hideous name for a curious little plant with thin, fleshy spotted petals).

The NGS is famously stringent when it comes to admitting gardens to its Yellow Book. The London gardens have to meet all those standards but with far less space than their country cousins. They are often no bigger than the show gardens at RHS Chelsea, but NGS plots require so much more thought and skill than those professionally designed gardens.