A Season of Open Gardens

Following on from the hugely successful London Garden Trail, the Society of Garden Designers (SGD) has joined forces with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) to launch Open Gardens - a new series of national garden events for summer 2011.

To tie with the SGD’s 30th anniversary celebrations, Open Gardens will see 30 gardens designed by registered members and fellows of the SGD (MSGD and FSGD), open across the UK, celebrating the best of British garden design over the past three decades.

To show the gardens at their seasonal best, the Open Gardens events will take place on three Sundays throughout the year - May 1st, June 26th, and September 25th - with 10 different gardens open on each Sunday.

Some of the Society’s leading designer members are involved in the events including Dan Pearson MSGD whose project for the Maggie’s Centre in London is opening in June, John Brookes MBE FSGD who will be opening a residential garden designed for a private client and Robin Williams FSGD – one of the founders of the SGD - who will opening a client’s private garden.

These rarely seen gardens, both private and public, will be open across England and Wales from Surrey in the south to York in the north.

For garden and design enthusiasts alike it is a chance to see some of the most inspiring British gardens created in the last 30 years and to meet some of the professional designers who created them, along with other SGD members in the region.

The gardens will be open from 2pm-6pm on the May and June events and 12pm-4pm on the September event. Last year, the London-only event attracted over 6,000 visitors and the Society are expecting strong visitor figures in every region this year.

The Open Gardens schedule will be available on the SGD and RHS websites.

Open Gardens is one of a series of events to mark the Society’s 30th anniversary celebrations this year. With an anniversary theme of ‘30 years and 3 minutes’ the Society aims to expand on the theory that just three minutes exposure to green space helps reduces stress and to explore how vital gardens and public spaces are for our quality of life; a subject that has long been known, but has never before been so pressing.
 

 
 

Article posted on 28 Feb 2011.

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