Opening up a gardener's world

WHETHER it was being dragged along as a reluctant child or enjoying a leisurely day out as an adult, most of us, at some point in our lives, will have visited at least one of the West Country's grand gardens.

- JANET HUGHES

From Tyntesfield to Stourhead, the region is blessed with an abundance of country estates that allow you to stroll along balustraded terraces reminiscent of a Jane Austen novel or picnic on lush, green lakeside lawns the size of a farmer's field.

But beautiful as they are, these historic landscapes with their impeccably clipped yews and miles of rhododendron bushes bear little relation to your average garden. The sweeping borders with their drifts of perfectly staked delphiniums may give visitors a few planting ideas but most are beautiful fantasies maintained by teams of estate workers or volunteers. Lovely for a day out, but that rose from the plant stall is never going to make the back of your three-bedroom semi look like a Capability Brown landscape in miniature.

Enter the National Garden Scheme. A scheme which allows people to view “exceptional” examples of private gardens of all shapes and sizes to gain a realistic view of what it is possible to achieve. A kind of Through the Keyhole for the green fingered.

Pat Prior is one of 3,300 people who allow the public into their back gardens to raise money for charity. Over the past quarter of a century, the 73-year-old grandmother has shown hundreds of people how it is possible to create a little piece of horticultural heaven behind your average suburban semi.

Not that the garden itself is average. While the front of her deco style house in Bristol looks pretty ordinary, the back is anything but. It may not have woodland walks studded with thousands of native bluebells and snowdrops, but it does have a winding path which takes visitors through a series of arches and a myriad of small spaces which are guaranteed to get any green fingers twitching.