The Yellow Book

Does anyone on this forum have their garden featured in the RHS Yellow Book?:wink:

 

Cheers Shiney. Your efforts to open your own garden sounds like it did the job, especially as you gained so much for charity. I usually watch that television prog with Jo Swift and co, but it always seemed to me that unless you had a couple of acres of absolute perfection, the RHS just wasn't interested. From experience, I know that charities do not look for perfection in order to raise funds. I just think that the RHS way is just pure snobbery at its best. Well done for what you have achieved.

 

I've watched it too,and the gardens that get through are indeed lovely, but the vetting process does seem over the top. The health and safety issues have my husband tut tutting and rolling his eyes.

Like you, I got the impression that you needed at least a couple of acres to qualify, and the vast amounts of money they seem to spend, make it seem beyond the purse of most amateur gardeners.

I thought the allotments were a nice addition, especially as so many these days are growing their own veg.

I've visited several gardens this year that like Shiney's are not part of the Open Garden Scheme, instead they have opened privately for a local charity. In my view they have been as much a pleasure to visit as those in the scheme.

 

I should imagine that most people who plan to try for the Open Gardens Scheme, must surely know by now, if only by watching the tv programme, that they shouldn't have large open boggy, bare, overgrown patches, and yet they do, and then they wonder why mr or mrs snob turned them down, (Sorry, but they are probably very nice people really.) :hehe:
Anyway, the main criteria is to have at least forty minutes of interest. If a gardener has a large enough variety of plants, the size of the garden shouldn't matter, I believe that it's the time spent looking at what's in the garden that counts, and this can quite easily be in excess of forty minutes. I like to see what will grow in similar circumstances found in my own garden, but I don't have the energy to go traipsing around gardens bigger than a football pitch just to prove something to the county organizer.:lollol:

 

I enjoy the programme, but ...

I'm intrigued to know how, almost to a man or rather woman, (they do all seem to be women after all), these county organisers actually have time to go off visiting other gardens. We are given a fleeting glimpse of them standing in what appears to be a park, while the voice-over tells us their garden is ''perfect' or 'immaculate' (insert adjective of your choice), from which we are led to assume that background vista is the garden referred to .... but is it? :wink:

My Father's garden was stunning (:ntwrth. In a plot 180' x 80', (considerably less than that of any county organiser I've so far seen) he had flower beds, 2 'bowling green' type lawns, a pond, greenhouse, fruit trees, fruit bushes, was practically self sufficient in vegetables and there was never a weed to be seen, but ... even in retirement, it took all his free time to keep it that way. Despite that, he would never have assumed himself to be an 'expert' and certainly not qualified to judge other people's gardens, especially so since what constitutes a 'good' garden is purely subjective.

Would he have made it into the Yellow Book? I doubt it. There were steps and a pond for a start! A distinct lack of 'focal points' or 'hidden corners of colour co-ordinated planting' wouldn't have impressed either. But it was a peaceful garden, one of which you didn't need some one else to 'approve', one you could happily sit in for hours just being surrounded by, and soaking up, the colour and beauty of it all and surely that's what a garden is all about?

 

Fidgetsmum,
What a well set out letter that is! You are straight to the point and absolutely no waffleing. It was a pleasure to read and I concur with every word about the criteria set out unneccessarily by the (judges).