Garden visiting

I love visiting  other people's gardens. Partly because I'm nosey but also because I can steal ideas. So throughout the summer at weekends, when I'm not too busy in my own garden, I'm often to be found visiting NGS gardens, with whoever I can cajole into coming with me. That's usually either my husband or my daughter, but sometimes I go on my own.

I always bring ideas back from my garden visits, even though  the gardens may be much, much bigger than my own. It might be just a seating area,  a colour scheme, plants which I've not used before or an unusual container arrangement.

There are some wonderful gardens in the National Gardens Scheme and they are not all big gardens. Last weekend we went to a village where a group of cottages were open. There were 4 cottage gardens, and they were amazingly beautiful. Two of them were small, long narrow gardens. The design of these 2 gardens was quite inspirational as to what you can do with a small area.  The owners had divided their gardens up so that it gave an illusion of space, like going through into different rooms. The other 2 gardens were bigger and also had their gardens made up as different spaces, so that you didn't see the whole garden at once.

All 4 of the gardens were real cottage gardens, packed full of plants which tumbled over the edges of borders in a lovely informal way. I love this style of planting and try to create it in my own garden. There were a lot of oohs and aahs and gasps of admiration coming from me as we walked round.

I also loved the way they all had surprises around every corner, like a little seating area, a statue, bird bath or some other interesting feature tucked in amongst the plant foliage.

Visiting gardens like these could make me feel a little envious, but on the whole I return to my own garden bubbling with ideas and it often gives me a new enthusiasm to go off and create something new.