It was a hundred years ago that Elsie Wagg, an avid gardener, had an idea. It was a particularly bad year for flu and there weren’t enough district nurses. Why not raise money for community nursing “through the nation’s obsession with gardening”, she suggested. Garden owners could open their gates and offer a cup of tea and slice of cake to the public in return for a charitable donation. The Times enthusiastically took up her cause and the National Garden Scheme (NGS) was born.
The idea was quintessentially British: a chance to wander round other people’s homes and eat a scone, all in the aid of charity. As Ann Treneman, our gardening columnist, says: “There is no word in the English language for that feeling of wanting to see a stranger’s garden. For those of us who are nosy (I prefer the term curious), to be invited in creates a bubble of emotions that includes the thrill of discovery, amazement, bafflement and, oh yes, envy.”
By the end of the summer of 1927, 608 people had been persuaded to open their gardens — including Sandringham — to the public in support of the Queen’s Nursing Institute. Admission was a shilling and they raised more than £8,000. By 1930 the number reached 900 and Winston Churchill joined in. By 1932 it had risen to 1,079, necessitating the publication of the first NGS guide which in 1949 acquired its distinctive yellow cover.
There are now over 3,500 private gardens open to the public, from barges to community gardens, stately homes, cottages and allotments, raising £3.8 million for various charities including Macmillan, Marie Curie, Parkinson’s UK, Carers Trust and Horatio’s Garden, which creates beautiful gardens for spinal units.
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Unlike the National Trust, the entrance fee is still cheap, about £6, and free for children. And each garden is unique and idiosyncratic. Unlike Chelsea Flower Show, the paths aren’t lined with stalls selling ornaments and the plants won’t be dug up and removed after two weeks. There’s no need to dress up and you can often bring your dog.
Wagg was right all those years ago. The British have always been obsessed with horticulture: medieval herb gardens, monastic orchards, Tudor mazes, Georgian parterres, cottage gardens filled with roses and gooseberry bushes, parks dotted with grottoes, camomile lawns, hothouses, Victorian ferneries, Edwardian Japanese fantasias, soldiers taking seed to the Somme, potting sheds, allotments, patios and garden centres — we love anything botanical.
Tastes may have alternated between romantic and formal, practical and ornamental, cut lawns and wildflower meadows, but ever since the British embraced the wheelbarrow in the 12th century, brought back by the crusaders, they have sought solace in planting, tending, pruning and weeding a plot of land for pleasure. Kew introduced female gardeners only in 1895 but it’s always been a soothing hobby for any man or woman who can lay their hands on a patch of soil.
Other countries can lay claim to their skills as painters and musicians but the British have embraced gardening as their passion. From Humphry Repton, William Kent and Capability Brown to plant hunters like EH Wilson, from Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West to designers like Arabella Lennox-Boyd and Tom Stuart-Smith, many of the most skilled practitioners have been born here and amateurs have enthusiastically followed. Who else could have invented the sunken ha-ha as an invisible fence, the star of Amandaland’s BBC Christmas special after she fell into one?
And what other country could have such heartfelt arguments over horticulture. Sackville-West, who created Sissinghurst in the 1930s from a field of mud, once dismissed rhododendrons as resembling “fat stockbrokers, whom we do not want to have to dinner”. Leylandii hedges divided the nation at the end of the last century. Now Monty Don gets into trouble if he suggests mowing your lawn or creating some decking instead of allowing nature to run rampant.
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Yet gardening is most often a peaceful, solitary activity that calms the mind. Perhaps it’s the temperate climate and long growing season, but nearly 27 million Brits engage in gardening activities, according to YouGov, a higher proportion than any other western country, with 88 per cent regarding it as a pleasure rather than a chore. The garden retail sector, according to the land agent Savills, is worth £5 billion. This year’s exhibition at the British Library, Unearthed: The Power of Gardening, looked at the impact of horticulture on our psyche, from manuscripts, novels, poems and plays to the first mechanical lawnmower, garden cities and now guerilla gardeners using seed bombs to plant flowers in neglected urban spaces.
The first printed gardening manual dates from 1564 and is aimed at “ordinary” gardeners helping them to learn how to sow and set a garden for pleasure.
Politicians are constantly trying to define Britishness and trumpet their patriotism by standing in front of Union Jacks. But gardens rarely get a mention alongside football, singing Jerusalem or discussing the travails of the royal family. Citing the BBC, the NHS or the Church of England as great British institutions is more likely to cause arguments than create unity.
Gardening is a less divisive way to connect us all. There is no place I would rather be in spring than on this island as the pear trees blossom. So, in 2026, if you want to celebrate Britishness, pick up a yellow NGS book and find a local garden that is open or buy a few bulbs and seeds and plant them on your windowsill.
As Shakespeare wrote, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” Embracing the soil may just help us through the next turbulent year.
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