We’ve attended a couple of events recently that have taken place locally. One, the National Garden Scheme, which, as the name suggests, is a national event that takes place locally; the other, Whiteknights Studio Trail, is locally organised and run. Both are the height of voyeurism if you like to nose around other people’s homes and gardens.
National Garden Scheme
The National Garden Scheme gets local individuals to throw open their (mainly) back gardens for public scrutiny in the name of charity. Last year, for example, it made donations of £3.11 million to a number of cancer and other health related charities. The money comes from entrance fees charged for visiting said gardens and if you choose to have tea and cake (how very British!).
We visited two local gardens on what was a very hot Saturday. When we originally booked it was only going to be the two of us but on the day we were accompanied by our two grandchildren, one of whom I carried around fast asleep, a dead weight on my shoulder. Both owners were very accommodating of the girls and the first encouraged us to play hide and seek at the bottom of their garden which we duly did.
I know that two gardens is not a very large sample size but both gardens were comfortably large enough to successfully play a decent game of hide and seek. There’s not much chance of getting lost in our garden and I think we are lucky to have the size of garden that we do.
Both gardens were different in that the first was more wild and the second had more structure but both made good use of winding paths and height of planting – something I’d like to recreate in our garden.
Whiteknights Studio Trail
The Whiteknights Studio Trail is similar to the NGS in that people invite strangers into their personal spaces to show off what they have got. In this case, it was a series of houses in the Whiteknights area of Reading where artists had their wears on display for you to visit and, hopefully, purchase. I was surprised by just how many artistic people there were in what is a relatively small area of the town (no we’re not a city yet. Maybe Charlie will look more favourably upon us?).
The variety of ‘art’ on display was quite surprising. It included all that you would expect in the form of paintings and ceramics through to an installation called The Butterfly Effect, which was encouraging people to make green pledges to an avant-garde electronic five-piece called Corporation Tramways and Fine Arts Committee operating out of someone’s garage.
All in all both events were quite lovely and I got to nose in quite a few people’s personal spaces!