It’s National Gardening Week this week so we thought we’d go wandering around the internet to find as many gardens for you to ‘visit’ as possible, especially as it’s raining. Before that though – just a reminder that our local nurseries and garden centres may not be open to visitors but you can still phone them or email them and order compost, pots, plants and seeds to be delivered. There will probably be a delivery charge and even a minimum order but you can always shout over the fence to your neighbours to see if they need anything as well.

Our summer trips have been cancelled but the gardens we were to have visited have plenty of photos on their websites to look at. So Moreton Hall Gardens (http://mortonhallgardens.co.uk/)  has a virtual tour (still photos not video) of the garden and last year’s tulip festival and Meadow Farm Nursery (http://www.meadowfarm33.co.uk/)  also has lots of photos on the website. In July we were to go to Coton Manor ( http://www.cotonmanor.co.uk/ ) which has a lot of photos of the gardens on their website. Click on ‘Gardens’ tab at the top menu for an overall view and then choose from options in the drop-down menus from there for more detail such as herbaceous borders  or garden areas which has another drop down menu as does garden calendar to see the garden month by month. And over on our Photo Gallery page you will find a slideshow from our February visit to Colesbourne Gardens to see the snowdrops.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show next month has been cancelled; instead there will be a ‘virtual’ show. Go to their website ( https://www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events/rhs-chelsea-flower-show ) for details and for a list of the exhibitors with links to their websites so you can still buy  from them.

Likewise all the NGS gardens are closed for the foreseeable future but many of them are participating in the virtual garden tours on the NGS website (https://ngs.org.uk/virtual-garden-visits/). Don’t forget to donate – as you would for a real visit – to keep raising money for charity.

A new website to keep us all connected is The Great British Garden Show (https://thegreatbritishgardenshow.com/). Join in, or just enjoy as gardeners old and new add photos or videos of their gardens around the country for us all to enjoy.

Many of our Botanic Gardens have put virtual tours on their websites – some are just photos, others are videos so from the comfort of your armchair you can go to Scotland to see many of their wonderful gardens (https://www.rbge.org.uk/visit/virtual-spring/) or to Cambridge (https://www.botanic.cam.ac.uk/wellness-wander/ and https://www.botanic.cam.ac.uk/virtual-visits/), Oxford (http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/botanicgardens/default.html ), or even all around the world (https://thespaces.com/take-a-virtual-tour-of-beautiful-botanical-gardens/ ). Kew has put a lot of videos of both its gardens and those of Wakefield Place on their website (https://www.kew.org/about-us/virtual-kew-wakehurst).

Some of the glossy garden magazines have produced lists of the ‘best’ virtual garden tours. (https://www.gardensillustrated.com/gardens/gardens-to-visit/virtual-garden-tours-best/, https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/garden/g31913008/best-virtual-tours-garden/, and https://www.theenglishgarden.co.uk/gardens/virtual-garden-tours/). A few of the gardens may be the same but there should be enough here to keep you occupied for a quite a while.

Enjoy the rest of the week, stay safe, keep well and, if you still need photos to look at, some of the photos from our Instagram feed are now in the photo gallery. If you need more gardens to explore there are plenty out there – just ask your search engine for virtual garden tours or for any of the gardens you fancy touring.