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- England
- Scotland
- France
- Holland
- Germany
- Italy
- Spain
- Portugal
- USA
- China
- Japan
- India
- Iran
- Advice
- Garden Tours
The Gardenvisit.com website was launched in 1998. Then as now, the focus was on visiting gardens and providing informaiton on why they are worth visiting. This began with an online edition of Tom Turner's English garden design since 1650 (1986) with links to visiting information about the gardens in the book. This grew into a full online guide to gardens to visit in the UK and, over the years, the coverage has been extended to over 2000 gardens in over 50 countries. The website also has 25+ online books with comprehensive information about historic gardens, garden hotels, garden design, design products and landscape architecture.
To celebrate Gardenvisit.com's 10thbirthday, two eBooks are being offered for free download in October 2008 only. They are: The Principles of Garden Design (normally £9.50) and 24 Historic Styles of Garden Design (normally £7.50). They were written by Tom Turner, whose book on Garden History has come top on Amazon.com since publication in 2005.
The Principles of Garden Design uses 130 photographs to explain the core principles of designing gardens which are useful, well-made and beautiful. 24 Historic Styles of Garden Design uses 230 photographs to give a crisp summary of 4000 years of garden history. It starts with the temples and courtyards of Ancient Egypt and finishes with the gardens of the 21st century.
Tom Turner, a well-known landscape architect and garden historian, said: 'These eBooks explain the features of the great historic garden styles – and how the next generation of gardens should be designed. Winston Churchill made a wise remark which applies to gardens and politics: "The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see."'
We have released what we believe to be a unique tool for garden visitors. Trip planner allows you to search for nearby gardens and nurseries to visit by entering your location (postcode/address). The search returns a Google Map with markers pinpointing the gardens and nurseriesin the set radius and providing links to information pages about each.
Our Nursery Finder is born. We cover nurseries in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Nurseries are organised by country and county and we have geopositional information displayed on Google Maps for each nursery, so plant enthusiasts can use it to plan nursery visits in their area. The Nursery Finder is linked with the Garden Finder so each nursery listing includes links to nearby gardens to visit and vice versa.
Finally the complete site redesign is live! GardenVisit.com has been redesigned for the first time since its launch in 1998, and now uses Ruby on Rails. The new and improved Garden Finder is now easier to use and has Google Maps and user reviews. Each garden has a Google Map showing the garden's location and each country and region has a Google Map showing all the gardens within the area. The 2007 re-design allowed an estimate of the website content: 18,000 pages, 3 million+ words (approx 200 words/page) and 12,000+ images. For comparison, the King James Bible (Old + New Testaments) contains 783,137 words - and no images.
We are very pleased to now include gardens to visit in New Zealand in our Garden Finder. Currently, we have 12 gardens listed in New Zealand but look forward to this number growing.
We have added the following new guide sections to the Gardenvisit.com website:
Gardenvisit.com's section on Garden Real Estate has been expanded to to 56 countries. At the time of writing, this page came 1st for searchs on these terms on Google.co.uk and 17th for searches on Google.com. We see Garden Real Estate as a significant niche in the markets for home and international property. Wikipedia defines niche real estate as 'a specialised sector of the property market' and further explains that garden real estate 'includes historic gardens, town gardens, country estates and roof gardens'. We expect the sector to expand for a number of reasons:
Gardenvisit.com have started promoting the idea of a garden short break. Garden visiting is one of life’s great pleasures. In the past, the problem was that great gardens tend to be separated bygreat distances. But air travel has eased this problem: it isrelatively easy to reach groups of good gardens from airports. We call these groups Garden ShortBreaks. Our aim is to recommend groups of gardens and also accommodation whichwill appeal to garden visitors: Garden Hotels or Garden B&Bs orHotels with a scenically attractive location. We also have recommendations for how to get the best deals on booking accommodation.
Gardenvisit.com's Garden Design Section has been expanded to provide: information for designers; a directory of garden products; a directory of garden designers:
Gardenvisit.com's Garden Real Estate Section, first published in June 2004 has been expanded to 20 pages, each dealing with a specific region of the world. The section was created in the belief that Garden Property is set to become an important niche in the property market. We receive many enquiries from people who seek:
Many pages in the Garden Real Estate Section have links to Garden Finders for the countries they serve. The section editor explained 'Real estate agents are good at letting you search for property in specified towns and of specified areas, sizes and prices. But they mostly ignore gardens don't give you much help in finding a house where you can make a good garden. We aim to help property seekers by telling them which areas have the best potential and which garden types to look for specific countries. Garden property can be purchased or rented for a holiday. We also cater for window shoppers. Is there any better place to dream than a beautiful garden in a beautiful place?'. Gardenvisit.com encourages real estate agents to include garden property as a niche market, alongside golf property, beach property and sporting property.
However surprising, it is a fact that an ever-growing percentage of the world's population is infatuated with gardens. People want to own garden property, enjoy holiday property with good gardens, stay in hotels with good gardens and spend their days making visits to historic properties with famous gardens. There may be a middle-section of a city's population (the appartment dwellers) who can live without gardens but the poor cannot live without growing their own food and the rich refuse to buy homes without gardens. Garden ownership is a highly income-elastic good. As people become wealthier they will demand well-made gardens.
New garden property pages have been added on: East Europe, North America, South and East Asia.
Gardenvisit.com's Garden Real Estate Section has been expanded to include Australia and New Zealand. These are great countries for outdoor living and garden design. Buyer's Agents (also called Buyers Advocates) may give you some help but, as in other countries, Real Estate Agents neglect the importance of gardens. A garden can be made almost anywhere but its a lot easier if there is existing vegetation, good soil, interesting views and a favourable microclimate. With an existing stream or pool it is hard to go wrong.
The Gardenvisit.com Garden Hotels Section now extends to cover Scotland, Ireland and Wales, as well as England. Each of these countries has a distinct tradition of garden design (see lists in Garden Finder) and the interest of garden visitors in finding garden hotels is likely to be as strong as in England.
Gardenvisit.com's Garden Real Estate Section has been expanded to 10 pages dealing with the types of garden property you can expect to find in different parts of North Europe. As before, the focus is on answering the question: 'Can you help me find a house with a good garden?'
Gardenvisit.com has launched a new property section dealing with Garden Property. The Section began as a single page, designed to answer a question from a reader 'Can you help me find a house with a good garden in England?'
Gardenvisit.com has published a Garden Hotels section for England. The aim is to assist garden visitors in finding hotels with gardens to stay in. Some hotels provide information for their guests on visiting gardens of interest in the area where the hotal is located and we hope this will become increasingly popular. This section will grow to cover the rest of the UK in the next year and, we hope, in time the rest of the world.
Gardenvisit.com has a new Landscape Architecture Section. It includes the full online text of Tom Turner's popular book on City as landscape, the Complete Works of Humphry Repton and Andrew Jackson Downing's pioneering A treatise on the theory and practice of landscape gardening, adapted to North America,1841. The section is designed to provide information for professional designers. It is signified by a different colour (grey) on the topbar and contains
relevant information for both landscape architects and garden designers. In terms of technical skill (in design, drawing, planting, construction, CAD etc) we see landscape and garden design as closely related professional activities. The most significant difference is that garden designers work mostly for private clients (home owners) and landscape architects work mostly for public clients (public companies and public bodies).
The Landscape Architecture Section begins with the statement that "Landscape
architecture is one of the world's most important professions" and
explains that neglecting the architectures of the world's fast-changing
landscapes will result in endless highways lined with endless blocks of
endless tedium - dreary expanses of housing, industry, forestry and
agriculture - our natural landscapes buried under repetitive building
and planting. Instead, we should design the architecture of 'new
landscapes for our new lives' (Fairbrother, N.1970). The engineering of
anti-landscapes should make way for an enlightened landscape
architecture. With the death of engineer's modernism, it is time for a
twenty-first century approach.
The best book ever written on the history of garden design is now available online - in the Gardenvisit.com website. Marie Luise Gothein's History of Garden Art was first published in German 1913 and re-published in English in 1928 (with the addition of chapters 17 on modern gardens in England and Chapter 18 on modern gardens in America . The English edition was in two volumes with 1000 pages and 1000+ material. The advantages of the online edition over the print edition are (1) its free to the user (2) it allows full-text searching (3) it has been provided with subheadings which make the text easier to read and easier to navigage (4) there are hyperlinks to descriptions of the gardens mentioned in the text by Gothein.
Gardenvisit.com website is launched as an information resource for UK garden visitors.