GARDENS OF EDEN

"Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made by singing, 'Oh, how beautiful', and sitting in the shade." Kipling was right, of course. Yet that's just what I'm doing as I write, in the scrawny patch of uneven grass and ill-dug flowerbeds that I call my garden. Because I know that elsewhere thousands of people are doing the job for me. Like the village cricket that I wrote about last week, Britain's gardens are one of this country's great sights--which few foreign visitors will ever set eyes on.

Yet they could. Of course, there are the grand National Trust houses and their gardens, open most months of spring and summer. But there's another, more personal way.

Find Midhurst on your road atlas of Britain. Then on a larger-scale map search a few miles west for Hammerwood House. This modest, privately owned country house on Sussex lane is the sort of place where Jane Austen's squires used to live (unlike the ducal palaces in which television producers locate them). Exceptionally handsome, wisteria- and rose-clad, the house is little known. Few people who live within 15 miles of it have even heard of it.

But at this season its garden is a miracle of azaleas and rhododendrons, of bluebells, clipped yew hedges, rare trees and swathes of immaculately mown lawn. A couple of miles away, up a still narrower lane, lies Malt House, probably much older and even less grand. Its garden, much of it on a steep hillside, is a crowded, brilliant patchwork of umpteen varieties of azalea and rhododendrons, with one huge purple-leaved Japanese maple among the mostly native trees.

My wife and I visited both these gardens last weekend. We were dazzled. Neither, of course, is near the scale or magnificence of Edmund de Rothschild's world-famous rhododendrons at Exbury, south of Southampton. But each was enough for an afternoon, and both have something else: they are ordinarily private gardens, maintained by the residents of the property.

They are among 3,500 gardens in England and Wales (the Scots, of course, have their own scheme) open to visitors for a day or two each year under the aegis of the 80-year-old National Gardens Scheme. To find what is open where and when, search the website by county or postcode. Habitual garden-strollers use the NGS's annual directory. Selling 70,000 copies a year at £7.99 ($16) in even the most urban bookshops, it is by now so well-known that is called simply "The Yellow Book".

You'll pay around £3 a head for your visit. The money--some £40m of it since the scheme began, and well over £2m a year these days--goes via the NGS to charities, mostly concerned with nursing. Or, with NGS agreement, owners may set aside part of their takings for some local good cause. The gardens may be huge or tiny, of modern design or traditional. Your hosts may be the Earl and Countess of Portsmouth or, much more likely, plain Mr and Mrs John Smith. The tea and cake that many of them serve will come from the house kitchen, and may well be dispensed by the lady of the house herself, while her husband does the hard work of talking to visitors about his plants.

Your fellow-visitors, you'll find, are mostly pensioners; gardens don't offer the youthful thrills of sports cars, seduction or sand-castles. Alas, but it's not pure loss: old people don't scream and scramble or (on the whole) seduce all over other people's herbaceous borders, but they do like company. The pair who shared our tea-table at Hammerwood were just back from a holiday in Italy, which the husband had first visited, for rather different reasons, in 1943-1944. Not every casual acquaintance can tell you about the capture of Monte Cassino.

Nor often will you meet so many decades of varied expertise in one place. Many habitual garden visitors know a great deal about gardening and will be happy, as will your hosts, to share if you ask them. I go to other people's gardens simply to admire their beauty, but no doubt I could pick up many useful lessons for my own.

Such expertise would have well served the previous owner of my own garden, I realise, as I contemplate the sierras and canyons of the grass, I've inherited. There's a recipe, well known except to him, for making the perfect English lawn: dig your ground, level it, level it again, sow it, then roll, water, weed, rake and mow it for the next 150 years and you have one. That says something about the stability of British society still detectable beneath its garish excrescences. So do other people's private gardens.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)