Feature Week

Gardens and
Garden Photography

For the plant, garden and wildlife photographer gardens provide a wealth of opportunities, but the scope is often far wider with architecture, sculptures, views and more available. For others a garden is not the subject of the photograph but the background within it, where they are looking at portraits or the recording of a special occasion or event. From this you can see that there are very few photographers, where garden photography would have no relevance.

The range of skills and experience that can be gained in garden photography, includes nearly all that could be obtained anywhere. It can be achieved with the simplest of equipment, but the opportunities and scope increases as the range of equipment and skills increase.

Some of this perhaps can be achieved in your own garden or those of relations and friends, but with several thousand gardens available to you across the UK, there is no shortage of opportunities. We have undertaken a project to list gardens open to the public on a regular basis, and this index contains over 850 gardens, indexed both by name and by county, and having links to allow you to get in many cases several different sets of details on each. We also identified a number of large groups of gardens that are open a few days each year in aid of charity, and identified how you find the information on these for the area or topic of choice.

In addition to this, and in many cases outside our indexing are municipal or town gardens, many of which offer a range of opportunities and settings. Just about every reasonable sized town has at least one and may have a wide selection. As well as this, as you travel around the country you will see many private gardens, generally not open to the public, and in many parts of the country there are also 'best garden' type schemes and awards, as well as best village, town etc. Most owners if approached by a photographer for permission to photograph within their garden, will be delighted that you have shown an interest, but if you are unlucky enough to meet one who does not, then you have no need to despair as there are so many others that will.

Rather than list here all the new articles we have on Garden Photography this week we have included it as a summary together with details of other information to look at below.

NEW Magazine area added to Reference Section

A new feature we are introducing this week is the addition of a section on relevant magazines. This has two objectives, firstly to allow you to discover the range of magazines  relevant to this topic, that you may find interesting either for an occasional edition or as a subscriber and secondly for those with skills and confidence to identify magazines to submit both articles and photos to.  When we cover each special topic we will be identifying the magazines relating to this at the time, and as you may now expect we are also building these into an indexed section both by name and alphabetically indexed. You will find this new section under reference, within the topic section or as a button when you select the reference button.

• Garden Photography - Introduction to Garden Photography. 

• Essential Skills for Garden Photography - A review of some photographic skills you may need to get the picture you are looking for.

• Garden Photography Essential Techniques - Some techniques that will both assist you to get more consistent results and a number of suggestions that may help.

• Importance of Timing - We all know about seasons, but timing in terms of time or day and in other ways can affect the images we get.

• Making the Most of Light - Using normal daylight and then looking at methods of enhancing it like the use of fill flash, using reflectors and more. 

• Limitations When Photographing Gardens - Gardens come in all shapes and sizes, and being outside you have variable weather and lighting conditions to contend with. Here is an idea of some of the limitations you might come across and how to resolve them.

• Wildlife in Your Garden - As well as floral and vegetable displays gardens are also a haven for wildlife.

• Types and Styles of Gardens - There are many different types and styles of gardens and many of them are included within the various ones listed in our indexes. This gives a list of the different ones and explains some of the more popular.

• Gardens Open to the Public - Taking a look at those gardens which open to the public to raise money for charity.

• Uses of Garden Photography - Looking at how we can use our garden and plant photographs also pointing out some ways we could earn an income from them.

Gardens in the UK - This is the garden photography index and has been updated to include all this weeks new entries. It allows you access to most of the items mentioned this week both articles and all garden indexes. There is a similar page to this which is the Topic Index to Gardens and Garden Photography and this also contains links to all garden locations written up by us.

Gardens of Wales  - an alpha listing of those gardens we have been able to identify so far.

Gardens of Scotland - and alpha listing of these gardens we have been able to identify so far.

Gardens of England by County, the following is a list of all those counties which have been indexed so far.

Benmore Botanic Gardens, Argyll, Scotland  

Coton Manor Gardens, Northamptonshire  

Dawyck Botanic Garden, Peebles, Scotland  

Exbury Gardens, Hampshire

Hidecote Manor Gardens, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire  

Kew Gardens, Richmond, Surrey

Kiftsgate Court Gardens, Chipping Campden, Glos  

Logan Botanic Garden, Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland   

Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall  

National Botanic Gardens of Wales, Carmarthenshire

RHS Wisley, Surrey  

RHS Rosemoor, Devon   

RHS Hyde Hall, Essex  

RHS Harlow Carr, North Yorkshire   

Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh, Scotland  

The Eden Project, Cornwall