Information & FAQs

Gardens & attractions

Not only is Britain a gardening nation, but our gardeners are keen to welcome visitors too.

Some 3,000–4,000 gardens will open their gates to the public annually. Some for charity, for just an afternoon, and some every day of the year, and we take you to a selection of the finest gardens in each tour area.

Ordinarily, we don’t guide you around the gardens, although at some gardens, we do arrange for a private guided tour or an introductory talk – often by the owner or head gardener – and on some tours we visit gardens not generally open to the public.

Wherever we are, we will rarely be far from other attractions, especially our history and heritage, and we use these nearby attractions as a backdrop to our day-to-day itinerary, stopping as our pleasure takes us.

Your group

We limit group sizes to a maximum of twelve and encourage a multi-national mix of garden lovers.

A few customers are as young as their early twenties and a few are in their late eighties, but it’s more likely that the mean age of your group is mid-sixties-to-mid-seventies.

To date, we have been joined by customers from Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and most of the states of the United States of America.

English is spoken in a range of styles, and with great humour!

Suitability

All our tours involve getting into and out of the minibus and for safety reasons alone, you must be able to do this independently.

On our garden tours, you can do as little or as much as you like, and at your own pace – you can sit and read a book or explore every path in the garden.

On our other tours – and on our walking tours in particular – a suitable level of fitness is required and this may vary from tour to tour.

If you are concerned as to the suitability of a tour or whether, or not, your fitness and mobility may impair either you or the group, please discuss this with us before you reserve your places.

Our tours have no upper age limit, although there is a lower age limit of 16.

Single travellers

We welcome single travellers and want to assure single female travellers that women make up some 70-80% of our customers. Typically women travel with us on their own or accompanied by their sister, their friends, their mother, their daughter or their colleagues.

Sleeping & eating

Your comfort, together with your safety, is our chief priority and we go to great lengths in choosing where to stay. The majority of our hotels are listed in the Good Hotel Guide and many of them are hotels to which we return, year-after-year, some for a dozen years or more. We seek out comfortable independent establishments with character, friendly service and a good kitchen. When considering a new hotel, we visit it first.

We enjoy good food too, and choose hotels with reputable kitchens. When we dine out, we do so at some of the very best local restaurants and pubs, often award-winning establishments, preparing locally-sourced fresh produce and cooking it superbly.

Meals

Dinner is usually taken à la carte, though occasionally in Britain and commonly in France dinner may be from a limited-choice menu.

Breakfast is a cooked 'full English or Scottish or Welsh' affair complemented by a lighter 'continental' breakfast, which varies from hotel-to-hotel.

Breakfasts in France are 'continental', as one would expect them to be.

Dietary requirements

We have, to date, successfully accommodated all our customers' dietary requirements – from vegan to gluten-free and much else besides – and we do not suppose requests will ever be a problem.

Accommodation

Bedrooms vary in size, sometimes considerably so – not only from establishment-to-establishment, but within the same establishment – and what may be considered 'large' in one place may be considered 'small' in another. It is all relative.

Double and twin rooms

In British English we say 'double-room' to mean one room with one bed for two people and 'twin-room' to mean one room with two single beds – please bear this in mind when booking!

Rooms, bathrooms & stairs

We confirm room reservations to our hoteliers, as bookings arrive, and they allocate rooms in the order in which they receive them, with the better rooms allocated first.

Your room will be en suite, typically a bathroom with a bath and a shower over it, though occasionally there may be just a shower or, exceptionally, just a bath.

We also ask to be accommodated on the ground or first floor, unless there is a decent working lift, but this is not always possible.

Let us know

If the nature of your room, your bathroom or the number of stairs to your room is material to your booking, then please let us know beforehand.

What to bring

We strongly recommend that you bring a good waterproof and windproof jacket and a pair of sturdy boots or shoes, remembering that, even at the height of a British summer, it can be wet and windy and, in any case, there will doubtless be gardens where it will be wet and uneven underfoot.

You may like to consider a hat, scarf and gloves, for tours in April, early May and September – and all tours in Scotland, whatever the month!

Otherwise comfortable clothes, layers that you can pull on and strip off, seem to work best for walking around the gardens, exploring villages and getting into and out of the minibus.

Dress at dinner

On those days when we dine-out, without first returning to our hotel, our casual day dress will be fine, though a spare pair of shoes (left in the bus for the day) won't go amiss.

When we dine-in, at our hotel, it is fair to say that you will feel comfortable dressed 'smart casual' to 'as smart as you like'!

Walking tours

There are specific requirements for walking tours, and these requirements will be set out in the tour itinerary.

Luggage allowance

Unless we say otherwise, we must ask that you restrict your luggage to one main suitcase and one smaller bag, a day pack or similar, per person, with no piece of luggage being taller than 80cm (32in) (including wheels and handles etc) or wider than 50cm (20in), and not exceeding a maximum weight of 23kg (50lb).

And please note that, whilst we will always ask that hotel staff assist you with your luggage, we cannot guarantee it, and you must be comfortable taking your luggage up one flight of stairs.

Britain

VisitBritain, our national tourism agency, has an excellent website with pages devoted to practical information and health and personal security.

Pounds & pounds

It may be as well to say that we use Pounds Sterling, and not Euros or Dollars, and that, whilst most of the places we visit do take credit cards and bank debit cards, we recommend that you have a little cash for those smaller places that do not take cards. There will be opportunities to get cash from ATMs or High Street banks during the tour.

And, although we may shop for kilos of cheese, metres of fabric and litres of fuel, we still drive in miles per hour and drink pints of beer – we remain a metrically challenged nation!

Weather

We recommend the BBC website for weather forecasts (click here and enter a place name in the Find a Forecast box).

In Britain, most of us talk about temperatures in degrees Centigrade, and not degrees Fahrenheit, but if you are a Fahrenheit person, then remember that 61°F is approximately 16°C (just transpose the numbers) and, likewise, 82°F is approximately 28°C and this is, broadly speaking, the range of British summer temperatures.

Communications

Please check that your mobile phone will work in the United Kingdom.

Travel

The joining instructions for each tour are outlined in the first day's itinerary, with any particular information in the ‘Additionally’ section towards the bottom of the tour page. The precise arrangements – the exact time – will be confirmed to you by email, a week or so before the tour.

Insurance

We require you to have adequate holiday/trip insurance, including, if necessary, Personal Liability Insurance, Medical Insurance, Repatriation Insurance and Holiday/Trip Cancellation Insurance (if you have to cancel at the last minute).

We do not insist on proof of your insurance, but we do presume that you will have it.

We do not sell insurance.

European Health Insurance Card (EHIC)

If you are eligible for an EHIC, then please ensure that you have one and that you bring it with you.

Travel assistance

If you require assistance with your arrangements in Britain – especially if you are arriving before the start of the tour or staying on in Britain after the tour – we will help you, where we can, with such arrangements, but please remember that we are not travel agents and we will make a reasonable charge for doing so.

Airports & meeting points

We do not collect customers from airport terminal forecourts, nor do we collect from anywhere within either Heathrow Airport or Gatwick Airport (save only when you are a group arriving together).

Our principal meeting points are:

• the Heathrow Sheraton Hotel, immediately north of Terminal 5, Heathrow Airport for most tours in southern England

• Ashtree House Hotel, Paisley (some 10 minutes by taxi from Glasgow Airport), for tours starting from Glasgow

• the Hampton by Hilton Edinburgh Airport hotel, for tours starting in Edinburgh

• Manchester Airport, at a location yet to be decided

We may add additional meeting points.

Long-haul flights

If you are planning to join one of our tours – and you are flying a considerable distance to do so – then please check with us that the tour has space for you, before you book your flights, and check with us too, that your proposed flight arrival and departure times are compatible with the tour.

If you are flying long-haul, please also consider the considerable benefits of arriving at least the day before the tour starts, so that you are refreshed from your long flight, from the start.

Airline baggage allowances

Finally, if you are flying long-haul into Britain and then intend to fly elsewhere, short-haul, especially with one of the many low-fare airlines, please check your baggage allowance on all your flights.

Our minibus

The current minibus is a March 2024 registered white Ford Transit 'Trend' high-roof, 17-seat, long wheelbase minibus which, with a luggage rack replacing the rear row of four seats, gives us our maximum capacity of 12 passengers plus driver.

It is registered and licensed as a Public Service Vehicle, fitted with an electronic tachograph and subject to eight-weekly safety checks and an enhanced annual inspection. Willingly we comply fully with current Drivers' Hours Regulations, which govern the driving hours and rest hours of all drivers of Public Service Vehicles throughout the EU.

No driving days

Notwithstanding Britain’s departure from the EU, we are, until the law changes, still governed by EU Drivers' Hours Regulations and, amongst many other matters, the regulations prohibit drivers from driving for more than six consecutive days.

On tours lasting longer than six days, there will be a day on which we will may hire transport for the day, or it will be a free day like, for instance, the free day we have in Bath, on the Cornwall & Bath tour, or a day, like in the Lake District or in Argyll, where we leave roads behind us and take to the water.

Website photographs

The vast majority of photographs on this website are customers' photographs, the majority from a handful of talented customers whom we would like to thank for their significant contribution to the website.

We would also like to thank the garden and other property owners for their permission to use images of their gardens and other properties.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge the contribution made by a band of selfless photographers, worldwide, who publish their photographs on Creative Commons and other platforms for us all to use. Thank you.