Unfortunately our annual Marchington Open Gardens will not be happening this year due to COVID-19, however the gardens are looking beautiful and as it's such a popular event, we've decided to host a virtual gardens experience! Through viewing the virtual gardens, we hope you will kindly make a donation through this page or the shop.

The Open gardens raised nearly £4,000 last year - a massive amount that kept the shop afloat. Any donations this year will enable the community shop to stay open and continue to serve the community.

Our open gardens history:

Our first open gardens in 2015 was organised to raise some money for our Community Shop which opened in 2010. We needed a new freezer costing over a £1,000 and were forced to try to raise some funds. We were both shocked and thrilled by how successful the event was both as a fund raiser and as a lovely event which could be enjoyed by the whole community and visitors. We hadn’t necessarily planned to do the event annually but through the success it has now become a much anticipated event in the Marchington calendar. This led to the whole village being inspired to do their own events and the Marchington festival weekend grew from this. The whole weekend is amazing with all societies running their own events for their own benefit including church flower festival, art and photography exhibition, refreshments, scarecrows and many many more.

Each year since 2015 we have run the open gardens event with some 12-18 gardens open to view for two days attracting over 500 visitors during the weekend. During the open gardens, funds for the shop are raised through some gardens selling refreshments such as delicious cream teas or ploughman’s platters and some grow plants in the weeks leading to the event for visitors to buy. Last year the funds were almost £4,000 and this has become essential to supporting our Community Shop. During the past months it has become clear how important it is to keep our village shop as we’ve been able to stay open for a few hours per day and take and deliver orders to the vulnerable and self isolating residents in the local community.

Sadly we cannot hold the event this year due to the pandemic but we’ve got our heads together to make a virtual open gardens video by asking all previous garden owners to send us some video clips or photos. We hope you can sit back an enjoy this and look forward to the real thing in 2021!!

Video available here: http://www.marchingtonshop.co.uk/

Thank you,

Marchington Shop Board & Open Gardens Committee