Laura loves a Glorious Garden!
All this week Good Morning Britain are live at a different Glorious Garden everyday after you sent in hundreds of pictures in offering us the chance to broadcast the weather live from your garden or community space. Thanks for making the effort - sorry we can’t come to them all - but don’t forget you can see some of them here in our gallery!
Blog: Monday's seaside sanctuary...
What a lovely sunny morning to start with! It hit 23 degrees in pretty coastal town of Seaford, East Sussex on Monday. Geoff Stonebanks, an early retiree from North London let us into his stunning ‘Seaside Sanctuary’, split into several garden rooms. You couldn’t quite see on the show but there is nothing between his house and the sea about a quarter of a mile away so the views were stunning! It is a garden FULL heavy and dense plants and flowers with wooden and rusted metal features with severn seating areas placed across the grounds. I couldn’t believe it when he told me there were over 500 plants! There was no lawn or exposed soil so it created an illusion of a much bigger garden (back garden 82 feet by 48 feet dimensions and front 29.5 feet by 31 feet.)
All morning both on and off screen Geoff had an amazing bout of energy - he was up at 0430 making bacon sarnies for the crew and still being accommodating until we left. The passion he has for gardening runs in the family but he never had a big enough garden before to get stuck in (you may have seen him watering plants in one of the shots!) is the reason why he actually started letting in members of the public into his garden over four years ago in the summer months - when his friends and family said he should share it with others. A decision he didn’t regret. 70 visits later, with over 8600 people, he still takes great pleasure in welcoming others into his home.
As you may have heard on the show today, Geoff has raised over £36,000 for different charities by opening up his garden - notably for the National Garden Scheme - where people kindly open up their gardens in certain months for charity. At least 80p of every pound goes directly to the charity so it’s certainly a worthwhile cause. The scheme has raised a whopping 42.5 million pounds for charity nationwide.
When reading about some of the visitors on his website, I can see why one person said: “It's the most staggering and inspirational garden to show what can be achieved without possessing acres but having an eye, imagination, a love of plants and great energy and enthusiasm. This is a real must see garden'. It certainly was!
Just one more thing - the GMB Gnomes seem to enjoy their morning amongst friends (16 of them to be exact!) - and although it’s sad to say goodbye to my own personal Gnome, I felt I had to offer it to him seeing as she will be in good company.
Take a look at Geoff's top gardening tips
Find out more about the garden Laura visited today