Green with garden envy? Just rent one...
If you have no room for a reunion with family and friends, simply hire a bigger patch, advises Helen Chandler-Wilde
From tomorrow, groups of up to six can socialise outdoors. Which is all well and good, but means the local green space will be full to bursting – and what if you haven’t quite got around to readying your garden for nonimmediate family members yet?
Well, there’s a thoroughly 21stcentury answer: hire somebody else’s back garden for the day.
Borrow My Garden (borrowmygarden.co.uk) enables you to book outdoor spaces, usually picturesque wildflower meadows and vast castle grounds, but the site has a few ordinary, Rule of Six-sized back gardens on its books, too. In February, after Boris Johnson unveiled his roadmap out of lockdown, the site saw 250 per cent more traffic than their busiest day last year.
“Everyone’s been locked down over Christmas and new year, and people want more than anything to see their friends and family outside,” says Claire Lee, the site’s co-founder. For a private reunion in a decent amount of outdoor space – away from the world and his wife down the park – people are willing to pay frankly eye-watering sums.
To take the concept for a spin, I borrowed a garden for a morning. Down a perfectly normal suburban street in Woking, Surrey, is Woodhaven (woodhaven.space), the home of Nicky Yates, her husband and two teenage children. It’s a large newbuild house with a sizeable garden that, in pre-lockdown times, they let out for barbecues and birthday parties for people who don’t have a large enough outdoor space of their own. She has seen a buzz of bookings this spring for family parties. “I’ve had loads of inquiries,” she says. “In the spring, we’ve got an engagement party, three 30ths and several weddings.”
Having a family lunch there would be nothing like renting out a huge professional events space, more like borrowing the garden of a friend – much like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did for their recent interview with Oprah Winfrey. Slightly less friendly is the price: from £1,200 a day for use of the garden and, when restrictions allow, the downstairs rooms of the house (kitchen included).
Admittedly, it is a lovely spot to spend a day: well-trimmed flower beds, a neat lawn, and even a small swimming pool tucked into an outbuilding. I wonder whether Yates minds having strangers trampling her back garden? “I love the buzz of having people here all the time,” she says, “I’m a born entertainer.” For an additional fee, you can even ask her to cook, too – less Borrow My Garden, more Borrow My Entire Family.
Ellie George used the Yates’s garden for a family birthday party with about 20 guests last summer, and loved it. “We don’t have a garden like that in our family. It had more space – and was better catered – than I could ever manage,” she says.
With the disappointing news that holidays in Europe look uncertain this summer, you could even rent a particularly large garden and stay for the week. Tony Hill has welcomed happy campers to his eight-acre garden in Kent (borrowmygarden.co. uk/listing/private-parkland-stylegardens), which he began renting out after the pandemic put a cork in his motorsport events business.
Hill believes many of his customers over the past 12 months have been town and city dwellers who have been starved of green space during the pandemic and are fed up with how busy municipal parks have got. “The people we have tend to live in towns and don’t have their own big gardens,” he says. “Here, [the lockdown] hasn’t been bad. But for people in a flat, it must be horrendous,” he says.
Even those with gardens of their own have got in on the renting rush, hiring luxury items to pep it up a bit in lieu of a summer holiday.
Stephen Brown, owner of Suffolk Hot Tubs (suffolkhottubs.co.uk), says his rental business has never been as busy. “It’s been a bit overwhelming, to be honest. We’ve been fully booked from January until April.”
For £299, you can rent a fourseater tub for a week – far cheaper than the £4,000 starting price to buy one. There are other objects for rent that will smarten up the garden. For an outdoor dinner party on a cool night, a patio heater might be a good idea; an internet search reveals hire starting from £30 for a day.
With garden furniture retailers offering lead times of up to eight weeks, renting outdoor chairs and tables might be your only option this Easter. If you’ve got a barbecue coming up but nowhere for people to sit, furniturehireuk.com will lease trestle tables, benches and bean bags – enough to cater for six – from £86.
Will this fashion for renting gardens, and for hiring extras to make your own existing space more comfortable, continue? Lee thinks it will be hard to give up. “Put it this way,” she says, “everyone who rents a garden from me signs up to do it all again the next year.”