GARDENS TO VISIT

ost gardens are opening with a combination of booked tickets or tickets on the gate; to book and for further details of all open gardens, visit ngs.org.uk.

BYWAYS 7a Brookfield Avenue, Brookside, nr Chesterfield, Derbyshire S40 3NX

Byways is an award-winning garden where late-summer perennials and annuals come together with perennial grasses in a memorable display. The warm shades of monarda, helenium and echinacea mix with frothy Stipa gigantea and other grasses.

There are containers filled with luxuriant fuchsias and pelargoniums and the greenhouse reveals a collection of regal pelargoniums. One striking feature is the flight of stone steps with ascending pots of fuchsias on one side and rockeries with alpines on both sides. There are extensive collections of hostas and acers, but throughout both the back and front gardens it is the dense richness of planting that is most striking.

Open today and tomorrow, 11.30am4.30pm, £3.50, children free

LAKE END HOUSE Mill Lane, Woburn Sands, Bedfordshire MK17 8SP

A large three-acre lake dug in a brownfield site provides a wonderful watery centrepiece for this extensive modern garden, which combines liberating open landscape with areas of fine detail and character.

The extensive modern house (not open) overlooks the lake, while on its other side there is a richly ornamented garden with a distinctively Japanese style, both in the buildings, which include a teahouse and red wooden bridge, and in the cloud-pruned shapes of evergreen trees and shrubs, small