A Garden Conservancy pilot project with Wildr Places offers another way to explore the plants, habitat, and ideas behind select Open Days gardens.
Every Open Day visitor knows the feeling. You spot a noteworthy plant, a pollinator-filled border, or a clever design idea and think: "How will I remember this when I get home?"
Maybe it is the name of a plant you have never seen before. A combination you want to remember. A strategy for attracting bees and butterflies. Or an artistic arrangement that could work in your garden. Open Days offer boundless opportunities to gather ideas and inspiration.
This fall, the Garden Conservancy is piloting a new partnership with Wildr Places, an app that helps people explore the plants, habitat features, and ecology of gardens they visit. Select Open Days gardens will now offer visitors a way to continue learning long after they leave the garden gate.
At participating Open Days, you will be able to scan a QR code and open that garden’s Wildr Place in the app. There, you can explore the garden plant list, photos, habitat features, and other details shared by the gardener.
So when you find yourself asking, "What was that plant?", you will have somewhere to look. you will have somewhere to look.
From Visiting a Garden to Learning from It
For more than 30 years, Open Days has opened the gates to remarkable private gardens across the country. Part of the magic is getting to see how another gardener thinks: what they grow, what they notice, what they value, and how a garden changes over time.
Those ideas rarely fit neatly into a single visit.
A plant you notice in September might send you searching for something to add to your own garden next spring. A meadow might change the way you think about your lawn. Seeing birds feeding among native plants might make you wonder what your own Place could provide for wildlife.
Wildr Places gives participating gardeners another way to share those details, and visitors another way to keep exploring them.
Look Closer at Your Own Place
You can also create a Place of your own on Wildr.
Add the plants growing in your garden, record habitat features, keep track of what you are doing for wildlife, and discover native plants and other Places for inspiration.
The idea is not to recreate the garden you visited. Gardens are shaped by their own soil, climate, history, people, and place.
Instead, look for the gardening approaches you can carry home and ways to adapt them to suit your own space.
What is blooming there when little else is? Which plants are alive with insects? Where is water collecting or soaking into the soil? What has the gardener chosen to leave alone? What could work where you live?
The more closely we look at gardens, the more there is to discover.
Find a Participating Open Day
The Garden Conservancy and Wildr Places are beginning with a small group of fall Open Days gardens and will use the pilot to learn how visitors and garden hosts use these new resources.
If you visit a participating garden this fall, look for the Wildr Places QR code during your Open Day.
Scan it, explore the garden, and take even more inspiration home with you.
