Four Seasons Garden

A garden like no other!





















Welcome to our ‘Four Seasons’ garden website

 
Never, even in our wildest dreams, did we imagine that a number of years after moving to Walsall our ¼ acre suburban garden would win two national gardening competitions, be featured in several television and radio programmes, be the subject of articles in magazines around the globe and welcome visitors from thirty-nine foreign countries! 

Although we have had no horticultural training, and are totally self taught, we believe we have created something very special.  

We have re-landscaped and planted our garden to be exciting in all four seasons. The garden is now used and enjoyed by our family and many visitors of all ages. 

We have derived immense pleasure from doing this huge project together without outside help. It has been very satisfying to use so many skills, and to have done every task ourselves, despite us both having had full time jobs until retirement in October 2009. 

All but one of all the plants in our garden have been planted by us. 









We really hope you will share some of the enjoyment, drama and fun we have had in creating our garden and photographing it throughout the seasons, and that the images convey some of the pleasures our garden has given to our family, friends and visitors.

Marie and Tony Newton
email: fourseasonsgarden@btinternet.com

Visiting us  - our garden no longer opens for members of the public to visit.

Our charity open days have always been very pleasant. It has been an honour to share our garden with so many enthusiastic visitors over many years. We are still gardening as passionately as ever. However, from 2023 onwards we discontinued opening our garden for public charity events. We realised that to continue our very busy open days into the years ahead would be increasingly unsustainable, and there was an increasing risk that, at some unpredictable time ahead, we might not be able to manage!

During the years 2006-2019 we very much enjoyed sharing our garden during charity open days. Since 2006 we have welcomed more than 15,706 visitors and raised over £52,498 for charities. Our main beneficiary has been the National Garden Scheme, which supports nursing charities. 

Please note:  We released this new, responsive, version of our website in September 2019.  
We apologise that some pages are not fully functioning at this stage because they are still under construction.  Our ongoing work continues to develop and complete these pages as soon as possible.

Our other website on Flickr has many more photos






National Garden Scheme

We have been a member of the 
National Garden Scheme (ngs) 
Since January 2008



Summary of our ‘Four Seasons’ garden achievements:


  1. 2006
    Winner Walsall in Bloom large rear garden category
  2. 2007
    Winner of the Daily Mail National Garden Competition 
  3. 2010
    Winner ‘Overall Gardener of the Year’ Garden News National Competition
    BBC2 Gardeners’ World half-hour television ‘special’, showing our garden in all four seasons
    Featured in magazines in China ‘Floral Time’ and Holland 'Home and Garden'
  4. 2011
    Radio 4 Gardeners’ Question Time feature  
    In one day, featured in Daily Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror and Telegraph
    Romanian magazine ‘Adevarul’
    BBC News photo gallery website “In pictures: Spectacular autumn colours in Walsall garden”
  5. 2012
    Featured in Garden Answers and  National Geographic Traveler (China) magazine
  6. 2013
    BBC Two Great British Garden Revival, trees episode.
    Featured in Garden News and also magazines in Greece, Romania and New Zealand
  7. 2014
    In one day, featured in Daily Mail, Times and Guardian.
    Featured in Russian magazine
  8. 2015
    6 January, ITV “Britain’s Best Back Gardens”. Ranked by Alan Titchmarsh as the winner of the TV episode: Impossible Gardens, by creating a showcase standard garden....... whatever the weather or season!
    Featured in the Times, Guardian, Mail Online, BBC1 Weather, BT Homepage, Radio Times, Aesculapius
  9. 2016
    Featured in Period Living and The English Garden
    Included as an inspirational garden in the introduction sequence of every episode of Charlie Dimmock’s Garden Rescue TV series 1, 2 and 3
  10.  2017
    Chosen as one of the Creative Black Country 100 Masters
    Featured as a show garden in Charlie Dimmock’s Garden Rescue TV series, episode 21 of series 2
    Featured in The English Garden, Period Living, RHS The Garden, Garden Answers 
    Groei and Bloei (Netherlands), Home and Garden (Netherlands), Garten Flora (Germany), National Wildlife Magazine Garden for Wildlife Book (USA) 
  11. 2018
    Autumn garden featured in RHS The Garden magazine (October) and Garden Answers magazine (November)
    In one day in October, featured in Guardian, i, Daily Mirror and on 14 newspaper websites and also newspaper publications around the UK. Also on BBC and BT websites
    ITV Central News Weather broadcast from garden  
  12. 2019
    Featured in The Guardian in January 
    Featured on Channel 5 News, Birmingham TV, ITV Central News,  drone footage x3, Radio WM, Daily Express (also teased on p1), Daily Mail, Guardian (double page), Mirror, Birmingham Mail, also Sun online, Daily Mail online, the i online, UKNews.Yahoo.com, BBC News: Week in Pictures: 19 - 25 October 2019 "A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week".
    During our two open garden weekends  in May and October we welcomed 1,520 visitors and raised £6,041 for charity. 
    Visitor numbers since 2006 have now reached over 15,706 people from 41 countries. Amount raised for charity more than £52,498.
    The total number of views of our garden photos on Flickr over the last 11 years exceed 15 million www.flickr.com/photos/fourseasonsgarden  
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