Virtual garden tours can teach, entertain, entice
When you can't visit in person, go online.
US Botanic Garden: Gardeners can visit virtually as well as in person.
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Travel is a great way to top off an education, especially for gardeners, who can pick up landscape and planting ideas and advice by seeing others' gardens. But they don't have to leave home to do it.
Virtual garden tours on the computer show actual gardens through video or still images, music, narration, and text. About the only thing missing is the scent of the flowers as they scroll by.
Some cybertours are informational, posted mainly to answer gardening questions. Others are designed to entertain, the digital equivalent of coffee table books or travelogues.
Still others are therapeutic and chatty, providing welcome bursts of color and commentary during the dark winter months.
Some are so enticing that viewers may be motivated to rise from their chairs and plan a real visit. Directions are included on most websites.
For the tours' sponsors and creators, there are many benefits. Educational institutions or public gardens use virtual tours to boost donations, enlist public support, or build enrollment.
Here's a partial listing of interesting virtual tours:
- For children: Cultivate this . Or tour this .
- Private gardens: A woman whose children call her "Moosey" has created an that helps move you through her New Zealand country garden. It also contains helpful sections about flower shows, containers, flower bulbs and more.
- Public gardens: . "We know a lot of people can't get here, but this might give them a sense of what they'd see if they could," says Christine Flanagan, a spokeswoman for the US Botanic Garden in Washington. "We plan to add a plant collection database with visuals in the near future."
A similar site is the at Kew, England.
- Tourist sites centered around prominent gardens: From your home you can visit virtually the French Impressionist painter at Giverny, in upper Normandy,where he drew much of his inspiration.
Or take a virtual tour of the 60 acres of the riverside in southeast England, a property once owned by King Henry VIII.
- about self-guided and virtual garden tours.
- Institutional/Educational: University of Florida at Fort Pierce.
"Virtual tours and virtual labs are something that is becoming more and more necessary at the University of Florida as we are delivering many courses via distance education," says Sandra Wilson of the university's Department of Environmental Horticulture.
"I teach courses to students located throughout the state. The virtual garden tour brings the gardens to them, as it is impossible for most students to travel here."
See also the . That brings you a six-minute virtual tour plus garden overview and garden detail tours.
Or enjoy a virtual walk through the .
"Aside from teaching, it seems like virtual tours are commonly used now by Realtors, bed and breakfasts, and others," Ms. Wilson says.