Take A Tour Round the Beechgrove Garden (beechgrove.co.uk)

Member Name: HamishMacbeth

Product:	beechgrove.co.uk
Date:	08/08/01 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: a good site to back up the programe

Disadvantages: none

Well if you are not one of the lucky ones who can actually get to see the show in question, (opinion on its way hopefully) then you can still find out what its all about here. This site aims to work alongside The Beechgrove Garden series and give you a better look at the three-acre site on the outskirts of Aberdeen from which the programme is broadcast.

When you get to the home page you will find a brief introduction and five main categories to choose from.

Take the Garden Tour

Here we have a colour coded and numbered map of the garden as a whole, but it is split up into various different sections. The numbers correspond with the links below the map as a guide to what you may find in each different bit, so click on those and you will go to a picture of each one. You then get a choice between two sizes of picture to view; one being 44kb and the other is a panoramic view and is 384kb. They do tell you that the large one may take a minute or two to download but on my PC, which has a 56k modem using a trial version of IE6, it only took about 45seconds, so not too bad and it is worth the wait in any case. Along with the pictures you will have very detailed descriptions of what's planted in each garden and how it was all done.


Behind The Scenes


Not a great lot here, but you do get some mini -type of biographies of all the presenters of the show who are Jim McColl, Carole Baxter, Lesley Watson and Carolyn Spray, like what experience they have, qualifications, their main interests and other projects they have contributed during their careers. I found that quite interesting myself.

Fact sheets

This section holds all the fact sheets offered not only for the current series but also for the last six years worth, which is a fair, few at 26 sheets per series, over 150 I believe! You can browse through any of these and print out any that you want to keep for further use, so much easier and cheaper than se
nding off stamped addressed envelopes. That appeals to me a great deal being the old skinflint that I am .I have the page in my favourites list so that I can check them out whenever I please. Anyway each one will cover everything that was mentioned in the show, in greater detail and you can easily see what is in each one as you open them up, in a short summary down the left-hand side of the page of each one. You can click on these individual topics too if you don't want to read through the whole lot.


Links

Lots of useful links to other gardening sites, but not much else to say about this really. I've tried a few of them and they all seem to work perfectly, none of that 'error 404 not found' business anyway.

It's a pretty good site to go with the programme and there are a lot of photographs of the team in action and the projects they work on. A good deal of them give you a before and after shot too, so you can really see what a difference they have made overall.

The first time I looked at this site some months ago, there wasn't very much on it at all, just the garden tour and the links for the fact sheets but it has greatly improved and I think will improve even more with time. I hope you will take the time to give it a good look over.

Thanks for reading once again; I'll get back to you soon,

Hamish.

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