Visitors

To make the gardens a success, we will need to welcome visitors to our community.

There are several reasons why this is important.

• The best way to promote our new way of living and of growing food, will be to show visitors how beautiful it is, and share our successes and our challenges, to inspire and teach them about the Gardens of Love.
• We can do this by creating a place where people come for their enjoyment and to be inspired. A place to relax and have fun, to go for walks in the forest and over the fields, or to swim in the lakes, for children to play and explore.
• We can show what is possible: how a farm can be made into a flourishing eco tourist attraction, and still produce more food than before.
• Part of the goal of the Gardens of Love is to create a place where we can heal and learn more about ourselves, so that we can do what we each came to do on Earth. We may start working on ourselves as Gardians and support our neighbours in their development if they wish to. Then we can take this further and create a place where our visitors can come to heal and recuperate. The Gardens of Love community can become a place of personal development and for doing courses to learn new skills.
• There is also another important reason to invite visitors to our community. In the Ringing Cedars books the picture is painted of Gardians becoming well off by selling what they produce on the land. It is unlikely this will work for us:
  • The price people are used to pay for their fruit and vegetables barely covers the cost of producing it;
  • We could take the excess produce to London, to farmers’ markets, shops and restaurants,but this would mean a lot of traveling and time spent away from the Gardens and the community.

Our solution is to invite visitors, and offer them food from café and restaurant as well as our shop; to further create an income by giving the courses and running the facilities that will draw people to our community.

The visitors would be welcome in our community areas. The individual gardens are better kept as private spaces. Gardians could offer tours for visitors in their private gardens from time to time, when this is suitable for them.

As long as we create ecologically sustainable facilities, inviting visitors can help our community to become sustainable economically, as well as socially and ecologically.

By creating a quite luxurious holiday destination we can attract ‘glamping’ visitors, who can afford to pay for the luxury options on offer and may be able to invest in the project.

At the same time, we can include others, who may not be so well off, by offering free activities with the possibility to donate to the project.

Together we can create a set of reasons to come to our communities for people with very diverse backgrounds, to create interest in what we are doing, to help inspire and heal our guests and to raise funds to expand on to more land in future.