How to modernise your garden club – We ran a zoom workshop last year to help clubs who wish to re-invigorate their groups. We expected about 25 people to turnup but we had nearly 300, so it overwhelmed our system. Once we are in a position to manage the quanties, we will be re-running the workshops with more dates. Please ensure you have joined the mailist to ensure you are informed of when they get scheduled.

Below you will see a range of chapters/topics that we will be planning to run.

  • What’s wrong with garden clubs, why are they in decline
  • What’s the future of garden clubs. Do we need speakers for every meeting.
  • Making the treasury role easier. How to use a card payment machine, changing your membership structure.
  • Speaker secretary role. Several items to transform how this works
  • How to get a free website using e-voice, or the common known providers like GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, plus how to get your own personal domain address
  • Idiots guide to using a teeny weeny bit of technology. Things like setting up a generic email address, using W3W, WhatsApp etc.
  • Revolutionise the membership activities by using a membership system
  • How to create an automatic email newsletter that’s GDPR compliant
  • Nayslayers – Probably the most important chapter. How to deal with the very few individuals who don’t want any change and will prevent you from modernising your club to the point of destruction. I will cover my unfortunate experiences and exampls with our local county federation which could be likened to the post office scandal.
  • Shows. Are they still relevant for our generation.
  • My worst bug bears about garden clubs.
  • Charter for a new way forward for garden clubs

You can hear the question Indy asked the BBC Gardeners Question Time panel, click the play button below

Interesting article from Country Gardener magazine Aug 2025