Text 1: Fourteen gardens and a lot of cake, by Clare Ashbury

An original contemporary online feature.

For one weekend every June, the village of Upper Haddon opens its garden gates. This year fourteen households took part, and more than 700 visitors paid £6 each to wander from plot to plot with a map and a programme.

The variety was the joy of it. Retired postman Keith Bolland grows nothing but dahlias, 140 varieties of them, and stood beside his beds answering questions for two days without a break. ‘I’ve been planning this since October,’ he said. ‘You want it perfect when people come.’ Two doors down, a young couple had turned their whole lawn into a wildflower meadow, buzzing with bees, and in a tiny terrace courtyard on Mill Lane, Rosa Fenn had squeezed in forty pots of herbs, tomatoes and chillies.

Visitors swapped tips and cuttings across garden walls, and several gardeners admitted they had been up at five weeding before the gates opened. ‘It’s a bit like having the whole village round for tea,’ said Rosa.

There was tea too, and a great deal of cake, served in the village hall by the Women’s Institute. Altogether the weekend raised £4,800 for the local hospice, and the organisers have already been asked by three more households if they can join next year.

Text 2: An afternoon at Heys Hall, by Dorothea Linnell

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1876, a young woman staying with her aunt in a Lancashire mill town describes to her sister the day a mill owner opened his private gardens to the families who worked in his mill.

My dear Araminta, You will laugh when I tell you that the great event of our week has been a garden. Every July Mr Gledhill throws open the grounds of Heys Hall to the people of his mill, and this year Aunt took me to help pour the tea.

They came up the drive at two o’clock, four hundred of them, the women in their best shawls and the men scrubbed until their faces shone. Most of them, Aunt says, never see a flower from one year’s end to the next, for the streets about the mill have not so much as a window box. You should have seen them in the palm house, which is as high as a chapel. A little girl stood under the great tree fern with her mouth open as though she were in church. A banana plant has fruited this summer, and Mr Dorrance, the head gardener, stood beside it all afternoon, telling everyone that it was the only one in the county.

Mr Gledhill himself took parties round the rose garden, which he has been planting for twenty years and of which he is prouder than of all his looms. He says a man who has seen such a garden will want a better home for his children. Some of the old hands, I fancy, came chiefly for the tea, served on trestles on the lawn.

At seven a bell was rung and they went quietly away, many carrying a sprig that Mr Dorrance had given them. One old weaver told me it was the best day in his year. Your loving sister, Dorothea.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly why people took pride in their gardens and what the garden events offered.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.