In article , Uncle Marvo says...
In reply to ShinyRed ) who wrote this in
, I, Marvo, say :

Hi

I'm new to this forum, but thought you might be interested that
gardening is more popular than ever, despite the fact that less and
less of us have gardens! So much so that Yell.com have refined Garden
Centres as a specific key word search in their directory.

Do you think it's part of the home improvement trend, are people
valuing their gardens more, and spending more time in them?

(Hope it's ok to post the link - thought you guys might be interested
in seeing what comes up )

http://tinyurl.com/yqza34

The trend I have noticed in Surrey, where I spend far too much of my spare
time, is that people build houses in their gardens. They then sell these as
a "pension", and retain the original house, less its garden.

It is not a trend that I like to see.

I was thinking of starting a magazine called "House In Garden". Do you think
it will catch on?



That trend is standard across the UK. It is the one main reason we left
to come to France. I believe the catchphrase is "affordable space". We
did try to find a property in the UK that had a big garden that fitted
our budget but surprisingly the estate agents and online sites in the UK
just can't handle "big garden" as a criterion.

Rightmove and similar web sites were complete rubbish for finding
anything suitable. We spoke to a number of estate agents giving them our
criterion but the common reply was that "what may be a big garden to one
person may be a small garden to another".

One estate agent said they had the perfect property for us and showed us
a picture (the house was of secondary interest to the garden). The photo
showed a lovely big garden, so we went along for a viewing. We didn't
even ring the doorbell. Looking over the fence the photo had clearly
been taken with a special lens and made the garden look ten times bigger
than it actually was.

Finding a suitable property here in France was a doddle. The internal
area of houses and total property area including land is always part of
the standard specification. Why don't estate agents do this in the UK?

--
David in Normandy.
(The free MicroPlanet Gravity newsreader is great for eliminating
rubbish and cross-posts)