Admission to NGS gardens comes for less than three pounds and in most cases children under 16 are admitted free. Over the past 10 years, the NGS has raised over 25 million pounds for charity from its gate collection.

Last year NGS donated over two million pounds to various beneficiaries.

The history of NGS dates back to 1927. Its objective was for people to open their gardens to raise money to help support the work of district nurses. Today it acts as one of the biggest fundraisers for charitable activities.

Morley said: 'Our main beneficiary charities are MacMillan Cancer Support, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Help the Hospices, and the Crossroads Caring for Carers. We are MacMillan Cancer Support's biggest single annual donor with half a million pounds being given.'

Anyone who is interested can go and see these gardens as they are publicised through fliers provided by NGS. People also get to know of them by word of mouth.

Shanthee Siva, 49, who is of Malaysian origin, is another garden owner. The Surrey resident's garden symbolises a tropical theme with different varieties of palms, cannas, castor oil plant and bananas, mainly with a brown colour scheme.

She was surprised after 158 people turned up to see her garden that opened a few days ago. 'It gave me an opportunity to get an idea on their opinion of my garden as most of the visitors were themselves gardeners,' Siva said.

A woman visitor who came to see Shanthee Siva's garden said, 'I did not expect to see such a variety of plants and all of them were thriving.'

Many garden owners provide homemade cakes and typical British tea to visitors. Some owners sell plants and the money generated again goes into charity.

NGS is growing by the day as more and more people have begun opening their home gardens to the public.

(Cynthia Chandran can be contacted on cynthiachandran@gmail.com)