Answers to the questions we hear most often.

GardensDB - short for Gardens Database - is the public catalogue of show gardens: the ones built for the RHS shows (Chelsea, Hampton Court, Tatton, Malvern and the rest), BBC Gardeners' World, and the growing roster of independent flower shows around the country. We pull them together in one place, alongside the designers and studios behind each one, the sponsors who back them, and the full team of people and suppliers involved.

It's the reference we wished already existed: a way for visitors to find a garden they loved, for designers to show their work, and for journalists, students and researchers to look something up without trawling a dozen press releases.

Show gardens live for about a week. The teams that build them spend months, sometimes years - and then the public sees the finished work for a few days, the judges look once, and it all gets packed away. Photographs drift across press releases, social posts and personal archives, and within a season finding a particular garden again is surprisingly hard. Try tracking down the supplier of those lovely bee posts you spotted at a show two years ago, and you'll see what we mean.

GardensDB started because we kept hitting that wall. Our founders Daniel Bougourd (who runs a software company) and Alana Sims (a garden designer) collectively had the right skills and perspective to make a start: somewhere these gardens could live properly, searchable, credited, and connected to the people who made them.

The community keeps it honest - designers claim their studios, owners add their gardens, and anyone can flag a correction. The record gets a little better every week.

Honestly, we get a lot out of GardensDB, just not financially.

It gives us a way to contribute, in a small way, to a world we genuinely love being part of. It has also given us a reason to meet and spend time with some remarkably kind, generous and talented people. Quite a few have become friends, which has been one of the loveliest parts of it all.

There are some very nice practical perks too. We're often given press passes to the shows we cover, which we're hugely grateful for - and which still feels like a real treat for two people who would otherwise probably be standing in a queue in the rain.

Financially, GardensDB doesn't make money, and we don't have plans for that to change. We run it as a not-for-profit project and fund it ourselves. It's on a very different scale from something as extraordinary as Project Giving Back, of course, but the spirit is similar: it's a project we care about, and we feel lucky to be able to keep doing it that way.

Nothing. GardensDB is free for everyone, and it will stay that way.

No paywall, no premium tier, no sign-up required to read anything. Some pages carry a clearly marked ad at the bottom, which chips in towards hosting costs, and that's the extent of it. The project itself is fully funded for at least the next ten years - the kind of runway that lets us think about the next decade of show gardens, rather than the next round of investment.

We took our cue from Wikipedia. The internet works best when its reference works are a shared resource rather than a product. Whether you're a designer building a portfolio, a student writing a dissertation, or a visitor trying to remember the name of a garden you loved in 2017, GardensDB will be here, and it won't ask you for a credit card.

All information in GardensDB comes from publicly accessible sources, or is provided directly by the garden designers and owners themselves.

We also visit most of the major shows in person, which is where a lot of the photographs and supplier details come from. If we've got something wrong a quick email is usually all it takes to fix it.

Short answer: yes, on both counts. Any image credited to GardensDB on this site is free to use elsewhere - no licence form, no fee. A credit and a link back are always appreciated, but not required.

If you're posting on Instagram, a tag of @gardensdb on the image would make our day.

For the 360° virtual tours, if you were involved in the garden, drop us a line at help@gardensdb.com and we'll work with you to provide the embed code.

One important caveat: please don't reuse images credited to other photographers, institutions or press offices without their permission. We display those under our own arrangements with the rights-holders, and they belong to them - the credit line on each image tells you who owns what.

And if you're the designer of a garden featured on GardensDB and you'd like high-resolution versions of any of our photographs for your own portfolio, just ask. We'll share them with you at no cost.

Please let us know at help@gardensdb.com and we will correct it as soon as possible.

Please get in touch with us at help@gardensdb.com and we will collect the relevant information from you and have it added to GardensDB.

When you first register, our onboarding process will ask if you'd like to create a public profile page. If you choose yes, you can fill in your details and your page will be created automatically. If you skipped this during onboarding, you can go through onboarding again to set up your profile.

During onboarding, you'll be asked if you'd like to manage your organisation's page on GardensDB. If you choose yes, you can search to see if your organisation already exists. If it does, you can submit a request to claim it - our team will review and approve the request. If your organisation isn't listed yet, you can fill in the details and submit it for review. This option is intended for owners and founders. If you missed this during onboarding, you can go through onboarding again to set this up.

If your email address already matches a profile in GardensDB, we'll detect this automatically during onboarding and link you to your existing page - no need to create a new one.

After registering, you'll be guided through a short onboarding process to help us understand who you are and how you'd like to use GardensDB. First, you'll select your role - whether you're a garden designer, a garden company or nursery, a sponsor, or an education institution. You'll then be asked if you'd like a public profile page on GardensDB, and whether you'd like to manage your organisation's page. You can skip the onboarding at any time and come back to it on your next login.

Yes. You can click "Skip for now" at any point during onboarding. This will let you browse GardensDB freely for the rest of your session. The next time you log in, onboarding will appear again so you can complete it when you're ready.

Yes. If your circumstances change - you start working with a studio, want to add a profile you skipped, or need to claim an organisation - you can go through onboarding again at any time.