Bramble › For historic gardens

Story maps for historic gardens

A garden changes every fortnight and a printed map does not. Bramble puts the story of each planting, folly and vista on the visitor's own phone, and you change it the week the bluebells come up.

Visitors scan a code at the gate or in the tea room and a map of the garden opens on their phone. There is no app and no sign-up. As they walk, each place tells them what was planted, who planted it and what to look for now. A stop might be a tree, a folly, a view, or the bed where something unusual is about to come up. Your own staff write them and your own staff change them.

The trouble is that a garden will not hold still

A map printed in March describes a garden that has stopped existing by June. It sends people to a border that has gone over, and says nothing about the one thing currently worth crossing the lawn for. Reprinting every season is a cost nobody signs off, so most gardens print once and quietly accept being wrong for three quarters of the year.

Two smaller problems travel with it. The knowledge is in one head: your head gardener knows why that yew is shaped like that, and on their day off nobody does, so the visitor walks past it. And you never find out what people missed. Someone leaves without having found the walled garden, and you hear about it in a review or not at all.

How it compares with what you have now

Option	What it does well	Where it falls short
A printed garden map	Cheap, familiar, works with no signal	Fixed until the next print run; no stories, only place names
A paper trail sheet	Good for children, easy to hand out	Gets wet, gets binned, and you reprint every change
A guided tour	The best experience there is	Needs a person, runs at set times, and does not scale to a wet Tuesday
An audio-guide app	Rich content, professional feel	Visitors will not download an app for a two-hour visit; most never do

Bramble is the row that is not in the table: changed by you in minutes, and telling each story where the visitor is standing rather than in a list. What it needs in return is a phone. Photographs also want a signal the first time they load, which is an argument for putting the code at the gate or the tea room rather than at the far end of the garden.

Questions

Will it work at the bottom of the garden where there is no signal?

GPS itself needs no signal, so the map can always place a visitor. Your stops and story text are saved to their phone once the map has loaded, so those keep working as they walk out of coverage. Photographs need signal the first time they appear, so it is worth having visitors load the map somewhere you know has a bar or two, like the entrance or the tea room.

Can we change it when the garden changes?

You sign in, edit the story, and it is live. There is no reprint and no waiting on us. A border that goes over on Friday can be a different story by Saturday morning.

Who writes the stories?

You do, on the self-managed subscription, which is why it is £1,500 a year rather than £5,000. If you would rather we walked the garden with your head gardener and wrote them, that is the done-for-you service and it starts at £5,000 plus VAT.

How many stops should a garden have?

Eight to fifteen for a first map. Enough that the walk has shape, few enough that you can write them all properly.

What it costs

Reprinting the garden map every season is the cost nobody signs off, so for most of the year it is wrong and everyone has agreed not to mind. One published map, written by your own people, is £1,500 a year, or £150 a month, plus VAT, and it is right in June as well as March. Nothing to sign off, no quantity to decide and nothing to pulp when the border goes over. For a trust that is one line in the budget, and one invoice a year if you pay by the year.

The writing is the work. Eight to fifteen stops, a paragraph and a photograph each, placed from a desk by clicking your own garden on the map, or outside on a phone standing where the story is. What that actually involves gives the timings without dressing them up.

If the stories live in your head gardener's memory and nowhere else, we will come and get them. We walk the garden with them, write down what they say, take the photographs and record the narration, so the garden keeps them when the gardener retires. That is the done-for-you service: from £5,000 plus VAT, then about £4,500 a year. It is quoted and agreed with you before we start, and it carries no money-back guarantee.

Writing it yourselves starts with thirty days free at portal.bramblemaps.com/start: no card, about a minute to set up, and the map is live from the first minute. It starts blank; we never seed a map with sample stops. Begin it in a month when something is worth writing about, so the first stories are about what is in flower rather than what was. Do nothing at the end of the thirty days and the map goes quiet, with every stop kept and an email from us first. If you then subscribe to the self-managed tier and it is not for you, tell us within thirty days of the first payment and we refund everything you have paid. That guarantee is on the self-managed subscription only. Full pricing.

Prices and facts on this page last reviewed: September 2026.