Garden Rant

The GardenRant Casting Couch

A GardenRant tipster tells us that Hollywood is searching for the next big sustainable vegetable gardening guru.  If you are hip, edgy, comfortable in front of a camera, and cool enough to connect with thirty-something locavores, this is the gig for you. They want somebody who's into growing their own food, raising their own chickens, maybe keeping some honeybees-- and doing fabulous things with all of it in the kitchen.

If you're ready to do all that and be a horticultural and culinary rock star in front of the camera, send a paragraph, a picture, a link to your website, and a link to a video, if one exists, to: 

tvshowcasting@me.com 

This is the real deal--we know the people and we know it's got potential. 

Pass the word on. The future of gardening television is in your hands.  Don't let us down.

Machismo in the Garden

 

Ah, the good old days of HGTV on Sunday mornings, when there were two whole shows worth watching - perennial favorite Paul James and the always interesting Landscaper's Challenge.  Now there's still Paul - one episode, not two - but no more Challenge.  In its place is Yard Crashers, a gardening show solidly in the mold of reality TV.  It stars Ahmed Hassan, a hunky and engaging landscaper somewhere in California.  That part is fine with me but you won't believe the concept:  he and his camera crew roam the aisles and parking lots of Home Depots on Saturday mornings asking customers to "Take me home with you and I'll do a makeover on your yard." 

Now as appealing a package as Ahmed clearly is, who among you would want to be on national TV looking like you look on Saturday morning at the hardware store?  So this gotcha trick is really awkward, with people pleading with him to get the camera away, or worrying about what their husband will say.  You know, the icky human drama of reality shows.  And when he finally nabs a willing customer the resulting two-day makeover is all hardscape and fire pits.  (I exaggerate but not by much.)

Now I was going to leave the charming Ahmed alone but the last episode crossed a line I didn't even know existed - gardening shows that are so macho as to actually offend women.  The willing homeowner in this episode is a young guy whose landscaping dream is a back yard so cool it'll attract girls.  So two days later he has a HUGE, hideous spa with built-in sound system, and a yard (not a garden by any stretch) strewn with places for stashing his brewskis.  All bad enough, but at the end of the show when he's asked how he likes his new yard he responds with a creepy grin, "It'll definitely help me bag some honeys."

HGTV has come to this.

Step away from the pansies

And here’s yet another installment in my on-going fascination will all things British. In between complaining about our own TV gardening shows (or lack thereof), it’s interesting to check in on what’s going on across the Atlantic, where they actually do have a primetime—and long-running—gardening show, Gardener’s World.

GW hired a new host a while back, Toby Buckland, and the reviews have been mixed. One of the snippiest is from former GW co-presenter/BBC personality Stefan Buczacki, who, after stating that the show no longer has relevance for real-world gardeners, sites an installment from last fall, where Buckland demonstrated how to take cuttings from pansies.

"Not one gardener in ten thousand wants to or ever will take cuttings from pansies. If they want more, they will go to B&Q and spend a pound or two on another tray. Get a life, Toby."

Even this critique demonstrates how far away the specific problems of British gardening are from ours; the extreme climates across most of our zones dictate that pansies will be an early spring (north) or autumn (south) annual and that’s pretty much the end of it. (Personally, I find pansies annoying in their prettiness—such a tease when I can barely get them to last through May.)

In perusing several of the articles referencing Gardener’s World, I did see that the show has recently been including some interesting topics, such as the problem of vandalism on allotment sites, and has long been addressing home vegetable growing. Whatever its problems, GW does seem to rise above HgTV’s norm of decks, firepits, and other accoutrements of “outdoor living.”

Gardeners Protest Vanishing G on HGTV April 13 - Be there!

Tina K is mad - especially about the impending disappearance of Paul James, her favorite TV gardening host - and she's not going to take it anymore!  So she's organizing a protest by gardeners, who'll all be emailing HGTV's programming VP and their advertisers on the same day - April 13. 

Ooh goody, I love uppity gardeners.  Check out the campaign here, and put it on your calendar to make your voice heard.

By the way, I just noticed that the HGTV website has actually removed gardening from its navigation - it's now "landscaping."  So, HLTV?  And not even much L?

UPDATE ABOUT PAUL JAMES
This just in from his representative:

Paul James Canceled? NO WAY!! GBTY is still the longest running show on HGTV and has NOT been canceled. We are however currently not filming new shows, however our newest season is running now. This is for now the last 26 new shows, however HGTV has told us they plan on running GBTY for at least another 3 to 4 years. Now for the good news, MAY 1ST we launch Paul's new website at gardenerguy.net and we are trying to get gardenerguy.com. Stay tuned because Susan from Garden Rant will get an interview REAL soon for this blog.
We have lots planned coming real soon.

"Man Named Pearl" on HGTV Sunday night 8 pm

In a fit of blogger fairmindedness, I'm ignoring all the rants I've written or read about HGTV and recommending you tune in to the channel tomorrow night to see a wonderful movie about the master pruner from South Carolina, Pearl Fryar (reviewed here). 

Follow this link to HGTV's blurb about Pearl and the documentary.

How TV gardening shows get it so wrong

After our lively discussion of the DIY Network's decision not to renew Joe Lamp'l's wonderful "Fresh from the Garden", with 65 commenters chiming in with their own complaints about TV gardening shows, I can't resist relating a recent incident I had with a home and garden show that I won't name (notice the restraint).

The show's producer calls to say they're doing an episode about "edible and stepable gardens" - because they're all the rage these days - and wants to know if I have a client whose "edible and stepable garden" they can film.  So I explain that my clients don't have edible gardens and that "STEPABLE" is a brand name, not a type of garden that's a hot new trend.  I suggest that one type of garden that IS suddenly a hot topic is the lawnless type.  I then e-mailed him lots of examples, some of them even using the creeping perennials now heavily marketed as STEPABLES^TM (always with the all-caps).

Next thing I know he's e-mailing me back, asking for the names of my clients with "edible and stepable gardens" that he could film, as though our 20-minute phone call had never happened!  Back to square one, with me explaining again that creeping perennials are one type of lawn replacement, that that's just one brand, etc, etc.  And he writes back to clarify FOR ME that "stepable" is a commonly understood generic name for a type of garden, "like Kleenex". Uh, no it isn't.  But by this point I'm tired of trying to help someone who's clearly not interested in what I have to say.

Later I related the story to the landscape designer who'd given this guy my name.  The producer had likewise asked HER for clients with stepable gardens and she told him she'd never heard the term! (Anyway, if it were really a generic term, isn't the ultimate "stepable" plant good old turfgrass?) So his insistence on using this term as though it really were a commonly understood word for a gardening craze sweeping the nation made us wonder:  Hey, are they sponsoring this thing?  And is the episode really an infomercial, with edibles thrown in for good measure?  That's the only imaginable explanation for the producer's obtuseness.

THE PUNCH LINE
But wait.  The most entertaining moment with the TV producer came when I asked when they wanted to do the filming.  Get ready for it - mid-March!  Yes, we all know how telegenic our veg gardens are in mid-March, just after we've planted our lettuce seeds and the ground is utterly bare.  Heck, not even creeping perennials look like much in mid-March around here, no matter what expensive brand name they may carry.

Mushroom Madness

YouTube won't let me embed it, but....sometimes you just need a video of freaky time-lapse fungal growth to get your Monday off to a good start.  Check it out.

Video game about flowers - really?

This week Sony will release a new Playstation game called “Flower,” which "explores the path of an urban flower that seeks to escape to the countryside."  Sony calls the game an "interactive poem, which uses abstract landscapes, and the flower is the gamer’s dream."  According to Wired, “Flower lets the player explore the dreams of city blooms trapped in urban decay, longing to caress the soft grasses of the countryside.”

Sony designed the game to be “attractive and meaningful” for adults, and wanted to make it simple and accessible. Players can control the path of the flower, and its pollination of the landscapes. "The game explores the relationship between cities and nature, the complexities of ecology."

Well, that's what the tech world has to say about this game that's supposedly about flowers.  From what I can see of it on this introductory video, I have to ask:  Where the hell are the flowers, the pollination, or the ecology, for that matter?  Looks like a very bizarre notion of those concepts.  But if anyone has a chance to play this thing, DO let us know what you think of it. 

Mrs. Greenthumbs: An Appreciation

My next-door neighbor recently said that she was stumped by design questions and that I should write a book about the subject. I laughed. If you want to know how to grow potatoes, I'm your woman. Design? No.

Since most garden design books strike me as abstract to the point of absurdity, with advice on the unhelpful order of "consider proportion," I went on Amazon and ordered my neighbor a copy of the out-of-print Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Garden of Your Dreams because its advice is simple and friendly and comprehensible. There's lots of sensible stuff about relating the garden to the surrounding architecture, such as using the golden section to calculate a visually pleasing depth for a bed in front of a fence, or finding the right stylistic vibe by making the garden about as formal as your house or slightly less formal.

Mrs. Greenthumbs, also known as Cassandra Danz, was a Brooklynite by birth, a comedian by trade, and a passionate gardener who ultimately made a career for herself planting pansies in handbags on the Live With Regis and Kathie Lee show.  Or so I've heard. I could never watch that show, always finding Regis and Kathie Lee's patter disturbingly similar to the spiel I used to hear from the crackheads in Morningside Heights when I lived there in the late 1980's.

Danz's first book, 1993's Mrs. Greenthumbs: How I turned a Boring Yard into a Glorious Garden and How You Can, Too, is one of my favorite of all gardening books for its snappy writing style. Yes, Mrs. Greenthumbs is a little tacky, with her dyed red hair and rayon dresses and relentless jokiness, but only in the smartest and best educated way: She is well aware of herself as a force for democracy in the snooty New York horticultural word.  Yes, she belongs to the bad old days before Jeff Gillman and Linda Chalker-Scott began subjecting gardening advice to the test of science, when most cultural recommendations were either mindless anglophilia, primitive superstition, or horseshit pure and simple. (Double digging anyone?)  But she did passionately recommend compost and mulch, good woman, and understood the cycles of life. 

I love her because she was fearless and funny and culturally clued-in, and a gust of enthusiasm comes off every word she ever put to paper.  She wrote about flower colors and giant lilacs and the experience of gardening itself the way they ought to be written about--as if she'd spent the most vivid moments of her life in the garden and the bedroom. Here's Mrs. Greenthumbs on the subject of ridding her yard of invasive bamboo:

My husband chopped the bamboo down using a machete he bought from Soldier of Fortune magazine.  I remember the sweat glistening on his torso.  I felt like Ava Gardner in Mogambo.  In a tropical frame of mind, I put on my muumuu and quickly mixed some Mai Tai cocktails.  We sat on the porch, looking at the bamboo stumps, waiting for the elephants to stampede.  Gardening is more fun than you think.

Then she has the nerve to continue the bamboo discussion this way: "After drinks and intercourse, we decided to do it the natural way."  They finished the bamboo with the lawnmower. 

Or how about this consideration of pollination, from a chapter titled, "A Petunia Named Desire":

Most people tend to assume that the bees have no knowledge of the plant's use of them and are only after the nectar.  In other words, they are a bunch of unwitting stooges, slavishly servicing the carnal appetites of the flowers and getting no fun out of the experience at all.  I don't think so.  I have observed bees going from flower to flower in the garden, and they seem to be enjoying themselves enormously.  I wouldn't presume to know the thoughts and feelings of bees, but if I saw a bunch of teenagers sipping nectar, rolling around with their feet up in the air, covered with fragrant pollen, and then racing off to do it again and again, I would assume they are having a wonderful time and would probably call the police.

Can you imagine, for example, The New York Times ever publishing any gardening piece with a fraction of that much personality?   Certainly, movie reviews and food writing and political commentary are allowed to have personality.  Gail Collins has so much personality, it barely fits within the confines of her column.  I frequently wonder which Olympian god decreed that garden writing alone should be so sterile.

The institutional tone ("plant for winter interest") may explain why I've been bearing the 2008/2009 collapse of the shelter media with relatively few tears.  Yet when I learned that Mrs. Greenthumbs died of cancer in 2002, I took it peculiarly hard, as if she were a good friend I hadn't yet met. In fact, I'm almost positive that's what she was.

Cabin fever, part I: The Teaflower

Here is my contribution to the Garden Rant library of instructional media. This was created not with a cool Flip device, but with my beat-up Olympus still camera (that happens to take video as well) and iMovie.

Um … enjoy.

I won't be so brash as to promise any future videos I do will be better.

GardenRant TV (Or, Look What I Got for Christmas!)

So you all had very nice things to say about the great production quality of the Wicked Plants video my brother, an actual filmmaker, made. But today we're slumming it in my backyard, where I am trying out the totally amazing Flip Mino HD I got for Christmas. I am so in love with this little camera that I am working on getting one for all four of us GardenRanters so that we can build our Internet video empire. These babies range in price from $130 to $230, are small enough to fit in the pocket of your jeans, and come with insanely easy-to-use editing software built right into the camera (which, by the way, has a built-in USB connection--no cords necessary).

OK, enough geek talk.  Oh, except for this: if you're in the market for one of these, go to YouTube and click 'watch in high quality' to get a better idea of what the uncompressed version looks like. Sorry the sound's a little iffy--now that I've done one of these, I've figured out how far away I can get from the camera and still get good audio.  The next one will be better.

Cows are Plants!

This is just some silly YouTube nonsense for your Monday morning.  My favorite line: "Many plants emit sounds.  The South American dwarf pelargonia emit a clicking sound when seeding."

OK, and I will add, in response to comments: if you're not, say, a Southpark fan, you probably won't love this as much as I do. And yes, I'm a vegetarian, too.

Pragmatism or idealism: a debate from across the Atlantic

Here’s an interesting if minor controversy going on in the world of U.K. gardening show Gardener’s World. While the previous presenter Monty Don was a resolute advocate of organic practices (assuming a definition of “organic” most of us can go along with), new host Toby Buckland, who has a more traditional background in horticulture than Don, has mentioned using both pesticides and peat as acceptable strategies, commenting that it’s better to be an “inorganic success than an organic failure.”

Buckland has frankly said he wants to help the industry that brought him success, going so far as to state, “There is a theory in gardening that you should only visit small nurseries and grow as much as you can from seed,'' as he urges gardeners to buy plants and learn to embrace garden centers.

Well, I’ve got no dog in this fight, as I can’t watch the program, but I can understand both sides of it. I don’t have much success with seeds, usually buy plants, and shop at both family-owned nurseries and—less often—big boxes. (I think there may be a starker divide between local nurseries and the big centers here than there is there.) If I have a really bad problem with a houseplant that I don’t want to throw away, I’ll spray something on it (very rarely).

But if I garden pragmatically, I admire the type of idealistic, romantic view of gardening advocated by Don and others. When I read about gardening or watch something about gardening, I’d prefer to be inspired. The matter-of-fact stuff I can get from other sources, or look up as needed.

Interestingly, GW has gone from 4 million viewers to 2 million in recent years, and it’s noted that in advocating smarter use of chemicals and easier methods than seed-starting, Buckland is trying to cast a wider net.

Chicken Day: Ira Glass Is Won Over

Here for your entertainment today are a variety of chicken-themed posts.  We begin with one of my favorites, an interview on Letterman with Ira Glass about his new-found love of poultry.

A topic that will not go gently

Judy Lowe, who blogs for the Christian Science Monitor, takes up the issue of gardening shows on HGTV, commenting

maybe the solution isn’t trying to get national TV to cover more gardening, but to encourage regional programs that can produce what the people of its area really want and need.

Lowe also links to many of us who recently ranted on the subject (and we love to see other blogs ranting). But I was interested in her idea of sticking to regional approaches. If only. In Buffalo, we have about five minutes a week on TV given to gardening in local guru Sally Cunningham’s segment on the CBS affiliate here. Big whup, as they say. Programming priorities tend to be even more harshly and narrowly defined according to lowest common denominators at the local level, though I wonder if a longer cable access show might be possible. Do any of you have great regional programs on gardening?

All together now: plurkers rant about H“G”TV

Will the evil networkmeisters notice? Probably not, but a bunch of garden bloggers are synchronizing posts aimed at the lack of garden coverage on HGTV. A group of us who talk about gardening (and a lot of other things) on the Plurk.com chat network are telling everybody what we really think about one of cable TV’s most disappointing channels.

My Corner of Katy notes: although the network has always emphasized HOME more than GARDENING, there was a time when their schedule of shows justified that G in their acronym. 5 out of 5 garden bloggers surveyed now agree, however, that there's precious little gardening to be found.

“HGTV is a misnomber," says Mrs. McGregor’s Daughter, adding “Currently, A Gardener’s Diary is the only 'gardening' program on HGTV worth watching.” Mary Ann Newcomer, writing for examiner.com, has done the math: 284 programs on HGTV with eleven, a paltry substandard ELEVEN, on gardening with half of those shows on instant landscape makeovers.... which should never, ever, ever, be confused with real gardening.

Vanillalotus/NewSprout, a young college student studying horticulture and working in her first garden says, “I could be wrong, but it would be nice for us gardeners to have stuff to watch too. I don't have a home to renovate but I do have place to plant stuff.”

Multiple Mousie winner Carol/May Dreams Gardens rules HGTV “guilty” of the false promises implied in its title and has sentencing recommendations, while Robin/Bumblebee, like Mary Ann, writing for examiner.com, has a wish list:

Beautiful shows about real gardens and real gardeners. I want to travel the country and peek into people's backyards. I want to meet the people who grow all those beautiful roses and find out how they got started. Who was their inspiration? How did they learn about gardening? Where do they look for plants and supplies? How did they figure out how to design their beautiful spaces?

Finally, Dee/Red Dirt Ramblings wants HGTV to tell it like it is:

Gardening is hot and dirty work sometimes. When are the media experts going to pull themselves up by their boot straps and start telling the truth? Viewers and readers know it, and they’re still gardening.

I don’t have much to add to all this, but I am deeply jealous that the British have a primetime show—Gardener’s World—that is avidly watched by a sizable audience, as well as other shows. I can also say I’ve pretty much hated every gardening show on HGTV I’ve ever seen. None of them seem to be about plants in an interesting sense; it’s either how to create an outdoor living space to suit your lifestyle, or quick and easy ways to do dull things. Do I think it will change? Well, at the least, if they’re going to keep the G, they should start paying more attention to vegetable gardening. I’d also like to see some attention paid to community gardens and native plants. There is gardening advertising. Why can't we have the programming?

New garden poster guy across the pond

Why do I even care about this? I will probably never see this show—when I travel to England I don't watch TV—yet I am interested to hear that Gardener's World has hired a new presenter. Following in the footsteps of Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don is Toby Buckland, a professional nurseryman and landscaper who's done some high profile gardens and won a prize for something (rather frighteningly) called "The Ethical Garden."

Buckland beat out more popular choices like Chris Beardshaw and Carol Klein. So there you go. It's interesting to me because this show is on at eight o'clock at night on BBC Two at the exact same time Eastenders is on. (The legendary soap beats GW in the ratings, but still.) A prime-time gardening show on a major network here? Not bloody likely.

And here's the other interesting thing; these presenters are always guys. It's noticeable enough that the Guardian has a poll out (no results yet) on whether Gardeners' World is sexist. And the conservative Daily Telegraph opines:

Is the BBC out of step in choosing another man? After all, the days of Percy Thrower, with his waistcoat, belted trousers, and collar and tie, are long past. It has been computed that nowadays 70 per cent of home gardeners are women.
When it comes to looking after the million acres of garden in this country, a division of labour now operates.
The blokes have been relegated to doing the boring bits, such as mowing the lawn, cutting back shrubs and laying patios, while women do the fun, creative stuff - planting borders, sowing sweetpeas, and deadheading roses. It suits us all fine since, surveys show, women are less interested in machinery or DIY than in nurturing plants.

Well, aside from all the questionable generalizations there, women gardeners throughout history and certainly today have been prominent enough where you'd think a woman would be chosen. But no. Over there you have Titchmarsh, Don, and now Buckland, while here we have Paul James.

It's a puzzlement.

Mickey Sprays Pesticides, Bugs Get Drunk on Poison

OK, this one's even better. From 1935. I'm speechless.

Disney Flowers & Trees

Maybe it's just been a long week, but I find this 1932 Disney animation short weirdly compelling.

Grow Your Own

Did anyone see this 2007 British film?  Not available on Netflix as far as I can tell.  As gardening films go, it looks  promising.