Back to basics

Wednesday, 13th May 2009

It’s spring, the gardening public has woken up and the plinky-plonky music calls us back for another series of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World.

It’s spring, the gardening public has woken up and the plinky-plonky music calls us back for another series of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World. We in England have no choice; it is all there is on gardening on terrestrial TV at the moment. This year, there is a new format and new venue, ‘Greenacre’, but is it worth staying in for an hour on a Friday night? Things certainly didn’t start very well.

When Monty Don left the programme last autumn, I, like many others, assumed that the new chief presenter would be Carol Klein, since she was both a good communicator and a very experienced gardener and nurserywoman. Moreover, her appointment would be recognition by the BBC of the horticultural preoccupations of women, who make up 70 per cent of gardeners. The BBC passed up that opportunity, obviously, but I was not sorry when Toby Buckland was chosen instead: partly because he has an engaging, friendly, low-key manner but more because he is a trained professional and would, I thought, be allowed to do things properly.

I was too sanguine. The first few programmes, salami-sliced into small segments, seemed slapdash and hurried, so that I sometimes watched in a state of frozen dismay. Toby splashed water around from a can without a rose, risking ejecting compost out of pots in the process. He started to plant up a white ‘twilight’ garden, only to discover that the foxgloves, which his co-presenter Alys Fowler (billed as ‘the thrifty gardener’) had sown the year before ‘to save money’, were probably anything but white. If it is thrifty not to label each pot, then give me reckless extravagance any day.

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