Back to basics

The mistake is to think that you can only catch the interest of new gardeners by doing things quickly. But novices are just people who haven’t had much experience yet; they are not fools with short attention spans who can be palmed off with old hat or incomplete explanations. If you want to encourage people to garden, talk knowledgeably about what you are doing. And why. Good communication is about making difficult or complex subjects intelligible, after all. Gardening, at whatever level it is done, deserves nothing less.

By programme five, everyone had calmed down quite a lot, and the watering can had acquired a rose. But there is still far too much thoughtless gush, rather than well-expressed lyricism, the result of no one troubling to write a decent script. And there is not enough of interest for the millions of gardeners who do know a fair bit about gardening and garden making. That said, when Toby Buckland is able to demonstrate his formidable expertise, Joe Swift shows people how to design their gardens (which he is very good at), and Carol Klein talks knowledgeably about plants, all is well. When they don’t, it isn’t.