Gardeners World - What a shame

[Chumpfriend]

Am I being unreasonable to think that Gardener’s World has jumped the shark?

It’s honestly a travesty of what went before and in no way makes anyone with a modest garden feel capable of creating a garden or delivers any meaningful advice.

There are BBC tropes and messaging rammed down your throat and literally nothing that relates to any ordinary gardener at this time of year.

The Beechwood Garden is a shadow reference to the old GW but I’m so disappointed at such a lost opportunity to make people feel like they can have a go at growing stuff.

Geoff Hamilton may be turning in his grave.

I love the specificity of How to set up small seed growing space in a tiny house with cats 😁

I would like a feature on how to have a winding path and hidden sections in a medium sized city garden (4x12m) while maintaining easy shed access for my bicycle.

I raise you how to make a garden that goes horizontal to the back of a house on a slope with clay soil look good!

I’m about to transition from owning a 40 square m courtyard to four acres of ridiculously hilly Peak District with a run down old bungalow thrown in. I’m hoping GW keeps running so I can do my own smug feature of ‘look what I managed on zero budget in terrible conditions’ in twenty years time. Please don’t get it cancelled :)

I love that @Fibrous , would you consider doing a thread to chart your progress? We could all say how well you're doing and give you akickupthebumn encouraging word when you're flagging <-

To be frank I do think the BBC should be answering more to the majority of its license payers ie the ones with small or medium plots they’re wrestle with whilst holding down full time work and kids- not those with 4 acres in the Peak District or an acre in the Cotswolds with a gardener.

I watch it every week. They very regularly feature not just tiny gardens, but balconies and houses full of house plants if someone doesn't have a balcony or garden.
I notice it as I have a tiny garden myself.

Not for long and not always in a meaningful way. It’s just like flicking a magazine. The bigger massive showier types of gardens get far more airtime.

Yeah sure, it’s a very challenging site - all woodland, a 50% gradient across the whole place, and acid soil with lots of stone. I plan to grow perennial edibles as there won’t be enough sun for annuals. The area around the house will be gardened but the extended land will be managed for biodiversity and wood, so we’ll be putting in basic paths with hoggin and material from the land. I’ll be focussing on native plants in the wood and non natives around the house. Budget is pretty much zero as the house is a full renovation project and we don’t earn that much money, so I’ll be growing most of the plants myself, and the retaining walls will be gabions so we can use material from the land. As I said, it will take us decades but it’ll keep us fit!

Judging by a lot of the questions asked on the MN gardening threads, perhaps they should do a feature about what to do in these situations:

How to grow a tree really fast to give privacy and which type to choose, bearing in mind that they need something evergreen, needs no pruning, has pink flowers on it all year round, casts no shade and drops no leaves, doesn't have invasive roots, won't cause hayfever, isn't poisonous to dogs, cats or small children, and will magically stop growing at the exact height the poster wants.

What to plant in a container that will flower for months, look amazing the whole time and that doesn't actually need any watering at all, even for a fortnight in a midsummer drought when they are away on holiday.

How to create a zero-maintenance perfect lawn in deep shade that looks like a bowling green but won't mind being used as a football pitch or as a canine play area/piddling station.

How to prevent every single creepy-crawly known to man from ever visiting your garden.

Why a north-facing garden is not the disaster house-buyers think it is.

I have to say I gave up watching several years ago as I found it more and more unrelateable. I still watch the iPlayer clips of ordinary gardens from time to time, and some of the 'national collection' people have been hilarious. There was a guy who specialised in elders who was like Simon Day! And a lovely Aeonium lady too. One of my favourite ever private garden was a young couple who discovered that the wild woody bit at the bottom of their garden actually belonged to them, and they turned it into the most beautiful woodland playground. Another was the beautiful botanic garden in Scotland, which had just been bought by a new (very wealthy) owner. Neither of these are exactly an everyday occurrence though.

For me YouTube is now my go to resource for advice these days.

I am also very interested in what @Nonameeohas to say. There is a growing trend for theories and ideas to become very authoritarian and not open to any proper discussion and scrutiny.

I have an ecology minor so not an expert but was trained by some really forward thinking people who were heavily research based. And I have also been a gardener so worked day in day out in various habitats, studied landscape for 20 years and on speaking with dual ecologists/ designers they have similar thoughts to me so that’s reassuring.

Basically the gov have implemented BNG, which is biodiversity net gain. But it should be really called conservation based financial market. In poor sites; which most sites are. It just locks in the crap stats of things. That’s a whole 20 posts in itself.

But horticulture and garden design/ trends come from professional work, Landscaoe architecture, theme du jour and horticultural availability. When professionals are not allowed (or heavily penalised financially) to specify non natives or even cultivar natives then that leads into both ‘theme du jour’ and availability.

But the big problem is I don’t think natives are all that. Loads of studies have shown that mixed planting is best. We have an incredibly limited and small native flowering fauna for typical soils. You get exciting stuff happening in niche soils like limestone and low fertility but for your bog standard English soil the climax is brambles, scrub then woodland. With very little nectar.

I think the biggest driver of encouraging wildlife is in biomassing, water and management. As in it doesn’t really matter what the plants are (As long as most are physically nectar available); it’s more about dimensionally creating habitat types that wildlife recognises to live in, hunt in, eat in. Certain species do need specific species to breed on but we can add those in. And they are ‘weeds’ so they are going to be around somewhere close.

And I have seen this. Our most wildlife success garden wasn’t designed to be. It did not have a single non cultivar or straight native. It was ornamental, alien or cultivar. We had bats move in, migrating birds, hoverflies, dragonflies, amphibian life. Water is a big one! That place was alive like no wildlife reserve I have ever seen. And yet wouldn’t be allowed to be planted with heavy financial fines in professional work.

So it’s not helping wildlife. It’s not helping biodiversity because they are actually decreasing biodiversity (by demonising cultivar and non native). & with climate change we need to be increasing diversity. Particularly when talking about long lived like trees and shrubs.

It’s really frustrating. People will figure it out again. Maybe 20 years. But we don’t really have any time to lose right now. Wildlife is struggling, our environment is struggling. People are struggling and environment helps mental health, community cohesion, sense of self and worth.

Basically in short big problem. But ecologists have literally been trained their whole life to believe our native flora is sacred. And it is. But we don’t need it exclusively everywhere. We are one of the luckiest countries in the world that our climax habitat is so strong. The only stronger habitat for our soil/ climate is Japan so we can pretty much grow anything from anywhere without risk to our native habitats.

Not just on MN, but in general, I'd like it to deal with:

• how do I kill this terrible horrible pest (which turns out to be ladybird larvae)?
• how do I identify this plant, I think it's a daisy? (followed by 20-odd replies of 'yep, chatGPT says daisy' before someone comes along and points out it's actually a rosebush/courgette/oak tree, followed by 20 more posts going 'nah, I reckon def daisy, chatGPT says so'.
• where can I buy a fruit tree really cheap and what do you mean it might be shit/there might be any dodgy ethics involved?
• my gardener charges more than tuppence ha'penny per week, the jumped-up cow, is that unfair? And also how come my garden looks boring all year when I don't have a gardener?
• Is this pot big enough? (Answer: no.)
• I planted a tree in a pot three years ago, how come it's not looking happy?

Actually, genuinely and without being snarky ... I do wish Gardener's World would do more to help people identify plants. I know some of it is experience and getting your eye in, but it's really useful. Eg. with weeds, you need to know that these little harmless-looking bulbs are arum and they'll spread everywhere, or this stringy root looks like ground elder and if you just break it, it'll make the problem worse rather than better.

I disagree, if I want to see a "normal" garden I can look out of the window, I watch GW for inspiration and unusual plants. I hated the viewers garden bits during lockdown, annoying shaky footage filmed on someone's phone, give me shiny paradise gardens and the national collection of lithops any day!

I think it changed massively when it went from 30mins to an hour long programme. There are lots of "filler" pieces now.

@Nonameeo

Your post is really illuminating and this thinking is clearly influential to GW or to those editing it.
I was trying to highlight - not as articulately as you - that I feel there’s a lot of messaging and not as much ordinary gardening.

it’s like some of the recent Chelsea Gardens that are essentially bits of the countryside recreated in London - why?! Personally, although I know they take skill to create I don’t feel that they are actual gardens.

I understand we have a responsibility to the environment but the biodiversity of a ‘normal’ garden that’s looked after thoughtfully and with minimal chemical intervention is still fantastic.

It’s not too long ago that GW were very keen on showing us how to plant tree ferns and tropical plants - which makes the recent change to planting self seeders in amongst the weeds native plants all the more jarring.

I adore GW, and this thread has spoiled it for me now 😂

You're all completely right. Especially the PP with the national collections of blah blah, I mean, who cares?

My garden just sits there with fight or die flowerbeds and a "lawn". Less time watching other people with their natural swimming pools and more actual gardening might inspire me to do something about it...

I’m borrowing the concept of ‘fight or die flowerbeds’.

Why not? I did! See earlier PP 😙

Like I said, I’m taking notes! 😀

Well interestingly you have hit the nail on the head. It’s all wrapped up in ‘what is natural’.

Again I could bore everyone with that because all our highest value habitats are not natural. Wildflower meadows, hedgerow, brownfield, mosaic are not natural etc. even woodland is managed if you want to increase biodiversity.

Still love it

I love GW and I love MD. But then i don't want to see a programme full of tiny little new build gardens that are the size of a handkerchief.

I don't agree. If you watch it every week, they feature small gardens a lot. I've thought before it's a good thing that they do.

Not talking about filling it with tiny new build gardens just having more realistic gardens in it.

They don’t, not meaningfully. Take this week, the small garden was somebody obsessed with daffodils and taking about why, Francis wasn’t in her small garden but in some moohhhosive garden she’s the gardener for, moving primroses off a stately drive to a wild area and pottering round the huge greenhouse most won’t have space for in ther garden let alone to grown large winter salad plants in.

Where was the gardening for the average Joe?