The enigmatic Alan Titchmarsh is probably my favourite TV gardening personality. He always combines a wealth of knowledge with a great deal of flair and humour – wish he was still doing the Friday night homage to gardening on BBC Gardeners World. Watching yet another garden being built from scratch at Greenacre is very sleep inducing on a Friday night.
What we need is some more imaginative filming, ideally in a “real” garden that has not been created just for the cameras.
There is one new gardening series on the BBC that has managed to acheive this.The Edible Garden, hosted by Alys Fowler in her own small garden in the middle of Birmingham gets my vote for being the best gardening programme at the moment because:
*It is realistic and uses the size of small space that most people have to work with .
*It is authentic as it belongs to Alys and is where she lives her life – not some tv set created just for the programme.
*It costs very little, no investment in raised beds or designs – she works with just a small narrow garden.
*There are tons of great ideas that anyone can try -especially growing pea shoots on a window sill
* She probably appeals to the 20/30 year old gardener, often alienated by more traditional TV gardening
Most of all she really makes me want to get digging in my new allotment which is surely what any gardening programme should do? Have a look at the first episode about peas and beanshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s08bx/The_Edible_Garden_Peas_and_Beans/
Read more about Alys’ advice for turning the smallest garden into a feast of food this summerhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/gardening/article-1256629/How-garden-eat-Gardeners-World-Alys-Fowler-believes-patch-productive-AND-pretty.html
As a nation of gardeners we deserve more of this style of programme. UK foodies have any number of well made, inviting programmesabout cooking but, gardening programmes never seem to deliver the same range and quality. Here is a summary of gardening TV over the next few months http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2010/apr/08/gardening-television-alys-fowler
December 7th, 2012 at 10:09 pm
This is a really interesting post. I completely agree. I think as more and more people start getting into gardening in any space they can get they will go beyond mainstream ideas from gimmicky TV programs. The 20/30 yr old gardeners plant for food and plant for bees and we should be encouraging that. Really thought provoking post.