Gardeners' World dumps organic ethos and gives environment the elbow

I would like to welcome John Walker to Landscape Juice.

Kew-trained John is a gardening writer and author with a special interest in exploring how gardening can become more ecologically sustainable.

He writes regularly for various magazines and newspapers. His 'digging deeper' column in Kitchen Garden magazine explores the impact of gardening on the world around us, and also investigates gardening 'greenwash'.

John won the Garden Media Guild Environmental Award 2007 and is currently making a new earth-friendly organic food garden in Snowdonia.

As BBC TV's revamped Gardeners’ World takes dumbing down to new heights, the more alarming casualty of the rush for ratings is the world around us, says earth-friendly gardening writer John Walker.

Tempting though it is, I’m going to resist adding my own two-penneth to the near-universal condemnation of the ‘new look’ TV programme Gardeners’ World (GW). Numerous others have eloquently captured the distinctly bad mood of our gardening nation: ‘irrelevant to the average gardener’; ‘isn’t it dire?’; ‘condescending’; ‘the whole ethos of the programme is simply boring’; ‘clueless’; ‘trivial, fatuous and glib’; ‘superficial’; ‘toe-curling attempts at being funny’; ‘lightweight’; ‘all the personality of a sheet of wet cardboard’; ‘utter twaddle’; ‘an insult to the intelligence’; ‘patronizing drivel’; ‘disappointed’; ‘gnome overload’; ‘should be dumped on the compost heap’; ‘it was bobbins’. And so it goes on.

I could fill this space with similar quotes from various publications and online message boards – and perhaps a few actually in favour of the revamped and now hour-long programme. But what’s striking, as well as deeply concerning, about all that’s been said, written and blogged so far (I write this as the fourth episode airs), is how almost no one has picked up on its almost complete disconnection from the natural world. The toes of earth-friendly organic gardeners like me haven’t just curled, they’ve become excruciatingly contorted.

Unless I’ve missed it, the ‘o’ word – ‘organic’ – hasn’t been mentioned once. In a sop to recycling, the shed doors have been reclaimed from some long-flattened football ground, and we’re being offered apparently ‘thrifty’ gardening tips that are, by and large, simply sexed-up, recycled common sense, but whither organic gardening?

From the outset, the new GW has shamelessly displayed its disdain for even a tad of environmental concern. It showed a battalion of diggers pounding the soil of this new TV garden to a pulp, amid a cloud of carbon dioxide-rich exhaust fumes. We then saw dizzying quantities of concrete being used to make footings for the overly tall brick walls which, at first glance, don’t seem to fall under any ‘eco’ remit. The manufacture of cement, a constituent of concrete, contributes five per cent of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide. So far, the ironically named ‘Greenacre’ has, bar the grass, been anything but green.

The earth-friendly viewer’s unease will only have been compounded by the large and gorgeous wooden greenhouse, which must have cost a fortune (and quite possibly a bit of the earth – is the timber FSC-certified?). It comes complete with a full mains watering system (have they not heard of rainwater harvesting?). This programme’s credibility might be in free fall; its environmental integrity already lies shredded.

You might think, almost a decade into the 21st century, and given all we know about the pressures our life-giving planetary ecosystem is facing, from resource depletion to climate change, that the team behind a flagship gardening programme might just have enough nous to see the future – or at least a glimpse of it – and start joining up a few of the dots.

So what has happened to the ‘o’ word, one used so passionately and persuasively by a distinguished dynasty of past presenters of GW? It would be easy to simply put its disappearance down to the ‘new look’ of the programme, which has all the hallmarks of being aimed mostly at ‘da yoof’, and of a misguided lust for ‘inclusivity’. (Gardening in a way that considers and minimises its impact on the world around us seems pretty inclusive to me.) But it goes deeper than that.

When the new lead presenter of GW, Toby Buckland, got the job last year, one of his first declarations was that he would ‘support the [gardening] industry’. Now, to support the gardening industry, you only have to fulfil one remit: to get folk buying and consuming as much stuff as possible – much of it stuff they probably don’t even need.

The ethos of gardening organically, of course, turns all of this on its head; we’re trying, by and large, to create vibrant gardens without gobbling up nature’s finite resources as if there were no tomorrow. As organic gardeners we’re also trying to take a considered, thoughtful approach to the way we garden, shunning the resource-hungry quick fixes that fertilisers and chemicals (and BBC budgets, apparently) bring.

We’re increasingly using our gardens as routes to greater self-reliance, especially when we grow our own food, and as sounding boards to help us live more connected, sustainable lives. By gardening organically, we become hard-wired into something beyond the ping of the garden centre checkout; we’re with nature, and boy does it have some lessons to teach us.

Teaching – or rather the lack of it – is one of the main bugbears of the new, dumbed-down GW. So far, we’ve had some bad lessons. Blasting water from a hosepipe over a bed of just-planted foxgloves in mid-April is not only unnecessary, it also shows a lack of awareness of just how precious – and finite – fresh, clean water actually is. What would be wrong with watering each plant individually, using water from the garden's water butts? Though there are pitifully few of those – judging by its size, the greenhouse roof wouldn’t take long to fill a 1,500-litre recycled water tank just like mine.

Some of those foxgloves were growing in the new biodegradable plant pots (made from straw, rice husks and bamboo), which can be used for several years. At the end of their life you break them up and add them to your compost bin. These pots, which are now widely available, are one small step towards weaning us off oil, which is needed to make the millions of plastic pots we use each year. Was any of this explained? No. All we got was, “I’m a fan of those.” Nothing learnt there, then.

My first early ‘Swift’ spuds are romping away in an old compost bag turned inside out. GW decided to encourage even more resource-gobbling by planting their spuds in those plastic ‘patio bags’, which have been peddled so hard this spring. If you’ve bought those, you’ve been fleeced. It’s a pity the programme’s ‘thrifty’ thread snapped at this point. It could have saved an awful lot of plastic – let alone money.

The great thing about the earth-friendly, organic approach to gardening is that you don’t have to put a label on it. You can explain all of its basic tenets and guiding principles, as well as demonstrate its practicalities, without one utterance of the ‘o’ word. In fact, I’ve often found it easier to engage folk in discussing organic gardening by, well, not mentioning organic gardening.

Explaining how a more earth-centric way of gardening can actually help to ease environmental burdens might not be ‘sexy’ enough for GW, but it’s a compelling tale that’s completely in tune with a growing understanding of how the way we garden affects the world around us.

There may yet be a glimmer of hope for Gardeners’ World. One area of the new TV garden has been set aside to demonstrate ‘back gardens’, and the plots will be used to ‘illustrate and highlight difficult practical issues that real gardeners face’. Would it be too much to ask that one of these plots, contrived as it inevitably will be, is used to show how it’s possible to garden in ways that don’t cost the earth? Overlook the ‘o’ word if you have to, but don’t stifle its message.

After all, it’s how we’ll all need to be gardening one day. Soon.

This article was first published in Organic Garden & Home, June 2009
Text and images Copyright John Walker

Comments

[Sue Melcaster]

Cor, blimey. Moan, moan, moan. Does this miserable sod not have anything constructive to say? It sounds like he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders and that nowt but him can do any right. I say good luck to any magazine that thinks it's wise to run with such regular negative articles – I imagine it won't be long before most of the readers either slit their wrists or go elsewhere.