G-Be-Gone

There’s been a lot of buzz in the gardening blogs about the state of garden shows on television. The big movement afoot is to put pressure on HGTV that they either remove the G from their name or shape up with some programs.

Elizabeth Licata, in Buffalo, NY (writing on gardenrant.com), quotes Mary Ann Newsome (writing in Boise, Idaho) as saying that there are 284 programs on HGTV, only 11 of them are garden-related, and half of those are those instant landscape makeovers that have nothing whatsoever to do with gardening! She couples this with the fact that demand for vegetable plants was up 40% this year, and the over-all increase in plant demand was up 56%. Surely there are a lot of us garden-lovers out there, and surely I’m not the only one yearning for learning!

Granted, the funding for garden shows is difficult to come by. My husband and I did some pilots about ten years ago, but we didn’t have the editing capabilities and the financial where-with-all to continue. These were, however, real people talking about their real gardens – warts and all, and that’s what we all want to see. Surely there are people with deep pockets who can help. There are certainly no lack of gardens and people to visit.

I’d like to see how gardeners solve problems: pets in the garden, beautifying rocky hillsides, water features, shade-only situations, favorite evergreens in the garden itself, weeds and other enemies, continuous color, reliable backbone plants, planting under birdseed, seed-collecting, unusual annuals, growing with only pennies … the list goes on and on! I don’t even mind seeing these solutions coming from other zones: the principles are the same.