lol that's a good idea. Any takers?

The only shows I can tolerate are garden smart and victory garden reruns. All the HGTV shows are extreme this or extreme that and all are complete redo shows. Apparently the only gardening worth doing is paying to rip everything out, paying to toss it all into a dumpster, and then throwing more cash at a box store garden center to overplant all the new beds.

I guess no advertisers will back a show that tells you to grab an old yogurt container, fill it with soil, and nurture a seed that will eventually give you a yummy tomato. Takes too long and how much money can you make off recycled containers and homegrown veggies?

I gave up on HGTV gardening when I realized almost all of the shows are done in sunny southern California and nothing theny plant will do well in my 6B shade gardens.

Kato: That's what books and magazines are for...

It just seems odd that the "G" in HGTV is so incredibly under-represented in terms of broadcast hours.

i started with victory garden.. is was on saturday morning .. just in time to motivate me for a w/end of digging ... he [roger??] started as a man.. last i saw him.. i couldnt believe how old he was ... now he is grandpa ... probably wearing the same pair of overalls ..

learned all about soil prep for sure.. tools .. plants.. bulbs.. seeds ... etc .... but as my lot size grew.. his info got limited ... i mean really 'double dig' 5 acres.. lol ...

martha was to girlie for me.. and way outside my budget.. and all the craft stuff was not what i wanted .. and on some level .. her multi-million dollar garden stared bugging me.. as i started to realize.. she probably had 20 paid gardeners to maintain it ....

paul the clown was... well.. a clown ... he was entertaining ... but it wasnt enough gardening inside the clowning ...

and then.. when i started realizing.. in my head.. i was correcting things they said.. i realized the limitations of a half hour show ... and that i was wasting precious garden time.. with shows that were pissin me off .. lol ...

so .. no.. i dont miss them ...

ken

Well said, Kato.

Ken, I agree. I loved watching Paul James, but just because he was so funny. He was almost a complete idiot as a gardener, but I do give him credit for learning from some of his mistakes and coming back to tell us about them.

Has P. Allen Smith actually ever had his hands dirty? I think he's too busy moussing his hair, but his show does include more plant close-ups than any other I've seen regularly. Isn't he usually in Virginia?

I would like a show that just visited a fantastic garden each time, in different states, and most of it was the gardener talking about their garden and gardening practices.

My biggest gripe with any gardening show is that they are all aimed at extreme newbies. They should use the correct terms so the newbies can learn them. And the way they gloss over things, generalize, and give ridiculously simplistic advice like, "just water it once a week," "never needs pruning," "spring is the time to trim shrubs," and often continue to wax poetic about exotic invasives.

Oh my, I just had someone taking the MG course ask if I was interested in going with her (read that as drive her) to a presentation by P Allen himself. I really did try to be nice when I said that I certainly would not pay money to go hear him speak. LOL

'ken' wrote: and that i was wasting precious garden time.. with shows that were pissin me off ....

But it still would be great to have garden shows...heck even bad ones, airing during our downtime i.e. the winter. I am really now getting 'stir crazy and I can't even see any of our gardens for the snow.

This post was edited by rouge21 on Thu, Mar 7, 13 at 17:30

nope, don't watch TV and I don't subscribe to monthly mags either. Always too simplistic, rarely innovative and once you have been through an annual season, it will basically be repeated, ad nauseum, with the same agenda of getting us to buy serious rubbish - the fad for plastic cloches and flat pack raised beds is showing no sign of abating in the UK, along with a ludicrous market for veggie plants (who are these people who are so utterly incompetent that they are buying trays of carrot and lettuce seedlings? In their millions. And if they are watching the current gardening TV, they are unlikely to get much smarter since, as far as I can see, gardening has become an offshoot of shopping.

I'm glad you mentioned a gardener's diary, I miss that one. Plus A gardener's Journal with Kathy Renwald was another good one. I did a google on these shows and a GW post from ten years ago came up..... it was a complaint of how HGTV's gardening shows were going downhill..... pretty much the same thread as this one, but it mentioned a couple other long deceased but not missed HGTV shows. Nothing lasts these days, they kinda all suck. Good for P Allen Smith though, his garden home retreat seems to be paid for and even though his shows are about as in depth as a comic book, I still watch them (Ken- at night when it's too dark to garden) All HGTV shows have to be TIVOed, usually I cut through the commercials and a 30 minute show is reduced to 15 minutes tops.

Oh I miss Gardens of the National Trust , it was an HD series on England's NT gardens. Just a couple episodes, but they were an hour long and covered some amazing gardens. I wish I had saved them to DVD.

Still no takers on starting their own show? All it takes is a camera and a youtube account....... please?
If you wear a floppy hat and sun dress it will be as if Erica has returned ;)
Frank

Just for the record (again for Ken), I was picturing the sun dress and floppy hat role to be more of a female role.

What about Growing a Greener World? And is Victory Garden done forever... With eternal reruns?

I don't know.... I'd kinda like to see Ken in a sundress and floppy hat....

;)
Dee

Looks like that's unanimous!

trust me.. you dont want to see it ... lol

i did like the diary show.. but these shows made me want to burst outdoors and dig holes ...

to watch the diary.. i really needed sedation ... and then.. well .... never made it to the garden.. lol ... maybe that show is how i learned to GIVE and take garden tours .... so much can be taught.. on a ramble around the yard ... with a new friend ...

ken

Our local PBS station is running old P Allan Smith reruns at 1am. If nature calls at the right time, I will see it. Not the best garden show, but better than nothing. And I am never out working with my plants, at that time. Al

The "G" they do show on HGTV is heartbreaking. I don't think I've ever seen them do an installation that wasn't supposed to be "low maintenance" --it appears their highest aspiration in a garden is that one musn't spend time gardening in it.

And their second highest aspiration is to use any unpleasant combination of red, gold, and purple foliage they can put together.

The lack of good gardening programs is a shame. Most now are just landscaping makeover shows where the plants are secondary and rarely mentioned. The homeowners all need space to "entertain" and require a water feature and a fire-pit. What is with all the ****ing firepits lately! I prefer my time spent in the garden not to be at night staring at a fire, feeding mosquitoes, sucking in smoke, and giving myself a sore throat and lung cancer.

The "good" garden shows are mostly touring a well to do persons impeccable estate, or are too simplistic like growing an herb in a pot on a windowsill. Many of the programs, especially the PBS ones suffer from the problem of having a lot of "filler" instead of helpful information. Filler like the overuse of segment transitional graphics with cheesy music. If you've seen P.Allen Smith's show you know what I mean. Those little transitions take up half the show!

I did enjoy Gardener's Diary but only every saw the last couple of seasons and they never seemed to rerun the earlier ones. For a while the most recent seasons were on Hulu too.

I watched P. Allen Smith for awhile but the information was light and he was not relatable in any way. His "home" on his new show is obscene. He talks a lot about being green while building it, but unless he has 30 other people living with him that we never see.... it is definitely is not "green".

"Gardener Guy" Paul James was likable and I enjoyed it, but it wasn't super informative. They definitely shouldn't have canceled it considering it was their only gardening show left.

They still show "Victory Garden" on PBS, but they are all reruns from its last couple of seasons, sometimes re-edited to give the impression that they are new. I don't think I have seen a new one since 2008? I wish I could have seen the earlier ones that had more practical info. The later ones did a lot of touring of public gardens.

I tried "Garden Smart" and "Growing a Greener World" on PBS and found them both to be low quality, boring, and not containing enough useful information to put up with it.

There was a show I watched some of streaming on Netlfix a few years ago, but I don't know if it is available anymore. It was "People, Places, and Plants" with Roger Swain. I think it went with a magazine or something. It was ok.

The Brits I think have higher quality programs, but the climate is different of course. I watched "The Art of Gardening" on dvd. It was a little slow and well....Britishy, but still ok :)

I enjoy Alan Titchmarsh who has had several gardening shows in the U.K. "Ground Force" was a garden makeover show but better and more practical than the U.S. ones. He also had a couple of short series "How to Be a Gardener" and "Love Your Garden". The former was better and was just him showing how he plans a landscape with drawings up through the planting and maintenance. In "Love Your Garden" he was a bit older I think and so transitioned to a bunch of guest segments instead of showing him gardening by himself. It was not as good.

I have found YouTube to be a good way to watch many of the British shows. Below is a link to one of the user's list that has a lot of the British shows and other gardening shows and segments. I haven't watched "Around the World in 80 Gardens" yet, but have it in my saved list to watch.

I wish there was a way to watch the earlier seasons of "Gardener's Diary", "Gardener Guy", "Victory Garden", etc. They only every rerun the most recent seasons and they aren't on dvd. Occasionally a few shows or segments will pop-up on You-Tube, but it is not much.

Here is a link that might be useful: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrGrizzerBear?feature=g-wl

Fun thread.

-molanic, thanks for posting the link to those shows.

I agree with pretty much everything stated before. Don't have cable myself, but now and again watch pbs garden shows ((when I can figure out when the heck they are on)).

The Victory Garden was okay, but nothing stellar. Very little of the plant selection related to me, or really to anyone outside of CA. I didn't "get" the food segment at all. There's the Food Network for that I believe...lol. Plus the host's impossibly white, break-out-every-time-the-camera-points-at-him smile got a bit annoying for some reason.

The "P" in P. Allan Smith may stand for Pretentious. While his gardens are grand and nice looking, they have no character or personality to me. The shows provide no depth or insight for the long-time gardener. And honestly, if I am watching a garden show, why the heck do I want to hear about your favorite throw pillows or how to make a tangerine and bay leaf wreath??! Its like if you were watching the nightly news and they suddenly did a segment on how to knit sweaters.
CMK

It is easy enough to send off an email to HGTV complaining about the lack of representation of the "G" in the network's name and requesting such shows. I have done just that.

"to watch the diary.. i really needed sedation"

For me, watching the the diary was sedation. lol Don't get me wrong, I loved the show, as I said above. I think it was the aura of a flower child that Erica gave off. And the poem at the start set the tone. How'd that go?

What grows in a garden so lovely and rare?
Poppies and hemp plants and junkies grow there.

That may not be quite right, but it was something like that.

tj - who saw Ken in a floppy hat, and does not want to see the sundress.

This post was edited by tsugajunkie on Fri, Mar 8, 13 at 20:14

Something like that! LOL, I think I'm picking up on a second talent.

Thanks for the link molanic. You may have just killed off hours and hours of my sitting around on the computer time. At least there are no comercials!
I should really get the stupid internet-on-the-tv-system working, but for a stupid as I accuse it of being, it's still got the edge on me. (that doesn't put me in a good spot)

Great comments, all. CMK, I really chuckled over your post!

Sadly, Campanula pretty much hit the nail on the head: HGTV is all about SHOPPING and pushing the sponsor's products. Many of these "makeover" shows are geared to year-round outdoor California living, as someone said --- fire pits, outdoor bars/kitchens and water features. Yuk!

Thanks for the links, Molinac. You pretty much said it all for me. HGTV should be called HMTV (Home Makeover TV).
Molie

"Its like if you were watching the nightly news and they suddenly did a segment on how to knit sweaters."

LOL. Loved this. Reminds me of how JF Styer nursery, when taken over by Urban Outfitters, shifted the focus from rare-ish plants to ridiculously expensive, imported-from-China trifling bric-a-brac and housewares.

I regret to inform you: the western world is in a constant state of intellectual regression. I could spend several paragraphs documenting it, but why bother. I will note that I was recently skimming through "The Culture of Narcissism" by Christopher Lasch, and found it absolutely hilarious that in 1979 he bemoaned the lack of intellectual vigor around him. Remember, back when conservatives watched William F Buckley and not Sarah Palin? When families still took their kids to Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge and not water parks?

Gardening - thought provoking gardening that is - is simply a very difficult thing to package into a brainless 30 minute cable program. I don't expect anything like A Gardener's Diary to ever return. At least not to cable. Heck, about 1/2 the programs on Discovery would make the founders of that network roll over in their graves. The only hope for tidbits of useful knowledge are programs built around a cult of personality, like Martha Stewart and P. Allen Smith. In an age where celebrities are deified, that's all that appeals to most punters anymore.

Part of my personal introduction to advanced gardening were the Peter Seabrook segments on Victory Garden, where he visited famous gardens around the world and would shameless coo over all the exotic and desirable plants. I really wish some of those were on youtube, but I've never seen any.

As for magazines, I still think the UK gardening magazines are sometimes worthwhile. Mainly "The Garden" which is the official RHS publication, and agonizingly expensive to subscribe to in the US. (By design I suspect...I think they fear floods of letters from people in Kansas on when to plant their tomato seeds or how to replant a sickly Acer rubrum LOL) I have a few old copies of Horticulture from the 1980s and I think the quality of the writing was higher back then. At least these days we have somewhat interesting plant blogs that are free to read, like "Transatlantic Plantsman."

I watched HGTV endlessly when they first began. It's been years since I've watched a single episode. I've watched most of the U.S. shows and some of the British shows mentioned at one time but have had complete disinterest in them for so long, I can't remember the last time I watched a garden related show.

I hadn't given it much thought, actually, but I see some of my reasons expressed here. As for the quality of the programming, isn't it true of all television? But, don't the television shows try to 'give the people what they want'? If you actually tried to put an 'educational' gardening show on, that was more like a master's gardening course in episodes, would there be enough interest in watching it? Or do most people find that too much work, tedious and not exciting or flashy enough? And how has HGTV stayed on the air? They still have an audience, which is sort of sad. It was a great idea gone wrong.

After this week, it should not be a problem for any of us. We all get to 'garden' instead of watching it. :-)

"Garden Programs"

"Garden Progarms"

"Garden Progarms"

"Garden Progarms"

I have come to love British gardening programs

Thanks very much for those links GardenEcstasy. This does give me something to do while waiting for the snow to melt ;).

Yea, PM2, very true that soon those of us in colder areas will be joining our fellow gardeners outside and then TV? ---- Who needs it?

Thanks, GE. I've watched and bookmarked the "Garden Programs" They're very informative and what I'd like to see more of on American channels.
Molie

You're welcome, I don't know if you saw but on the link to
Dailymotion you should be able to catch the new season of Gardeners World, I also really enjoyed the series 'A year at kew' found on youtube. I still very much miss Gardener's Diary on HGTV but Ken is right TV is dead, my blood just boils watching endless commercials about how this or that medications side effects will slowly kill you.

This post was edited by GardenEcstasy on Tue, Mar 12, 13 at 15:16

my blood just boils watching endless commercials

And that is why the (HD)PVR is the best invention since sliced bread.

Thanks for bringing this topic up again. I think I posted on the first one some years back.

I too miss the "Good Old Days" on PBS and HGTV.
I don't watch anything on HGTV since they discontinued the gardening shows. And I just don't care for the content of the newer Victory Garden series. I'm so old, I remember the informative man near the beginning of the Victory Garden who wore over-alls and talked about planting seeds and taking cuttings. That was when I really learned a lot about gardening from TV. Alas, those days are over, I guess.

Our PBS station thinks that everyone wants to cook constantly and not do much else. And if it isn't a cooking show, it's a travel show. I paint and I sew, as well as garden, and it's hard to find a painting or sewing show to watch now, even on the PBS Create Channel. And I know those shows are being made and are shown on other PBS stations throughout the country, but not in the Pittsburgh area.

My husband and I talk about an old show on PBS that was about gardening with a married couple who was probably in their late 70s or 80s who lived in Watertown, New York. They were just amazing and so was their yard. I'd love to see some episodes of that show again. I wish I could remember the name of it. We did enjoy it so. As did we enjoy A Gardener's Diary from HGTV. Those were the days....

Linda

I remember that older couple. I think the show you are thinking about was "From a County Garden", I think the woman's name was Anstice or something similar. Do you remember a show from maybe Iowa? There was a woman who grew her garden in dozens of maybe 5x5 raised beds, each one had a different color scheme or some other planting experiment. I liked that one for a while.
Is the victory garden still on air? I think it was one of the longest running garden shows ever. I also lost interest as each host seemed to have whiter teeth than the last and less and less gardening was done on air.

-GardenEcstasy, AWESOME BLOSSOM! Thanks a lot for posting those shows...
;-)
CMK

Bless you, kato_b, you got it! Now I don't have to keep thinking about it, trying to remember the name of the show. The TV station in Watertown,WPBS, they produced the show and distributed it to PBS stations. That's where I got the link to "Watertown."

The couple on the show were Larry and Anstice Esmonde-White and according to this site, Anstice is still gardening:
http://www.esmondewhitehouse.com/about.html
and she is 93, at the writing of the website. That's amazing. Gardening must indeed be good for the body and soul! Thanks again for your help kato_b!

I don't remember the show about the raised bed gardening but I wish I had seen it. That had to be interesting and informative.

Linda

In my opinion the best gardening show ever on TV was on PBS and made in England sometime in the 1970's I think. It was called the victorian garden. It featured an old man who was apprenticed as very young boy to a grand Victorian estate as a gardeners helper. They had rebuilt an estate garden with lovely glass greenhouses. This old guy showed us how a victorian garden was run. There were many tricks and methods that were very interesting and some of them I use to this day. It was a very good primer for gardening before the use of pesticides and commercial fertilizer.
I especially enjoyed the one on espaliating fruit trees and the use for those garden walls. They were not just walls but contained brick ovens that they would light to keep the frost off of the fruit trees.

A very interesting show and apparently there are sequels but were never shown on PBS. I sure would like to see them as well as the Victorian gardener all over again

With all the gardening departments in many stores that are loaded with items to tempt the gardening public, you have to believe that there is quite a lot of interest in all types of gardening right now. That is why I'm so puzzled as to why there are so few gardening shows on PBS and cable channels. If there's $$$ to be spent, you would think that sponsors would be crawling out of the woodwork to pay for shows to showcase their products, as well as how to use them. Just doesn't make sense that we are posting here, lamenting the lack of informative, intelligent gardening shows.

The Barbara Damrosch, Eliot Coleman series was the best ever. I taped it many years ago - loaned it out-never saw it again. I wish they would play re-runs. The information is timeless!

On YouTube: Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Klein. It's British, so not everything may apply, but it is WONDERFUL.

Also on YouTube- Fork to Fork for veggie gardening. Also British.

I've also wondered with all the money spent on gardening, why HGTV has no real gardening shows. Then I realized it's because plants can't compete.

Can you imagine them trying to attempt a show?

The plants must compete with each other in order not to be dug up by the contractors. Realtors focused on what sells the house fastest will be the judges.

After checking back within the hour, .....uh, the garden looks pretty much the same. It becomes obvious that plants can't compete worth cr@p!

Forget the garden show. Rip these suckers out, and ignore that G in HGTV. There must be about a million first-time home buyers we can film instead.

My favorite garden series ever was Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn. I found a teaser, it also looks like part of another episode from the series is at the same link.

Here is a link that might be useful: Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn - Formal Gardens

Experiencing garden withdrawal today. The temperature was warmer but it's also been very, very windy --- which made it too cold to be in the garden. So instead I revisited this thread to look for more garden shows.

Scrolling through, I realized that I also used to watch Erica Glasener on "A Gardener's Diary". Thanks, TJ! When I clicked on her blog, there she was --- still wearing that brimmed hat. She said that her shows are owned by HGTV, but that they can be watched on Hulu. Don't know about Hulu, but there is a link to her page.

Molie

Here is a link that might be useful: Erica Glasener

There are some garden tours in the Bahamas available on Bahamas Realty Now youtube page https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZJ0HQNm8-MV0xxE98n2PAqlvoWuvvob

We have a lovely little local garden show here called Georgina Blooms, hosted by Kathy Bruce, a member of our hort Society. She visits people's gardens (she's been at mine to deal with hostas and gardening cellulitis) and she visits local garden centres, growers, etc. It is generally very informative and a good half hour diversion. I suspect it isn't shown widely beyond or Town, but you might be able to find it on line with ROgers Cable 10.

Interesting thread...I remember watching The Canadian Gardener on CBC years ago...that's why that lady mentioned in an above post looked familiar, Anstace Esmonde-White and her husband Larry, used to be regular guests on that show.

The only gardening program I watch regularly these days would be BBC Gardener's World...not so much for the gardening ideas because it's a much different zone, but more for the entertainment factor...it's presented beautifully.

Update:

Just this week have begun watching the Australian series DREAM GARDENS.

For a 30 minute show it is well thought out with the writing/narrative of a high quality.

DREAM GARDEN TV Series

From my brief time in a portion of Australia (granted, the portion where the majority of Australians live) I can say the gardening culture there is more "serious" than the US. (Not that it would take much lol.) It is a commonwealth country after all, settled mostly by the English. It definitely helps that it's a climate where year round gardening is possible. Even though they seemingly have a lot of land and very few people, much of the outback isn't suited to conventional agriculture. So the land use patterns reminded me more of Europe (the UK specifically) or the denser parts of the US. Melbourne and Sydney and their suburbs would remind people much more of London or the San Francisco Bay area than say, Atlanta. Even if the climate differences weren't taken into account. There isn't miles and miles of exurban sprawl with hundreds of thousands of housing units on well and septic. It's denser suburbs clustered around commuter rail lines that often quickly give way to open agricultural land past where the lines end. When people have a limited amount of land and/or places with over 1/4 acre of land are hard to purchase and insanely expensive, they tend to make more with what they've got. Just for kicks, for example, I looked for places for sale in the Blue Mountains with 1 hectare or more of land. It would be at least 5x harder and maybe 2X as expensive to buy such places as in say, the outer suburbs of Philly, DC, or Baltimore.

Exceptions would be, for example, the Dandenongs outside Melbourne, where there is a lot of older, sometimes stately housing stock on larger lots and quaint village centers, sort of similar to say, Bucks Co, PA, Weston, MA, North Shore of Chicago, etc. (even the western US ended up a little more like Europe in this regard, especially California, more because of water and geographical issues than an absolute shortage of land) But, again, because people had to pay more for such acre or more properties than they would have in various American cities, they are making the most of the garden space. And some of the private gardens I saw driving around were very impressive.

I have seen 2 episodes rouge and quite liked it. The older couple that removed the vista spoiling hydro poles and the white house underpinned by the large rock, they installed a rooftop garden as well.

Thanks for the recommendation, rouge...I watched it and it's amazing how much money these people spent on their landscaping projects. The most modest project cost-wise was the very first episode, where the designer was the homeowner's son and the labour was a team effort by the family. I wonder if a second season is in the works?