Gardens
For couch potatoes
Ursula Buchan
One of the more depressing phrases in the English language (along with 'self- catering accommodation', 'pay as you earn' and 'please make your way up to the carvery') is 'instructional video'. The underlying assumption that we are such sofa slumpers that we need visual images to tell us how to make everything from zabaglione to exotic love is not one I accept with any enthusiasm.
My prejudice was reinforced by a few practical gardening videos, which I watched in the late 1980s. They were notable for the plinky-plonky music which accompanied every meaningless view of a garden, for the jerky and unhelpful camera work, the diffi- dence of the presenters, and the lack of thought about content which meant an alarming leap straight from sowing seed to hybridising rhododendrons.
That was in the early days, however, and they could only improve. And, I have to admit, they have. For a start, they are bet- ter organised: there is (usually) a more nat- ural progression between sequences, and the ones made by PeriwinIde Productions are indexed, so that those people with a tape counter on their video machines can 'look up' a sequence almost as easily as refer to a book. Most important, the cam- era work has improved markedly so that, if someone takes a knife to cut off a shoot in the middle of a plant, you can now see clearly what they are doing.
The Royal Horticultural Society has its own series called The Practical Guides (made by Two Four Productions). This is no surprise, for it is the Society's job, after all, to educate its members. The subjects range from propagation and vegetable growing to water gardening and even bon- sai. The more specialist subjects have spe- cialist experts but, generally, you can depend on a succession of chaps in green, be-logoed sweatshirts and unmemorable names, from the RHS gardens at Wisley, telling you quietly and authoritatively how things should be done.
Periwinkle Productions, which make and sell a range of videos called Practical Gar- dening Techniques, favour a dialogue between a presenter (usually a telly-famil- iar gardener, like the ubiquitous, and jolly, Anne Swithinbank) and a specialist grower. The result is less earnest, if sometimes also less illuminating. One of the best is Rhodo- dendrons and Azaleas, fronted by Christo- pher Fairweather, a genial patrician with a natural feel for the medium. You can also get a number of Gardener's World videos, which are not shot specially but taken from the BBC 2 programme of the same name, starring the affable and late, lamented Geoff Hamilton.
The experts have gained in confidence since last I watched them at it. The improvement in technical quality of televi- sion gardening programmes must have helped. For example, some real stars were born on Channel 4's ground-breaking Gar- dener's Calendar programmes in the mid- 1980s: Harry Baker (Apples & Pears and Soft Fruit for Periwinkle) is a kind of genius at describing the intricacies of cultivating fruit and it would be a dullard indeed who was not spellbound when he explains how to prune by the modified Lorette system. One or two of the old wrinkles have not yet been ironed out. These videos still pre- suppose the viewer has good gardening equipment but no knowledge (which is not how life works at all), and the musical plinky-pionkyness has regrettably survived. Nor have they acquired much glamour over the years. A lot of footage is still shot, either in barn-like, aluminium, professional glasshouses or in tiny amateur ones, with a few polyanthuses doughnutting in the back- ground. The intercutting of dollops of instruction with shots of wonderfully colourful gardens and blooming flowers and fruit only serves to emphasise the gen- erally workaday nature of the surroundings.
It is just not easy to imbue the taking of a streptocarpus leaf cutting with a touch of magic, when it inevitably involves dirty fin- gernails and grubby compost. Much as I love practical gardening work, I am not blind to that. Worthy as they are, these films struggle to compete in allure even with cookery videos. You cannot make hor- mone rooting powder look or sound as interesting as Chinese five-spice powder.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed my week slumped in front of the box. I remember, particularly, watching entranced as a chap in a green sweatshirt showed me how to twin-scale snowdrop bulbs. I know that nei- ther I, nor one viewer in a hundred, will ever take the trouble to emulate him. So this was knowledge for its own sake and I am all for that.
For a list of RHS practical videos (and others on gardens), write to the Newnham Video Collection, P.O. Box 17, Plympton, Devon PL7 SYG. For Periwinkle Productions, write to Old Bank House, Shore Road, Warsash, Southampton, Hants S031 6FS.
Previous page
