We watched Gardeners' World last night, partly because it was on before Monty Don's Italian Gardens, which was the programme I really wanted to see. The reformed, back-to-basics version is OK. Quite nice, really. If I were still commuting and wanting something very undemanding to collapse to on a Friday night in front of the box I can see it would be fine. They've got rid of the awful embarassing matey backchat between the presenters, and returned to a series of more or less sensible features about gardening.
I would have liked to know more about Carol Klein's old daffodil varieties. Why are they later blooming than the modern ones? I can see the advantages of having developed daffodils that flower especially early, but why drop the late flowering strains from mainstream commerce? And was it a coincidence that most of the varieties featured were white? The last of my daffodils to flower, which are not old or rare varieties, are the white and pale coloured ones. I should have liked to know the name of the one with the gappy, slightly twisted petals, but didn't write it down at the time, and have since had a rummage around the programme's website without finding it. I could presumably watch the programme again on i-player until I got to the feature on daffodils, but I don't think I can be bothered. I suppose the BBC won't name actual suppliers because they can't be seen to favour individual commercial firms (I'd love to know where Monty got those chunky artichoke plants from in their beautiful wrappings), but to be told that old daffodils are hard to find but if you search around you can track them down isn't very helpful.
I wasn't completely convinced by Rachel de Thame's feature on renovating a shrub bed. We saw her take some of the top growth off the condemned Choisya, then a shot of her levering the roots up with a garden fork, then in the next shot it was already quite loose in the ground and she and the plant's owner were tugging at it, and out it came with a final heave. I have never dug up a large Choisya, and it may be that they have sparse root systems, or that this one had been so damaged by the cold that half its roots were dead, but I wonder how long it really took to get out of the ground, and how they actually did it, and what tools they used. The last time I tried to lever up quite a small hydrangea using a garden fork I broke the handle. It is true I have a bee in my bonnet about pickaxes at the moment (the Pittosporum tobira went today. I'm starting to have an azalea theory in its place) but digging out established shrubs is generally heavy physical work. It can take the best part of half a day, if not an entire day, and it is immeasurably easier if you have the right tools (a pickaxe, and possibly a saw for the larger roots). I'm not sure that leaving beginner gardeners with the impression that they can do the job in half an hour with a garden fork is doing them any favours. There was no mention of the fact that before going on to plant your new herbaceous perennials you would need to remove the remaining Choisya roots, or that it would be a very good idea to refresh the soil with plenty of added organic material before replanting.
So Gardener's World probably gets 5 out of 10, or 6 if I'm feeling generous, which is a considerable improvement on its previous rating of about 1. However, Monty Don's Italian Gardens were really good. I thought they would be, having enjoyed his previous series on gardens around the world. Last night he looked at gardens built by ambitious cardinals vying for the papacy. We learnt about the social context of the gardens, why they were built and how they were used, and where they were (not too far from the Vatican). He covered economic and practical aspects of getting that much water into a garden, and practical aspects of construction such as that the sculptures in one garden were carved in-situ from rock outcrops on the site. He mentioned symbolic aspects of the gardens, and the original access routes and viewpoints from which they were approached and seen (not always the current ones). He discussed which original features had been lost (mainly flowers and specimen plants) and the extent to which the gardens differed from their original design. He covered present ownership (mostly state owned). He questioned whether restoration was always wholly desirable, and the difficulty of deciding at what point in time you should restore to, if you were restoring. There was really a lot of interesting stuff in there, and plenty of footage of the actual gardens, which were very handsome. It's a four part series, and if you missed part one it's worth catching on the i-player and then watching the rest of it. I expect to be glued to the TV between 9.00pm and 10.00pm for the next three Fridays.
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