day two of open weekend

Radio 3 managed to get me through breakfast and to work without breaking out into listeners' e-mails.  There was something pastoral and vaguely familiar that turned out to be Delius, something choral and rather splendid by Herbert Sumsion (I never heard of him but that's part of the point of listening to Radio 3), and a nice romantic piece of Johann Strauss.  It was a properly civilised start to Sunday, and I hope they keep it up, although that is 'hope' in the sense of 'wish they would' rather than 'expect they will'.

Comparing notes with colleagues in an idle moment this afternoon, it's not just Radio 3 that is alienating its audience though pandering to the idiot element.  On Friday evening, after watching Gardeners' World, the Systems Administrator and I stayed tuned for the first part of Autumnwatch.  I was fairly sure after the first two minutes that I was not going to like this, and it was a great relief when the Systems Administrator agreed that it really was dire, and we switched to recordings of Michael Portillo's railway journeys.  For those of you that didn't see Autumnwatch, two gurning men with bad haircuts and a silly woman with a mirthless smile larked about with zero personal chemistry between them in Westonbirt Arboretum, and an item about horseshoe bats, which should have been jolly interesting and included some fantastic night photography of the bats, was needlessly cut with jumpy camera shots and switches into black and white with dramatic music intended to reference horror films.  Why?  I mean, really, why?  Nature is fascinating, and lots of people like it, as witnessed by the enduring and highly successful career of David Attenborough.  Plus people who stay in to watch telly on a Friday evening are probably middle aged or older.  They (we) don't need to be jollied along as if we were watching a version of Ceebeebies for grownups.  One of my colleagues said that Autumnwatch was dreadful, and she had gone to sleep during in it, and the manager said that it was dreadful, and he had stayed tuned in to the bitter end but wouldn't watch any more episodes.  Apparently after we gave up there was a feature about radio tagging migratory birds, and rather than telling him anything sensible about bird migration the presenters had larked about giggling because the tag fell off.  After BBC2 Gardeners' World crashed and burned when somebody tried to turn it into an offshoot of light entertainment you'd think the management would have learnt something, but apparently not.

It rained for the first part of the morning, which was not supposed to happen.  The forecast said that the rain was due to blow through in the night.  Although as one of my colleagues said, this was still the night.  Things brightened up later on, and we sold a bit more than we did yesterday, but it was still quiet.  I really don't know what to blame.  The overall economy?  The lack of activity in the housing market?  The weather?  Gardening going out of fashion?  I have a nasty feeling that if people aren't thinking about their gardens by now, they aren't going to until next spring.

My first task was to tidy out the small greenhouse in the corner of the plant centre.  It is a lovely greenhouse, I guess Edwardian, with magnificant roof vents and a brick lower half.  Some of the glass has been replaced with polycarbonate, but it is still a nice little building.  It gets used for putting reserved plants to one side, and overwintering tender plants, and also tends to accumulate junk.  The aim was to get rid of the junk, sort out the plants, and have one end dedicated to stock, including things that mustn't be watered too much in the winter or they rot, and the other end for reserved plants.  The manager can then water the stuff that needs to be dry himself, and if they rot he has only himself to blame.  Unfortunately in the course of removing the dead plants, empty compost bags shoved under the staging and other miscellaneous rubbish, I managed to tip compost laden water down my uniform shirt, so by the time the customers arrived I presented a thoroughly shabby sight.  I did have to bite my lip when one person asked me whether I worked here and just say yes, how could I help, rather than yes, it's the uniform shirt with the company logo and compost all over it that's the giveaway.

Two gardening programmes

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.