Ego Trips

Hopefully every gardener has a nursery that they love going to, even if it's just to look around.  Mine is Green Acres and it's right down the road from my house.  I consider myself to be a regular there.  I say that with the full understanding that my definition of a regular is probably totally different than their definition would be.  But for the last several years I have gone in there at least three or four times a month throughout the year so at the very least they have to give me "repeat customer", right?  No matter how they classify me, it doesn't change my love for this nursery.  I love the plant selection, I love the layout, I love the staff, I even love the satellite radio station they play on the speakers at just the right volume.  But somehow I manage to get in and out without being recognized much by the staff.  My outgoing friend and neighbor, Brian, is less of a regular but when he goes in there they know him by name!

A lesser man would have his pride wounded by this, but the truth is, I know I'm a bit of a wallflower and I don't go out of my way to make my presence known.  Not unless I've had a few too many cocktails anyway.  So it's good for me to have a friend like Brian who is willing to stop an employee and ask a question or find a manager and negotiate discounts on expensive items like fountains (more on that in the coming weeks, I hope).  Discounts are nice, but the real benefit of having an outgoing friend is that it gets me out of my shell a bit more than I'm comfortable with.  My default setting is to believe that when you put yourself out there you open yourself up to criticism and life is easier without that.  That said, my experience has also taught me that not much good happens when I hide out in life's corners.

So, in the spirit of stepping out of the shadows, I decided to add my blog to Blotanical a few weeks ago and it's been a great way to put my blog - and, by extension, myself - out there.  As a result, my tiny little blog has started to sprout.  (Sorry for the bad pun.)  It's been especially gratifying to have people comment on my blog posts and send me messages.  But it's been even better as a means of discovering some great garden-related blogs and bloggers.  None of that would have happened if I hadn't been willing to take a step out of my comfort zone.

This iris has absolutely nothing to do with the post.  I just like it.

Call me shallow, but the comments, compliments, and page views matter to me.  It's one thing to write a blog for nothing but the sheer enjoyment of writing and chronicling your efforts, but when you have an audience, no matter the size, it makes everything that much more fun and rewarding.  It's good for the ego.

Speaking of which, the other day I decided to make good use of my lunch hour so I drove down to Green Acres and bought a few plants I knew I'd want to get in the ground over the weekend.  While I was paying for them, the cashier asked me if I had a contractor's acount with them.  Hah!  A contractor's account?  Who me?  No, I'm just a quietly obsessed gardener who happens to come in here A LOT.

"No," I said, "I'm just a customer" and I walked out feeling like a true regular.

A Gardener's Admission

I like growing flowers and vegetables. I like pots, arbors, benches, and potting tables. I like shrubs, ornamental trees, vines and enthusiastic ground covers. I like a little bit of green grass and approving comments from neighbors.  I like eating the fruits of my labors.  I like the way orange blossoms smell, the way maple leaves look and the way Lamb's Ears feel. I like all these things, but none of them are why I invest so much of my time and energy in the garden.

I garden because it fills a need in me.



A few things I like

I garden because I’m nostalgic for my childhood which was blessed with unspoiled woods to explore. I garden because I’m nostalgic about those days when we took our time walking home from the bus stop because we were in no hurry and because we could absent-mindedly braid pine needles and laugh at everything while the air was still and crisp and smelled like apples. I garden because I’m nostalgic for that time when we knew the neighbors were gone and we sat on the top of their fence with our legs hanging over and we took our first good hard looks at their koi pond. I garden because I’m nostalgic for the summers when we made fort walls out of fallen branches and sheets of moss pulled from ancient rocks. I’m nostalgic for those days when we would huddle around a wild honeysuckle plant and suck the nectar from its flowers. It was like sipping sunshine itself.



Photo courtesy of Keyseeker on Morguefile.com

I live almost a thousand miles away from where I spent those days. If there was some way to calculate emotional distance, I would guess that I feel even farther away than that. There are very few similarities between where I live now and where I lived then, but when I garden I feel closer to that place . . . at least on an emotional level.   For some reason, when my knees are on the ground and when the smell of earth is in my nostrils I feel transported.  Sometimes I feel transported to another time, sometimes to another place, almost always to a different state of mind. 

I garden because I can plant a tree that will give me the kind of deep shade I loved when I was 10. I garden because I can fill empty spaces with grasses and shrubs and branches that all work together to give me a spot – just one spot – where I can sit with my eyes wide open and still get that feeling I had so long ago when I sat in one of our forts.

Too much of our lives are spent working for grown-up things like paying bills, saving for college educations or retirement.  We work so we can afford a car and we need the car so we can go to work.  We work so we can have a sense of security or we work to achieve validation of our self-worth.  Too many of us work at jobs that don't inspire us, that don't excite us, that don't fill us up. 

So I admit it freely here: I garden selfishly. I garden because it makes me feel satisfied, it makes me feel young again, it makes me feel creative, and it makes me feel like I am in touch with myself and with the world around me.  Gardening makes me feel.

Garden TV: Wilting Before Our Very Eyes?

I’ll admit it.  As much as I love working in the yard and being generally outdoorsy, I’m still a TV junkie.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a couch potato, but good TV is like art to me.  Because TV can combine music, poetry, story-telling, dance, cinematography, and drama it can achieve what I like to call "high art" although I readily admit the vast majority of TV shows do not.

If you are reading this blog, chances are that you would agree that gardening itself can be an art.  It seems logical to conclude then that adding an artistic subject like gardening to an artistic medium like TV could propel the end product into High Art, but for some reason garden programming has never really achieved that.  In fact, much of it is downright bad and boring.

In spite of that, I do have the word “garden” programmed into my DVR so any show with "garden" in the title gets recorded. Sometimes that means I have to go through my library and erase movies like “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, "Garden State" (great soundtrack, by the way) and "Grey Gardens" as well as a surprising amount of QVC's gardening sale-a-thons or whatever they’re called.  But it also means I have hours and hours of sometimes inspirational and entertaining garden programming.

From time to time on this blog I am going to review some of those shows.  This time I will start with one of the better known gardening shows, “Gardening by the Yard”.

When I first bought a house and had to tackle the daunting task of doing something with the yard, "GbtY" was the first gardening show I discovered on HGTV.  In that way, it served as my introduction to some of the basic and finer points of gardening and it became the standard by which I would measure all other garden shows.  Like an adult child, I would wake up on Saturday mornings and tune into "GbtY" as if it were my favorite cartoon.  I devoured episodes as quickly as they aired and after I got my fix I would be stoked about gardening and I would rush out into the yard or drive off to the nursery armed with some new knowledge or inspiration. 

The show is hosted by Paul James who goes by the alias “The Gardener Guy.”  It's not a super creative nickname, but that’s just me being unnecessarily persnickety.  Paul James is the perfect host for a gardening program.  With equal amounts levity and botanical nerdiness, James walked the fine line between entertainment and education.  The result was probably the most accessible program for new gardeners with enough meat and variety to the programming to keep the interest of more seasoned veterans.  Most of the segments were filmed either in James’ own yard in Oklahoma or at the gardens and nurseries of show guests across the US. That gave the show a practical, real-world-applicable feel to it.  As much as we can all marvel at the world’s famous gardens and conservatories, most of us have little gardens attached to humble abodes and no staff to attend those gardens so it helps to see the way a pro tackles routine functions like edging beds, storing tools, composting, thinning vegetables, and cleaning up after storms - all of which are representative of the topics covered by "GbtY".

"GbtY" taught me several things that have become standard operating procedure in my life as a gardener. For one, I stole his term for justifying not waging an all-out war against weeds in my lawn: “biodiversity.” Also lawn related, James was the person to convince me to give up the putting green look.  He convinced me that the best thing I could do for my lawn was to set my mower at its highest setting, use a mulching mower and let the clippings fall where they may, mow regularly so that I wouldn't cut off too much at once, and to fertilize less often than the fertilizer companies say we should.  

The show was also my first encounter with people sharing both creative and functional ideas for the garden.  Suggestions like using wine corks as mulch for a container or using a half wine barrel as a base for a patio table opened my eyes to a creative aspect I hadn't considered before.  That really helped me make the leap from being a guy that did yard work to a guy that loved to tend his garden. 

  

But like so many things (such as Seattle’s old Kingdome), one of the most captivating aspects of this show was its demise.  In 2008, HGTV decided that they didn't want any more newly-produced episodes of "GbtY".  Over the years, the show had compiled an impressive catalogue of episodes and it appears that the network concluded it would be more profitable to air reruns which it still does today (usually at the crack of dawn on weekends). 

As one of the most successful garden shows, I see HGTV’s decision not to purchase new episodes of the show as the canary in the coal mine. Clearly, if GbtY isn’t going to generate enough advertising dollars, no gardening show will.  Paul James wrote on his blog that the decision didn’t surprise him in the least.  He also made a fascinating observation: even though gardening interest is stronger than ever and we spend billions on it collectively every year, the networks simply can’t get enough ad revenue from garden shows to continue running them.  I don’t know if you blame that on gardeners not watching garden programs or the garden industry companies that either choose not to, or can’t afford to purchase, television ads.  Either way, it's apparent that as viewers begging for more garden programs we can't be choosers anymore. 

Check out Gardener Guy TV for several more 2-3 minutes clips by clicking here.
You can also see full episodes of GbtY by visiting HGTV's web site here.