Friday, March 28, 2008

Is Gardening Coming Back to TV?

Last night I watched a documentary about gardening on CBC TV called Gardening Confidential. It was a whole one hour long! It was full of neat little snippets about all kinds of gardens, tips, tools etc. If you didn’t watch it, check out the web site http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/confidential/garden.html to see what you missed.

I miss the good old gardening shows. Remember when HGTV was the channel to tune in to for ‘Gardener’s Journal’ with Kathy Renwald, ‘Mark Cullen Gardening’ (is that what it was called?), ‘Gardening by the Yard’ with Paul James, and the british show ‘Ground Force’ and many more? Then something happened and fewer and fewer aired and they were replaced by home decorating, renovating and real estate shows. Oh yeah, and the get organized shows. Sure there was the odd garden design or makeover show but they were not the same. I remember reading in a forum a gardeners take on this - she said something about losing the G in HGTV!” I agree.

Another favourite, ‘Recreating Eden’ apparently airs on Vision TV but when I have remembered to tune into watch it’s not on when the schedule says it should be. It continues to be produced and if they were available on DVD, I would buy the seasons I haven’t seen yet.

So I was pretty excited to see this new show and am thankful for all of the excellent gardening web sites and blogs – without them a gardener could get a little stir crazy!

Do you know of any good gardening shows currently on TV?

Regards,
Shirley

3 comments:

IBOY said...

I always say that HGTV is now HTV; I think the problem is that it's way more profitable to put on shows about home buying, remodeling, etc.; there is just more money in it. Gardeners think they've splurged when they buy a twenty dollar rose bush, while they think nothing of spending thirty thousand to remodel the kitchen.
Don

Linda said...

How about HDTV - home decorating tv? I miss all the gardening shows too. I did watch some shows called The City Gardener, and they were interesting.

Carol Soules said...

Maybe we need to all write letters requesting a new network, GTV?
Carol
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