`Phenomenal!” says Paul James, self-proclaimed “Gardener Guy” and host of Home & Garden Television’s (HGTV) “Gardening by the Yard” and “Paul James’ Home-Grown Cooking.”
“It’s unbelievable. I did a seminar last Saturday, and there were a thousand people. They’re all chanting my name, and I’m thinking to myself, `Wait a minute, I’m just a gardener!’ “
These days, it seems the only thing gardeners like better than getting their hands dirty is to watch other people do it on television. It’s a far cry from the days when PBS’ “The Victory Garden”–which began in 1975 at the height of the back-to-nature movement–had the field practically to itself. In syndication and on cable, shows featuring gardens and gardening advice are popping up like, well, dandelions in an April lawn.
And you don’t need a half-acre under cultivation to tune in.
“It doesn’t matter how big your garden is,” says Roger Swain, host of “The Victory Garden.” “The difference is whether you have a garden or no garden. The single window box filled with herbs gives you your place in the sun. It can be a single African violet on the window of a nursing home, is the way I like to put it.”
But why all the fuss over digging in the dirt?
“The attraction of gardening is it’s meaningful work,” says Swain, who presides over “The Victory Garden” (5 a.m. Mondays on WTTW-Ch. 11; older shows air on HGTV) from the show’s “suburban garden” (actually producer Russ Morash’s Boston back yard). “It connects you with some primitive, basic and delightfully satisfying bits of our history. Putting the seed in the ground, growing the plant, putting the food on the table, that’s where gardening began.”
“I don’t know where it all began,” says James, “or how it got into my soul, but I can tell you that it’s so firmly embedded that I can’t imagine life without gardening. I bought my first house in 1978, and before I had even unpacked the boxes, I was out creating a vegetable garden.”
Despite all the work, James insists gardening can be fun. That’s what he pitched to HGTV when he wanted to go national after years of being the “Gardener Guy” for KOTV, the CBS affiliate in Tulsa, Okla., where “Gardening by the Yard” (7 p.m. Tuesdays; 10:30 a.m. weekends) is still filmed (in James’ back yard–there seems to be a trend here).
“I think Roger Swain is much more knowledgeable than I,” James admits, “but what I think I’ve done differently for gardening programming is to introduce the `wack factor’: Keep it light, keep it very loose and have fun with it.”
James writes his own scripts, sandwiching solid advice between sight gags, puns and goofy jokes. A natty suburbanite in a polo shirt, shorts, glasses and Teddy Roosevelt mustache, James is a contrast to Swain, whose long beard and plaid shirts evoke a folksy flavor. But there are no rules about what gardeners have to look like, or what they have to plant. Some gardeners even seem a little confused.
“Everyone in the North wants an English perennial garden,” says Swain. “I just spent some time down in Georgia and points south, where it seems that everybody wants a New England cottage garden. They would love to have one of those gardens you find in Bar Harbor, Maine, but it doesn’t do very well in Savannah.
But things are changing. “I am encouraged by the growth in the native-plant movement,” says Swain. “After hundreds of years touring the world looking for exotics and dragging them from other continents to plant in your garden, people are suddenly starting to look in their own back yard.”
What about folks who don’t even have a yard? “I think those people are often overlooked by TV gardeners in that millions of people live in apartments and condominiums, where maybe all they’ve got is a terrace with no soil,” James says. “I’ve addressed those issues by talking about growing in containers.”
But whatever size your garden is, Swain insists that the point of having a garden is to be in it. “The best fertilizer for a garden is the gardener’s shadow. Rather than looking at gardens as low-maintenance, you should look at them as enjoyable time. To race through your garden and then go to the exercise club strikes me as nutso.”
Children can even be lured away from video games, if you know how.
“Mudpies,” says James, a husband and father, “that’s my first step. First you play in the mud, get the kids to get an affinity for the dirt–which is easy, I think they’re genetically hardwired to appreciate dirt–then make mudpies. Go out and start collecting flowers and leaves and cool stuff out in the garden and slap them in the mudpie. That’s a great way to get kids started. Then let them grow what they like.”
