The Lazy Gardener... there is an easier way

                                                 

I have a confession to make...I don’t really like gardening anymore. 30 years of looking after other people’s gardens can do that to a childhood hobby.  But don’t get me wrong – I still love spending time in beautiful gardens; I just don’t want to be tinkering under the bonnet any longer. And I’m not the only one.

‘There are 26 million gardens in the UK, less than 1% of them are owned by gardeners.’

This leaves a huge blind spot – the lazy gardeners.  We make up the majority of society and yet we’re left scrabbling around looking for ideas; most of us make hard work of it because, let’s be honest gardening TV/media is a turn off. Just like cookery was in the early 1980’s.  But then someone with vision let Keith Floyd off the leash.  BBC Gardeners’ World programme used to attract 5 million viewers, now it’s less than 2 million.  Even publishers aren’t publishing as many gardening books.  The masses have changed how they see their gardens; they want to enjoy them but don’t want to be gardeners. 

This blog will show you how to make your garden look stylish even if you’re not interested in Latin plant names.  And once it’s done, that’s it – you’ll only have to ‘do’ any gardening 3 times a year.


Interested?...watch out for 'Lazy Gardening' blog posts.

Gardening; an industry in need of a star

                 

The gardening industry is in a spot of bother. TV viewing figures are down; book sales are down and youngsters are turned off by it.  25 years ago Gardeners’ World programme used to attract 5 million viewers.  Now it’s 2 million.  What is happening?

I’m afraid it’s a victim of our modern times; where perception is everything, reality is nothing. Like it or not the image of gardening needs updating. This is a huge task and there’s only one medium capable of achieving it; television. 

TV can make and then break the public perception of an industry. Look what it did for cookery and cars.  Remember the cookery series Food and Drink back in the 1980’s; pretty ordinary wasn’t it. Then Keith Floyd came along.  Cookery on TV was never the same again.

Top Gear is another success story.  Back then it had a minority audience of bearded men in overalls.  And then a brave TV producer took a risk and let Jeremy Clarkson off the lead.  They may have lost a few viewers initially but they managed to collect some new ones too; the last count was 350 million. If these specialist industries can transform the way they’re perceived, why can’t gardening?    

In evolutionary terms, gardening TV is still at the ‘Food and Drink’ stage. It plods away preaching to the converted…but that market is dwindling. It needs to adapt, it needs new formats and new faces.  These are the people who change the public perception of an industry; its role models. If you only ever saw artists like Tony Hart, rather than Tracey Emin representing the industry, its image would be very different.

It’s so frustrating because gardening TV could have a much wider appeal. Nearly half the population of Britain has a garden but the TV coverage is aimed at only a tiny percentage of them; the gardeners. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of what it’s capable of.  New markets are out there. The masses are interested in their gardens they just don’t have the time to be tinkering under the bonnet any longer. They’re interested in how it looks, not how it works. This market is confident when designing the inside of their homes but clueless when it comes to the outside. What they need is an innovative, practical design programme; not whimsical makeovers or banal competitions. 

Whether you liked it or not, Ground Force was on to something; it got the nation talking about gardens as never before.  The industry should have built on that success; instead the format was copied to death and gardening TV regressed as a result.  

Is the literary novel dead - Time for a Selfie Will?

photo from the guardian.com

According to Will Self, novelist and professor of words no-one has ever heard of, the literary novel is dead ( The Guardian ).  As a fledgling writer of fiction I find his lack of faith disturbing.

I recently went to a lecture delivered by the head of fiction at a publishing house famous for its literary fiction. She held up a copy of an early Julian Barnes book and said if this was written today it wouldn’t be published.  It wasn't because of the content but because of the prose style.

Tastes have changed.  It’s not the literary novel that’s dead just the challenging style of prose they’re written in.  Have you tried reading Ulysses recently? Or for that matter the Will Self piece in The Guardian.  Ideas in literature can be as interesting and challenging as ever but it’s surely the job of great writers to present those ideas in a way that is contemporary and above all understandable. 

Will Self reveals a little of himself by his attitude towards Twitter. He has nearly 50,000 followers – people who chose to listen to what he has to say. But he follows not a single person.  He wants people to listen to him but isn’t interested in returning the favour. 

Surely any writer, even one as well known as Self, who only wants to listen to his own voice is asking for trouble. Writers are communicators. I know I’m only a rookie but isn’t communication supposed to be a two way thing?  Is it any wonder that he feels the literary novel is dead. If he made his prose style even just a little more accessible, maybe more people would be able to understand his challenging ideas. 

The grubby truth is that whether writers like it or not, writing is a business – you produce something that is for sale...and no business survives without listening to its market.   

Nick Turrell picks up the Garden Media Guild’s The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent Award 2013

 

 

 Wed, Nov 27, 2013 18:49 CET

 

The Garden Media Guild awards were held at the InterContinental London Park Lane hotel today. The awards recognise the very best communicators and media professionals across the gardening and horticultural industries.

Nick Turrell, writer for The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times, overcame stiff competition from other newcomers to scoop The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent Award.

 The judges said:

“Nick's writing style is original, refreshing and accomplished. Often funny and sparky, his features are strong and interesting while making serious points. Nick is an engaging writer who has written some very enjoyable pieces during his first year.”


Nick commented:
These judges are obviously very smart people with impeccable taste.  After much deliberation I'd have to agree with all of their comments!
(in case you were wondering, the chap next to me was standing on a box - me and Alan are both really very tall)

November 27, 2013 turned into one of those days I'll remember for the rest of my life.

 

Harmless sexual harassment anyone?

 

 

 

I have a great idea for a funny TV advert.  Picture the scene.  Three old men are having lunch on a deserted Mediterranean beach.  They notice a gorgeous young woman come out the sea after a swim.  She wraps her towel around her and starts to wriggle her swimming costume off underneath it.  We see a close up of her costume arriving at her ankles. She is now naked under the towel.

The old men, who are huddled together at their table, despatch their little dog over to wrestle the woman’s towel away from her.  The dog does as it’s told and her towel is pulled from her, revealing her beautiful naked body; she is forced to cover herself with her hands.  One of the old men then takes a photo and they all laugh. The End. What do you think? Hilarious eh?

Somehow I don’t think so.  And yet Bertolli has this exact advert currently running on our TV screens to prime-time TV audiences.  There is of course one tiny (excuse the pun) difference.  The three old people are women and the embarrassed youngster is a man. So that makes it alright then doesn’t it? It’s just harmless fun.     

Is it somehow more acceptable for old women to ogle a young man than the other way round?  Do women see this as harmless fun and in which case are they guilty of double standards?  If the tables were turned in this advert, there would I’m sure be a fizz of complaints. Perhaps sexual equality is just not possible in society.

I’d love to hear what you ladies think about this...Do any of you secretly like it when you get whistled at by builders? Perhaps Shakespeare was right on the money when he said ‘the lady doth protest too much’.

Twitter biogs; what the...?

If you’re signed up to twitter, you might remember what it was like when you first joined.  Once you’ve registered your name, which of course isn’t your actual name but a bastardised version because someone else has already registered your name.  It’s then straight down to business...write something....hhhmmm.    

‘Twitter’ kindly offers the advice of... start following people.  Terrific; who? Unless you already know someone on twitter the first port of call is your favourite celebrities. This gives you confidence; you actually get to read what people, whom you admire, are talking about.  You feel part of their inner circle.  So you dip your toe and write a few tweets; really whacky, crazy stuff like... ‘I need coffee’...or ‘is it wine o’clock yet’. Hilarious.  Then it dawns on you, they don’t actually read your tweets because they’re not following you back – why would they? 

If you want people to follow you, you have to trawl through ‘the no-bodies’. You obviously don’t want to follow a psychopathic killer, which you suspect some of them are, so you need to ‘find out’ about them first. That means reading their biogs.

When you write your biog, twitter gives you only 140 characters to sum up your entire existence.  Who you are; what you do and somewhere in there you have to get in a pitch for people to follow you as well. This is tight. Your biog is your big chance to hook as many new followers as possible.  It’s fair to say that these 140 characters are pretty important so why do people write such banal, crap for their biogs? 

From those I’ve read; there seems to be several recurring themes; one of them is the ‘I’m totally mad’ theme.  “Yeah I’m mad me, huh huh, I’m so crazy and interesting you must follow me, it’ll be great fun!  What that actually says is ‘I’m so dull I have to pretend to be ‘mad and crazy’. Surely those people that are genuinely ‘out there’ never say so. ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know, was not something Lord Byron said of himself

Another common theme is to mention how much wine you drink.  Remember when you were about 16, the big thing was to tell your friends how much alcohol you could drink.  It was boring then and it’s a story that doesn’t improve with age.  Again how many interesting eccentric drunks tell people how much they drink...they don’t need to, they’re too busy being eccentric and interesting.  ‘I’m mad me and I drink too much wine’ are the two things that say exactly the opposite of ‘what it says on the tin’. 

The one that really puzzles me though and seems to pop up all over the place is this; ‘cat lover’. Am I missing something with the whole cat lover thing?  Is it some secret underground club more powerful than the Freemasons?  You’ve only got 140 characters to do the job of selling yourself, if your choice of pet is that high on your priority list...you need to get out more.

And don’t write some philosophical quote from someone who was interesting but is now dead – that doesn’t get you off the hook and it doesn’t make you as interesting as they were, it says I have no original thoughts of my own.

I beg you twitter users, make your twitter biog; funny, interesting, or original.  The human eye reads fast and 140 characters is not long enough; the reader will have imbibed some of the banal, crap before they wince and move on.  By this time it will have soiled their minds and a constant drip feed of crap biogs can’t be good for anyone. Do you follow?

Penis envy

I was listening to Gardener’s Question Time the other day and it reminded me of the time when I went to one of their recordings and asked a question with a difference.

Have you ever been to a BBC radio broadcast?  It’s quite exciting but completely without glamour. The outside broadcasts are usually held in a village hall, where the local gardening society or Women’s Institute fills the room with plastic chairs, silver hair and diseased plants.  At one end of the hall there’s a table with a green ‘snooker style’ cloth over it.  This is where the experts sit. 

When the crew arrives with the recording gear the sight of the equipment causes a buzz of excitement in the hall. Then something extraordinary happens; it makes the people in the audience regress to 1950’s England. Everyone in the audience is obsequiously polite.  They all suddenly speak with clipped ‘BBC’ accents and they roar with laughter at the weakest of jokes from the panel. 

The members of the audience that get to ask a question go even further, just as the microphone approaches them you can see them nervously twitching and then on cue they revert to a language not heard since the days of black and white TV...“I recently purchased a flowering cherry tree...!” Purchased; there’s a word I haven’t used since, well the 1950’s.

Most of the audience are posh women, keen to show off their gardening knowledge by using as many Latin plant names as possible.  However they like to pronounce them slightly differently to everyone else.  At the recording I went to a very proper lady asked a question about her Scots Pine tree.  She of course used its Latin name of Pinus sylvestris. However she pronounced it as Penis sylvestris.  It went something like this... “I have a magnificent Penis sylvestris but it’s leaning to the left....” She didn’t even flinch.  Nor did the rest of the audience; I damn near wet myself.

This pronunciation tolerance got me thinking and immediately a plan hatched in my mind.  I had brought with me, two diseased plants and was hoping the panel could tell me what was wrong with them.  I knew what they were called but they didn’t know that. 

When the next question opportunity came along I shot my hand up and managed to get the attention of the man with the microphone and he came straight over.  “I’ve been given these two plants as presents but I’m not sure of their correct Latin names” I said loud and clear through the microphone.  “The friend that gave them to me says they’re called Biggus dickus and Sillius soddus, is this correct?” You should have seen their faces.