Opinion: Gardeners’ World and its problem with wealth

I love Gardeners’ World.

My gardening naiveté has been tamed and minimized by the sage-like knowledge of the horticultural world that comes flowing from all of the presenters.

There are really three tenets of the entire show. Anyone can do it; it is good for your mental health and wellbeing; and you do not need a lot of money. These are positive messages, which optimistically might inspire more people to take up gardening, but cynically help to bolster ratings and pander to a well-worn-in audience, even at the expense of sounding mawkish and cliched.

The trouble with having tenets is that they constantly have to be assuaged. If anyone can garden, then the show needs to demonstrate a diverse group of people, either as presenters or from sent-in videos, promoting and succeeding at gardening. If gardening improves mental health and wellbeing, then personal stories are needed that explain how gardening helped cope with mental illness or disorders. These first two tenets are usually met exceedingly well, even though if you obsessively stream the show you might get a little sick of hearing about mental health, and desire to see a garden that just kills everybody.

The last major message, about not needing a lot of money, is where the show clearly suffers some dissonance.

The subject of horticulture is just as immense as the space that is pragmatically required to showcase it all. Long Meadow is perfect for the show; it appears expansive, there is immense variety and diversity, and the different gardens within allows Monty to address many different topics within horticulture. But it is also an extremely large private garden that is not near housing estates or main roads. There are ornamental pots within the garden that together would cost as much as someone’s full time annual salary. Not only does this point to considerable private wealth, but the success of the show, and the values and knowledge that it wants to impart, are only possible because of the wealth.

Long Meadow provides gardening enthusiasts with a fantasy. An immense ecosystem with braggadocious diversity, where the only shown manmade structures are the ones that serve plant growth. This fantasy portrayed through the show is given to viewers at next to no cost through their television packages. But for Gardeners’ World, cheap sets and props cannot really be used because it has to be the real thing. To provide this all natural Alice-in-Wonderland backdrop for viewers comes at no small cost.

These underlying facets of the show are obviously skirted around to enable the belief that gardening is inexpensive. Viewers are constantly shown how and when to take cuttings, how to divide bulbs and take seeds, and then just let nature do its thing, presumably for free. However, desiring change in a garden, with new plants and esthetics, is expensive. Needing more space becomes expensive. If the show transitions from discussing things that are cheap to things that carry a higher price tag without mentioning cost, there is an underlying dishonesty in the presentation. There is also an incongruence when in one scene viewers are being shown how to grow potatoes in a bag, to the next scene of the presenter strolling through their million pound estate.

Gardeners’ World is extremely comfortable with the wealthier aspects of society, as is evidenced by the overlap of Gardeners’ World and the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. There is a ridiculous amount of money tied up in the pomposity and pageantry of Chelsea, as all hosts and presenters agonize to push their champagne-addled minds to not overlook the artistry, design, and plants. They will succeed because this is Britain at its finest, parade the wealth as entertainment and leave the peasantry in silent awe with the hat they bought as a treat for the occasion. The sycophantic visit of Camilla to Long Meadow was also telling of how the show and its presenters would like to position themselves.

Viewers from all economic backgrounds should be able to enjoy the show, but the inherent wealth behind the scenes will speak to audience members differently. The show is clearly adored by the wealthy as they can watch and appreciate the investment element of creating such a property, while for the poorer viewers the show is taken as garden pornography and its advice.

Acknowledging expense and cost is a hard thing for the show to do, especially when the numbers are only viable for a small section of the population. My advice would be to simply cut out the idea that cost does not have to be an issue, because then they will not have to fight so hard to pretend it isn’t.