It goes without saying that the program, seductively retro, analogue and calm, has helped its stuck viewers over the past year. As a new series begins in both the UK and US (available via streaming service BritBox), it promises to keep delivering its doses of pandemic drugs.
But in its own country at least, Gardeners’ World has always worked in the same way as escaping life’s difficulties like gardening itself. It first aired in 1968 and is a program that can only come from the UK, where gardening is part of the national program Identity is where a garden show neither has to be explained nor hyped.
It is broadcast during prime time for the practical gardener to get advice and inspiration and to keep the chair gardener entertained. An early host was the avunculare Percy Thrower, who showed up in a starched shirt and tie and gave guidance while puffing from a pipe. He was known as the nation’s “chief gardener” but was removed from the show in the 1970s because he appeared in commercials.
Cambridge-educated Don, who once designed jewelry for the London jet set, is more difficult to pigeonhole. Articulate and smooth, he delivers his advice with the enthusiasm of a Shakespearean actor. The ladies love him, perhaps because he is the rarest male being, polite and practical at the same time.
I have come to admire him very much because he had a dream of an ambitious garden and then set out to create it with very few resources and a lot of hard work. Undoubtedly, much of the garden is now tended by behind-the-scenes workers, but when Don and his family came to Longmeadow in 1991 to build their rural sanctuary, his job was cut out for him.
