Peter Seabrook is sick and tired of our industry being critised, particularly by TV gardening presenters. So in The Sun at the weekend he put forward this case in answer to the critics:
From The Sun Gardening pages, Saturday 28th November 2020.
The British nursery industry is one of the most eco-friendly on the planet, not that you’d know from watching Gardeners’ World.
Britain has some of the most efficient, high-tech, environmentally and sustainability aware nurseries in the world. They are using biofuel boilers for heating, in some cases growing acres of coppice willow to grow their own wood chips.
These greenhouses’ heating pipes can have the water flow reversed in the day to remove excessive heat and convey it into insulated reservoirs, ready to return into the houses again on cold nights. Shading screens also protect plants from scorching sun during the day and can be drawn at night to reduce radiation heat loss.
The staging upon which the plants are grown in such glasshouses is on rollers to reduce the number of paths and increase plant populations. These feature flood benches to conserve water and irrigate plants from below, reducing the incidence of soft rot diseases. Rainwater is collected from roofs and cleaned through sand and reed beds, with slow-release fertilisers reducing nitrate leaching.
Pests and diseases are controlled biologically, reducing the need for pesticides, while recyclable materials are now widely used for pots and carry trays. This efficiency, coupled with remarkable skill, has resulted in some plant prices being lower than they were 20 years ago for better-quality plants.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the trade is incensed that a TV gardening presenter recently wrote: “We should not be buying cheap, mass-produced, disposable plants. We should either grow them ourselves or buy them locally from small producers.”
No mention, of course, that most small local producers buy their seedlings and cuttings from these mass producers, who also supply home gardeners via mailorder specialists with literally hundreds of millions of young plants, so we can grow our own every year. Indeed, the BBC’s Gardeners’ World actually uses mass-produced plants in its own garden!
In 1976, there were just three staff making this series – a producer/director, their PA and presenter who recorded two 30-minute programmes in a day. Fee for the presenter was £75 per programme, which also included all research and answering viewers’ letters. The audience was four times larger than it is today and presumably the mail considerably more.
Why does today’s programme require five researchers? And why are there so many people named when the credits roll at the end of each episode? Yet another mystery is why horticulture shows come off the air in the autumn, when gardening certainly continues and gardeners have more time on dark evenings to tune in.
There used to be a gardening spot on BBC1’s daytime show Pebble Mill At One from September to May, and I do not remember them once running out of subject material. It must be time that a professionally trained horticulturist, with commercial experience and gardening skills, was recruited to rebuild the reputation of Gardeners’ World.