'Love Your Garden'
Everyone loves a garden makeover show – especially when the changes are dramatic. With Ground Force, national treasure Alan Titchmarsh had a small timeframe, with secrecy the watchword, and each amazed punter ended up with at least one bit of decking and a water feature.
That might not be strictly true, but it always seemed that Tommy Walsh was screwing together a nice bit of tannalised board, while Charlie Dimmock’s specialist skill was a pond with a fountain.
These days things are a touch more sophisticated, with ITV’s Love Your Garden, which has taken the mantle of Ground Force and thrown a lot of budget at it. In the new format Alan conducts a much bigger team as they transform the neglected garden spaces of worthy charity workers who devote so much effort to their causes that their gardens have turned themselves into junkyards.
This time round he has three on-screen helpers; the flaxen-haired David Domoney, gardening’s answer to ‘The Hof’, who does a nice line in check shirts and sucking his stomach in, and looks like he’s been handed a spade seconds before the camera starts rolling.
Then there’s the lovely Frances Tophill who specialises in all the empathetic sections of the programme - painting pebbles with children etc - for which she is so brilliantly cut out. Finally, Katie Rushworth, who seems contractually obliged to wear shorts whenever the temperature gets above 14 degrees centigrade, and/or it stops raining.
Along with Alan, who plans each garden transformation, there is also an army of helpers wearing a job-lot of polo shirts and workmen’s trousers they got straight out of the Screwfix catalogue.
The transformed gardens are busy places with a ton of hard landscaping, gazebos, outdoor dining areas, fences, walls, lodges, hammocks, murals and the occasional water feature all going in together.
It’s a great programme with a strong emotional core, but I worry.
Most of the time Alan confides to camera that they’re putting in AstroTurf “to make it easy to maintain, these are busy people”. The recipients are hard-working charity folk, sometimes old, and sometimes with an illness or incapacity. (There is also the fact that 100 people and the film crew will be tramping backwards and forwards over it for the remainder of the shoot and real grass would get mullah-ed.
However, after emphasizing that they’re creating a low maintenance space they proceed to plant it with a garden centre-worth of plants. Every spare space is crammed with interesting planting, some beautiful and exotic trees are inserted, substantial shrubs that will need a watchful eye to make sure they don’t dry out given three days of sun and temperatures in the mid-twenties.
Once the expert gardening team leaves, that’s a whole lot of watering, cutting and pruning. Having been gifted an impressive show garden (and given their previous record outdoors) surely it’s going to be all downhill and a certain amount of worry from there…
