WP: Bob Flowerdew, Britain's Man In the Middle Of the Garden

[DeepModem Mom]

A Growing Influence
Bob Flowerdew, Britain's Man In the Middle Of the Garden
By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 17, 2006; Page C01


"I think most of us are not in contact with the real world. . . . As a human race we are losing something," says Bob Flowerdew. (By Francesca Yorke -- Getty Images)

DICKLEBURGH, England We ring the bell at a cottage called Harvey Lodge and a shadow soon appears behind the glazed door. Then there is the fellow himself. Bob Flowerdew, in the flesh. He is not quite what we expected, not exactly the image conjured by his prim and proper radio voice....

***

Flowerdew is a wildly popular gardening figure in the United Kingdom. He's the preeminent organic fruit and vegetable guru and a prolific author of books and magazine columns. But his biggest gig is as a star panelist for the past 12 years on the BBC's hit radio show "Gardeners' Question Time." "GQT" has aired weekly for more than 59 years, and it still attracts almost 2 million listeners in a nation of 60 million. On a per capita basis, that would be about twice the size of the audience of "A Prairie Home Companion." Every Sunday afternoon, Britons stuffed with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding flop in front of the wireless to hear Flowerdew and his cohorts talk about pruning pears and blanching endives.

The notion that Britain is gardening mad is absolutely true, of course. It is unquestioned that the annual Chelsea Flower Show, held in May, is televised in prime time over several days. Go into a pub, and you are as likely to hear an argument over how to grow runner beans as the political fortunes of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Last year, a man in Lincolnshire was given a day in jail for trying to kill his neighbor's sunlight-stealing Leyland cypress hedge. By urinating on it.

In the uncertainty of postmodern, multicultural and rather godless Britain, gardening is not just a shared hobby. "Gardening is one of the few things holding British society together," said Sir Roy Strong, historian and former longtime director of the Victoria and Albert Museum....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/16/AR2006071600982.html?nav=most_emailed

[NJCher]

1. run article

Thanks for posting it. Mr. Flowerdew is indeed a character.

I also read some of the blog comments and found one that remarked on how we in America could probably not get behind any one garden commentator like the British have with Mr. Flowerdew. The blogger speculates that it is because we do not have the gardening heritage that England has.




Cher

[TygrBright]

2. We can't get behind one commentator because...

...our gardening heritage has evolved in such diverse strands. We have huge climate zone differences, for one thing. Far more extreme than anything the British Isles has. We have centuries of ethnic populations maintaining their own traditions and assimilating them into the larger stew of American culture. Everything from Italian market gardeners to Colonial cottage herbalists to Asian meditation gardeners to Native American farmers and German/Middle European farmers and... well.

Even our ornamental horticulture traditions derive from a multiplicity of sources and adapt to a wide variety of climate conditions. We operate on a larger canvas, in many cases, than the constraints of the English landscape. The size of our geography and the size of our population affect how our gardening heritage forms. So we have many gardening gurus and commentators. Some of the best garden writing in the English language has been 20th Century American writers. I love the English gardening tradition and I pay sincere homage to their worldwide contribution to horticulture, but it is only part of what makes up the wealth of American gardening lore and practice.

assertively,
Bright