The Full Monty
Monty reviews 50 years of gardening
ardeners’ World was first broadcast on 5 January 1968, so this year we are celebrating its 50th year on our screens. However you measure it, it is a landmark. So the celebrations will rightly be loud and long and I will be cheering as loudly as anyone. But when the partying is done, there remains a much deeper fascination with the changes that those 50 years mark. It goes without saying that the world has changed utterly – I was 12 in January 1968 and, as the opening words of L.P. Hartley’s book The Go-Between so memorably say, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ It was. We did. But more specifically, the changes in gardens and gardening have been fascinating. My parents had embraced the new age of labour-free gardening with gusto. Until the mid-1960s, we had two greenhouses (heated by coke wheeled down the garden path in a barrow to the ancient boiler) full of alyssum, pelargoniums and chrysanthemums, for mass bedding, along with hardy annuals. This was all swept away, the ornamental Victorian beds grassed over and shrubs planted – not as part of shrubberies, as my great-grandfather had planted them, but as individual specimens in a sea of grass. My grandfather’s hybrid tea roses were daringly replaced with shrub roses. At just the time when Gardeners’ World appeared on our screens, three sociological changes were occurring that transformed gardening and gardens for ever. The first was ownership of colour TV sets. The launch of the BBC’s colour transmission service in 1967 meant that colour TVs, once the preserve of the very rich, became over the following decade almost ubiquitous. Gardening in black and white had a following, but when broadcast in colour it really took off. The second huge change was car ownership, which rose dramatically during the 60s, and has continued to do so ever since. This meant that instead of sending off for plants and seeds by mail order and waiting weeks or even months for delivery, families could drive to and buy plants from the third significant change to affect gardening – the garden centre. Until the mid-1960s, to buy a shrub you had to order it in autumn for spring delivery, and it arrived bare root. But as more and more people owned cars, nurseries realised they could make sales all year round. Plants could be potted up, sold, put in the car, taken home and planted within the hour. This meant gardening could happen on a whim – or in response to a television programme seen the night before. Work patterns were also changing. Many people worked on Saturday mornings as a matter of course, well into the 1970s. But as this diminished there was more leisure time in which, among other things, to shop and to garden. Gardeners became consumers, because they became mobile and had more opportunities to shop, and plants became consumable goods, because their customers were mobile and had easier access to them. There was one other significant commercial influence. Until August 1994, almost no Sunday shopping was possible. Garden centres, however, were exempt from the Sunday trading ban and had started to capitalise on the itch to spend, opening cafés and selling anything remotely connected to gardens – and quite a lot that was not. As a result, by the mid-1980s gardening had become a ‘lifestyle’ activity. The gardening world has changed beyond recognition since Percy Thrower and Ken Burras first broadcast Gardeners’ World from Oxford Botanic Garden. In 50 years’ time, if the programme is still on air, it doubtless will have changed as much again. But those changes will be driven not so much by science or horticulture but – like all gardening fashions and trends throughout history – by changes in society and, above all, by technology.
Gardening in black and white had a following, but when broadcast in colour, it really took off