My Stormy Relationship with "Landscape Smart"

Here's another in a recent spate of blogger reviews of gardening TV shows, and I can tell you I've really struggled with this one. I used to think it was just a tacky reality show with bad designers - which, come to think of it, maybe it really was.  It's possible they're hiring better designers now, a change I'm happy to note and endorse. 

So now the After gardens look really good, I learn a thing or two by watching the makeover in process, and I'm enjoying the show.  It's still got that reality show writing and production, which I'll always hate because I don't really want to get to know the cute young couple who happen to be the homeowners for that segment.  I don't care about the amusing marital issues that arise and I don't enjoy watching the stagey shots of them pitching in and laying the new patio themselves.  Like they're expecting us to believe the typical homeowner could make this huge makeover happen with no professional help.  Okay, I'll put up with all that show-bizzy dumbing down because it might appeal to young, nongardening viewers, but the gardening viewer watches for those lovely and functional designs, and we sometimes get ideas from your money-saving techniques - the "smart" in the title referring to money-saving ideas.

But now we come to my standing complaint, something this show does that still makes me yell at the TV screen - a reaction usually reserved for Charlie Rose when he asks the fifth version of his question while the frustrated guest is waiting to answer, not to mention the frustrated viewer just wanting Charlie to shut up.  But I digress.  What drives me nuts about "Landscape Smart" is their footage of the final result.  Listen up, producers:  Anybody who actually gardens, presumably a large proportion of your viewers, wants to see the resulting garden, a slow and steady pan from at least two vantage points - generally from the house and from a seating area in the garden looking back at the house.  We most decidedly don't want to see the MTV-type split-second editing of close-ups that you're showing us. I like being transported to those drug-and-music clubs in Amsterdam in the '70s as much as anybody, but I'd rather see what the damn garden looks like. 

Bottom line, with just some tweaking of the shooting and editing techniques in those final few minutes, your show could be as young and hip as you want and still make us gardening viewers happy.  Oh, and it would sure be instructive if you told us what the transformation cost.  Just my 2 cents.

Comments

[Amy Stewart]

I love it! You tell 'em!

[Heather]

Gonna have to set that one up on Tivo. I will also yell about the lack of a pan shot and cringe at the ubiquitous "isn't shoveling and hauling wheelbarrows full of manure a laugh a minute?!" shots. The only time there's a knee slapper in my garden is if you see me after I think a bug has landed on me. The shrieking and flailing is actually pretty funny.

[Val]

"...slow and steady pan..." - I'd like to see that! I'm afraid that seems to have disappeared from current TV programs, not just the example you give. So does everyone else have trouble following modern day editing techniques? I thought it was just me.

In some of the gardening programs here, they sometimes show the workers in speeded up mode, which adds even more to the frantic feel of things. They also have the "surprise" gardens that confront unsuspecting (?) family members when returning home in the late afternoon. A new garden in a day: I'm often suspicious of those.

[Verdant Heart]

In the past year I've almost entirely lost interest in the gardening shows on the H O M E & grdn channel. Once they had shows both in the morning and afternoon though still only on weekends. The shows left focus on a decorating approach with the 'yard' being an extension of the homeowner's taste in furniture. Never mind that every single one of them originate three to four zones south of here. Gone are the afternoon shows with real plant people and interviews with great gardeners. We are treated to such shows as Groundbreakers where we see rich people living in McMansions 'sprucing' up their yards with a massive, expensive 'makeover' with more money in hardscape than I'd spend on plants in a lifetime.

Sorry, more to your point Susan. I think the short edits are meant to keep the average viewer's attention and make an essentially slow process seem ready for a music video. "Gardening is the slowest form of performance art" Try The Zen TV Experiment Finally my pet peeve. I don't care a lot what the garden looks like right after it's done. I want to see what it looks like one, two, five years later when it's really had the test of time. Instant pretty is what most landscapers are decent at. Enduring beauty that's a very different thing.

Just found your blog. Count me in as a regular reader. Thanks.

[Alice]

Like Justme, I want to see the gardens in a few years time. Sometimes here they will return to a garden a year or so on and I always find them very disappointing. I guess the reason these people needed garden makeovers in the first place is because they aren't gardeners, and whilst they may have maintained their free TV garden to some extent, they've certainly not become gardeners. It's almost as though they are not game (or permitted?) to touch anything out there, with no attempt to put their own touches to the original plantings. It's all just as sterile and artificial as when it was planted.

[Michele Owens]

Know what drives me crazy about those shows? The Mexican labor. The only people who actually work in those yards on those shows are nameless Mexican immigrants, who presumably are very badly compensated as part of an enormous "crew" that makes a garden overnight.

The message is that if you've lucked out enough to buy some hideous McMansion, you are simply too exalted to know the first thing about gardening. By implication, gardening is similar to cleaning a toilet or vacuuming a swimming pool--you show your status by hiring the little people to do such distasteful jobs for you. These shows are anti-garden! Not to mention weird, undemocratic, and guaranteed to make me feel very bad about America.

[Eliz.]

I honestly don't see how you guys can watch any of these gardening or landscape shows. They are SOOOO boring! So poorly made. Miss braless on Gound Force is kinda fun, but otherwise...

Maybe if someone made a Runway style show pitting gardeners against each other with her and Tracy Sabato-Aust as guest judges. And us. I can think of some interesting challenges.