Can a garden be perfect?

Jill Severn

A friend recommended a British (BBC) garden TV show called “Your Garden Made Perfect.” I am skeptical but curious about the possibility of garden perfection, so I tuned in.

This pseudo-reality show mimics the slow pace and friendly competition elements of the Great British Baking Show, but also includes an occasional dash of Real Housewives spite.

Two garden designers politely compete in each episode to win a paying client. But the Real Housewives snarkiness sneaks in when, for example, in a scene with a retired couple, the wife turns to her husband and snaps, “Sit up straight; you look short.” He obeys; she says, “that’s better.”

However, this being a British show, that’s about as testy as conflicts between couples get; we are left to imagine what fury may lurk beneath the surface.

The two garden designers begin by asking clients to set the budget, which seems to range from about £25,000 to £60,000. (A British pound is now equal to about U.S. $1.20.)

The competing designers display their proposals to the couples and the audience on virtual reality headsets. The show makes the most of this technology, which vividly illustrates all flowers in full bloom and all trees and shrubs in their full mature glory.

The retired couple had a big, deep backyard that had been a kids’ play area. It had a large expanse of scruffy lawn, a badminton or volleyball net, and not much else. With the kids grown and gone, the husband said it was the wife’s turn to have the garden her way. His one request was to keep his two sheds at the very back of the yard, where he liked to work on bikes. His wife thought the sheds were an eyesore.

By the end of the show, the yard was indeed transformed, and the sheds remained but were mostly hidden from view.

This was a typical storyline of the first two-thirds of each episode.

However, a shorter, secondary section of the show takes on lower-budget customers with smaller yards. There’s no competition; the low-budget folks don’t get a choice of designers. Fortunately, though, the designer for this feature is an older, more humble and lovable guy, free from the fancy ambitions of his younger peers.

There’s a lot we can learn from this show, though it’s not necessarily what it intends to teach us. For instance, I learned that the English call any backyard a “garden,” even if nothing is growing there.

One house, whose owners specified a budget of £30,000, had a “garden” consisting of a paved yard with a deep, derelict and empty swimming pool. They could have had the pool removed and the hole filled for their total budget. Then they would have had a blank slate of soil and could have planted what we would regard as a normal garden: they could have grown tomatoes, trees, shrubs and flowers. Instead, they agreed to a sunken garden with steps down into the empty pool, now filled with enormous rocks, potted palms and ferns. This was billed as a Mediterranean feature. The lesson here is . . . some designers are nuts, and so are their clients.

Another lesson – and this strikes me as odd, too – is about the importance of “hardscape” – landscape designer lingo for hard surfaces like paved paths and patios, retaining walls, rocks, and pergolas.

One of the designers says she thinks a garden should be 40 percent soft (meaning actual plants), and 60 percent hard. In the six episodes I’ve watched, most of the time, money and design work focuses on hardscape.

This focus seemed to be shared by all the designers, even though they advocate biodiversity in the garden, including water features to attract newts and frogs, and plants that attract birds, bees and other insects.

But the focus on hardscape leaves little as little time for conversation about plants as there is about housewifery on the Real Housewives.

There is also hardly any discussion of what maintenance these designs will require or how they will change over time. Maybe that discussion takes place off-camera. I hope so, because the show begins with the host cheerfully remarking that although we all know how to manage our houses, “we are clueless” when it comes to our gardens. Yikes.

I imagine that henpecked husband – the one ordered to sit up straight – will spend his retirement refinishing decks, pruning trees, and managing a complex water feature consisting of a stream, pools, and lots of plumbing. As he ages, I worry about him having to step from one rock to another to cross that stream to get to his bike-fixing sheds.

I hope a future season of this show, about five years from now, will revisit the redesigned gardens. That might teach us many more important lessons about perfect gardens.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com 

Correction: The earlier version of this story claimed that the British Pound was worth U.S. $ .85. It trades at about $1.20 now. We regret the error.