Fantasy Gardens and Garden Shows to Watch
Winter won’t be letting go of its grip of the North for some time, so why not settle in and watch some garden shows, both fictional and real-life.
Some fictional gardens really stick with you. For our executive director, Rick Juliusson, it’s the garden Peter Sellers’ character tends in the classic satire, Being There. Everything the gardener knows he’s learned from the garden and TV. For Northern Gardener editor, Mary Schier, Meryl Streep’s amazing vegetable garden in the 2009 comedy, It’s Complicated, became the unreachable standard by which all vegetable gardens are judged.
We asked our fellow gardeners on Instagram which fictional gardens they loved and people recommended the dreamy garden in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, The Secret Garden, the quaint English garden in Peter Rabbit, Gorillas in the Mist, and A Little Chaos, the Kate Winslett film about the (fictional) designer of some of the gardens at Versailles.
If you like your garden shows factual, our followers are huge fans of Gardener’s World and anything else British garden personality Monty Don is involved in. With so many streaming services around, you’ll have to search what is available on your services for binge-worthy garden shows. But some we like include Growing Floret, about flower farmers in Washington state on the Magnolia Network and Fantastic Fungi on Netflix. Hulu offers The Biggest Little Farm about John and Molly Chester’s move from Los Angeles to the countryside where they create a farm in tune with nature and Amazon Prime has Triumph of the Tomato about how a Peruvian fruit took Europe by storm.
If you get Pioneer Public TV in western Minnesota, Prairie Yard & Garden is must-see TV for Thursday nights in winter.
Many of us get our garden information and inspiration from YouTube as well. Garden Answer has hundreds of videos about garden design, containers and plants. We also like Roseanne’s Garden, produced by a Minneapolis gardener, and The Impatient Gardener, which features USDA Zone 5 gardener Erin Schanen and offers lots of design, garden care and plant advice. Joey and Holly Baird of the Wisconsin Vegetable Gardener have great vegetable growing tips, too. A recent discovery of ours is Shifting Roots, a Canadian cut flower farmer, who grows in zone 3. She has timely and solid advice for cold-climate flower growers.
What are your favorite garden shows these days?
Does anyone remember the wonderful BBC series, “A Year at Kew” ? It’s not streaming anywhere. I loved it so much I’m thinking of buying the very expensive DVD boxed set!