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There's something about Carol Klein's Lancashire burr that turns my legs to jelly. But sadly there's rachael ray show recipes nothing she can do not on BBC2's Gardeners' World , not in her Guardian column and not even in my surprisingly well-thumbed rachael ray show recipes copy of her book Grow Your Own Veg to make me into a gardener.
I could and do spend hours watching her witter poetically about the scintillating colours of flora. I can and do read her proselytising for hours about the virtues of growing your own potatoes . But none of this gets me off my bum to do what she says. None of this makes my potato-free garden rachael ray show recipes a thing of beauty.
On summer nights, while slugs drink down my beer traps and, fortified, go back to eating my delphiniums (the post-pub kebabs of their world), I sit and watch Carol. While my lawn goes as bald as my head, I stand looking out of the kitchen window at the grisly sight, listening as Bob Flowerdew explains to Evesham's Horticultural rachael ray show recipes Society on Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time the incredibly complicated regime necessary to restore one's lawn. Yeah, like I'm ever going to follow Bob's advice.
This is because there is a problem with gardening in this country. We have possibly more TV and radio gardeners per plot than anywhere in the world. But, just as the high ratio of TV chefs to humans has done nothing (really) to improve the quality of British home-cooked cuisine, so the airtime devoted to gardening has a negligible, perhaps even inverse, impact on the quality of TV viewers' and radio listeners' gardens.
After watching Carol show me how it's done, it feels wrong to attempt to emulate her. It would be like me hearing Jean-Yves Thibaudet play a Prokofiev piano concerto and then try to pick the thing out on my guitar at home. Pointless, wrong, and borderline insulting to everybody involved in the original.
This is why I greet the news that Gardeners' World is launching rachael ray show recipes a new series next month with a new presenter ( Toby Buckland ) who will, with Carol and the rest of the team, transform a muddy playing field in Birmingham into what the BBC press office calls the "nation's new back garden", with mixed feelings.
On the one hand I'm looking forward to watching him create an urban meadow replete with hardy garden annuals and a stunning range of sunflowers and dahlias, but I'm also poised rachael ray show recipes for a seasonal renewal of the feelings of deep inadequacy that always surge through my loins (sorry about that unwonted reference) at this time of year. As usual, our TV gardeners will be setting the bar too high, and I will quickly give up the hope that I can do more but watch how it is done.
After all, if they're going to create rachael ray show recipes the nation's back garden in Birmingham, doesn't that mean the rest of us don't have to bother? And doesn't it mean that what they will create will be better than anything we could do? In each case, I'm pretty sure it does.
I remember Gardeners' World presenter Geoffrey Smith some time during the 1970s saying: "It's a leisurely business, dead-heading roses ." And so it should rachael ray show recipes be, especially as a rustic riposte to our 24/7 working world. What he didn't realise is that it's even more leisurely to watch someone else dead-heading roses. Ideally, of course, they should be dead-heading my roses as I recline on a sun lounger with a glass of wine. But I don't have any roses to dead-head rachael ray show recipes in my garden, rachael ray show recipes and even if I did, I couldn't afford to get them dead-headed by anyone else.
So instead, I watch others do it on telly, while my garden goes to hell. Am I the only one to feel the occasional twinge of guilt at this, even though it's never enough to get me outside and sort out the problem?
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