Who Gardens?

 “Ah, well!” the Gardener said with a kind of a groan.  “Things change so, here.  Whenever I look again it’s sure to be something different!  Yet I does my duty!” wrote Charles Lutwidge Dobson, mathematician, in the story Sylvie and Bruno, penned in 1889.  Dobson is, of course, better known by his nom de plume Lewis Carrol.  And he was right!  Things change so!  A decade or more ago, the magazine racks held but a smattering of gardening journals.  Today, they are as numerous as dandelion blooms on a spring lawn.  A recent survey of the magazine section at Indigo’s Bloor and Bay store revealed upwards of thirty.  And this in the so-called off-season.  Gardening, observed a profound employee there, is no longer a hobby but a lifestyle.  A year ago, Kelvin Browne, surveyed the situation for the Weekend Post, observed that, “some gardening magazines are worth cultivating; others aren’t worth the bloomin’ price.”

 Most surveys seem to agree that 80 per cent of the adult population claim gardening as a hobby.  Yet, strangely, not one of the top ten selling Canadian magazines featured the subject.  Despite there being such admirable issues as Canadian Gardening, Gardening Life, Ontario Gardnes and even Wildflower Gardening, to name but a few, the top three magazines are Readers Digest, Chatelaine and, gulp, TV Guide.

 One would think that in an era where movies are more popular than television, actors would confess to a liking for such a popular pastime.  But while Jennifer Lopez has increased the sales of toupee tape, she has alas, failed to do the same for trowels.  When it comes to actors we must look, as in times past among the proletariat, for age in gardeners.  Michael Caine, Dom DeLuise, Eartha Kitt, Spike Milligan, Barbra Streisand and Max von Sydow all confess belonging to the green thumb brigade.  So did the late Boris Karloff, James Mason, Gregory Peck and Natalie Wood.  When Roddy McDowell died in 1998, a group known as “Roddy’s Girls,” including Taylor and Lauren Bacall, raised funds for a special rose garden at the motion Picture and Television fund’s home for aged actors in L.A.  McDowell was a keen rose grower.  Julie Andrews is pleased to proclaim that she comes “from a long line of below-stairs maids and gardeners – good old peasant stock.”

 It’s a puzzlement, an oriental ruler proclaimed in The King and I.  Well-known Canadian gardener David Tarrant is more positive.  “Gardeners are going to save the world,” he says.  Perhaps so, but not according to the “Personals” column of some of our great newspapers.  If there is anywhere that should reflect modern lifestyles and pastimes it is in such wondrous columns.  Horrifyingly, horticultural pursuits apparently do not rate high when it comes to advertising for companionship.  Turning to Canada’s other national newspaper; the “Meeting Post” – “The Place Where National Post readers Connect” recently saw 110 women and 73 men in the Greater Toronto Area attempting to make such connections.  Just four, all female, though gardening would attract partners.  And one of those advertised herself under the thought provoking heading of “Wanted: Political Mate.”  The lady continued:  “While I seek re-election.  I’m a SWF, 53, who’d looking to meet an established SWM, 45-65.  I’m average height with blue eyes.  I’ve been told that I’m vibrant, intelligent and pretty.  My hobbies are writing, sports, gardening and having fun.  Ad#1546.”  It might be churlish to mention that the advertisement continued for several weeks…Out of 40 lonely women in Now magazine, just one listed gardening, assuming that is, that the hopeful who referred to herself as “vine-ripened” and seeking a “handsome prince” with “flat gut, small to medium ego” was no daughter of the soil.

 Where then are the 80 per cent of adults who claim to be gardeners could it be that the big Canadian daily newspapers, unlike their British brethren, fail to carry gardening pages each and every day of the week because there is not really so much interest? Or do they detect that gardeners simply turn to such pages and resist the blandishments of advertising messages?  Perhaps some things will change.  Meanwhile, we can take heart in the wisdom of British author, physician and yes, horticultural enthusiast Richard Gordon.  According to him, “gardeners and doctors very seldom commit suicide.”

Return to The Gardener Archive Page.