A small fraction of the people we’ve had as guests on our Garden Masterclass public service broadcasting.
It is a year ago that Annie Guilfoyle and I launched our online broadcast service, initially called Tea Garden Talk, now Thursday Garden Chat, as a response to the Covid crisis lockdown. We had been a running a business putting on live events up til now, and the lockdown was obviously going to that what a sharp frost will do to a previously healthy tomato plant. So, we decided to go online. Around ninety broadcasts later…. ! …. here we are.
A year later is a good time to review an amazing twelve months. We're hugely proud of what we've done – building up a business at a challenging time but also providing over a hundred hours of free content on our You Tube channel.
We are of course amongst the annoying people who have 'had a good lockdown', as has the garden business as a whole. For many it has been an immensely difficult time, and gardening and growing things have been part of the emotional release that has helped them through. We know from many of the messages we have received that our programming has been part of this, helping a lot of people get through a very difficult time. That is very humbling.
We started our online broadcasts as a public service, and we will continue to do this for TGC. Like many new ventures we had very little idea what we were doing at first. Annie and I kicked off with a little interview about Garden Masterclass, and then a week or so later Nigel Dunnett and I did a Zoom presentation about our gardens. That has since had 5,715 views on our You Tube, which is deeply embarrassing because that was the first video editing I have ever done, and is very rough, and not just at the edges. I seem to remember being practically in tears trying to find an editing app I got on with. It was also one of the rare occasions I worked late into the night.
“Let's do a broadcast” I said to Anne, “we'll go through our address books and interview people or ask them to do little presentations... we'll grab everyone we know in the garden and landscape world”. “Once a week?”. “No, Annie, daily!”. We settled on five days a week. Our first guest on April 8th was photographer Claire Takacs. Then Juliet Roberts, former editor of Gardens Illustrated. We moved on to a rich and varied list of people, aiming to mix well-known personalities (Tom Stuart-Smith, Dan Pearson and Fergus Garrett were amongst our guests in the first few weeks) with, let's call them everyone else: designers, working gardeners, landscape architects, garden owners. We soon found ourselves with a pattern, people giving a presentation and then answering questions from our now global audience. It soon became clear that what people wanted at this time of unprecedented stress, and in some cases, real fear, was beautiful gardens as a source of joy and inspiration. The visual element, the ability to see gardens, landscapes, plants, beauty and good design, soon established itself as primary. Listen to some clips from Fergus’s presentation here.
However I have always wanted to steer the event towards having more discussion but this does involve a lot of preparatory work, either by ourselves or our participants. This was brought home to us by Rebecca Lemonius's lyrical tour of her historic garden in Kent (Vita and Harold before they went to Sissinghurst); apparently it was the first powerpoint she had ever done. You can see some clips here. This rapidly clocked up viewing figures in the thousands. Our audience responded to some lovely personalities; we like to think we have launched Katy Merrington as an up-and-coming star; she is the Cultural Gardener at the new Hepworth Wakefield Garden around the gallery that celebrates the work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth. We all found her very heartfelt engagement with her work and her public deeply moving. Some clips from Katy here.
Our more ambitious programmes involved my learning new techie tricks, and some high-risk timings, such the round-up we did with four interviewees in eastern Europe: one in Łodz, Poland, one in Kyev, Ukraine, and two in Vilnius, Lithuania; we actually carried that one off. Our critical panel to talk about the Chelsea Flower Show got off to an iffy start when my co-presenter forgot to introduce her old pal James Alexander Sinclair, while the panel to discuss Garden History rapidly went into depression mode over the state of heritage awareness in Britain. We have had some technical challenges: Piet Oudolf getting ‘locked out’ of the webinar he was meant to be giving, speakers suddenly disappearing leaving us to ad lib until they re-appeared - just because something works in rehearsal does not mean to say it’ll work on the night.
Annie and I both felt we wanted to stress the social engagement aspect of gardening and landscape. An early broadcast was with the President of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society who do amazing work helping deprived neighbours build and maintain public gardens. We delved into the hidden history of Black American gardeners with Abra Lee from Atlanta, Georgia and talked about school gardens, with campaigner Sonya Harris from New Jersey.
From early on, we decided to ask for donations, to cover our running costs and as some recompense for the amount of time (and sometimes stress) we both put into this. After a while though, at the end of the first lockdown period, we felt we should be reverting to something more educational, an online version of the live workshops which for the previous three years had been our main business. So we launched pay-to-view webinars, with presenters being paid on a profit-share basis. Dredging up a phrase that must have been drummed into my head when I did an adult education course many years ago, we have always insisted that these must have 'clear learning outcomes'. Our first one was with Jimi Blake in his spring woodland garden near Dublin. We then seemed to go to Holland a lot, with Jacqueline van der Kloet, Tom de Witte, Piet Oudolf, and a two-hander exploring the legacy of pioneer landscape designer Mien Ruys. If you haven’t already seen it, here is the link for our webinar programme.
A year ago we were astonished at how quickly our British audience was joined by viewers from all over the globe. Many became familiar faces as their little portraits popped up on Zoom, and we started to have little chats with the people who Annie calls 'frequent fliers'. One, whose company we have particularly enjoyed has been Wendy Hilty, who lives on one of the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast, and has to deal with occasional alligators in the garden, although they do not eat her plants.
Particularly exciting has been working with collaborators. The Pampa Infinita school of garden design in Buenos Aires wanted to get Piet Oudolf to do a presentation as part of their twentieth celebrations, so we organised an event with them, with them providing interpretation into Spanish. Piet was really relaxed with his audience of over 400 and the discussion continued for over two hours. We've done similar with a Korean group, and most successfully with garden business in Japan. Sachi Tanabe is a landscape architect who works for Ikor-no-mori, a visitor destination garden and design business; so far we have run three webinars with her providing Japanese sub-titles as well as a Tea Garden Talk where she talks to some of the people making gardens on the northern island of Hokkaido.
People have been very generous with their time and support. In some cases this is going to segue into actual employment, as we find we are now having to devolve some tasks. Joanne Glättli in Basel, Switzerland, went off up into the Vosges mountains to interview Monique and Thierry Dronet in their heavenly garden of Berchigranges; again it was the first video work she had ever done, but she came up with what we feel has been one of our best Thursday events. Translations usually rely on transcription, and we're lucky in having Małgosia Kiedrzynksa to help us with this, as well as her doing some video editing for us. And we've take on Magda Pelka to help with some technial and admin support.
Things will obviously change with the end of lockdowns all over the world (even in Argentina where it has gone on for 10 months!) and the revival of live events in Britain and Holland, but we now have an international audience, which we hope to continue to serve with digital material. We look forward to getting suggestions of presenters from our audience too!
So…. come and join us….. 18.00 London/WET every Thursday here on Zoom. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83781125288