On 31/5/04 8:58 am, in article , "Stan The
Man" wrote:

In article , mich
wrote:

BY the way, whats the name of that lady who replaced R.de T whilst she was
germinating and growing on her seedling? I thought she was OK and ought to
have a place on the regular GW team. Maybe she is no real looker , but she
was a gardener!

Sarah Raven, the Queen of Grunge - also a lecturer and columnist for
the Daily Telegraph amongst others.

The DT has one of the best gardening sections among all the papers.

I think she's more than OK. She'd be better still as a presenter if she
went to the same smile trainer that Ms Dimmock has been using. She is
fallible though: I rather like my gardening presenters to be world
champion plantspeople (like James Alexander Sinclair) and it undermines
my faith when one of them says "What is that?" or "I've never seen that
before".

Now - be fair! How many plants are there in the world? My husband is a
nursery of many years' experience but he sometimes meets plants he doesn't
know. There was a plant on the NZ stand of which there is only one lefft in
the world!

If AT is out of the equation, then JAS (he of the wide-brimmed hat) is
my favourite TV presenter. He's a brilliant plantsman and a very clever
garden designer - and he's very entertaining to boot, although I
concede that his language may be too flowery for some. I loved his
series of Small Town Gardens last year and can't understand why he
isn't more widely used by the BBC.

Maybe he drives as many people round the bed as he does me. ;-) He's just
another of those 'cult of the personality' people with that stupid hat. If
he dropped the gimmmick and just gardened, perhaps we'd notice that rather
than the headgear. As it is, he strikes me as pretentious.
Llewellyn Bowen has the hair and the shirt cuffs; Sinclair has to have a hat
because everything else is taken - no bra for Charlie, hair and nails for
Rachel, natty suits and "aren't I a one" for Alan, Irish and Cockney accents
for Diarmuid and Joe - nothing else left, really. ;-) Somehow, Geoff
Hamilton got by with a spade and fork and dirty hands. Nowadays, they'd
probably tell him to have a perm, or something. Even Tommy's had a 'hair
do'.

--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the weeds after garden to email me)