In article , says...
In article , ShinyRed
wrote:

I?m new to this forum, but thought you might be interested that
gardening is more popular than ever, despite the fact that less and
less of us have gardens!

Unfortunately, that's a load of tosh. The UK garden market has been in
decline by value every year since 2001/2, ie since the highly
influential (like it or not) Ground Force TV programme was taken off
air.

For the actual picture, see
http://www.the-hta.org.uk/index.asp?...86&s_idno=1079

Surely how much we spend does not give a good indication of how much we
garden? At its basic level it cost virtually nothing to garden. I do
accept that the garden sector has been in decline but see that more from
the point of view that gardeners have wised up to the garden centres
trying to squeeze money out of them all the time, I think Ground force
missed an important point and know severall dissapointed families that
decided to give their neglected garden a makeover, most were quite
succesful but the programme never made it clear that the glass of bubbly
at the end was not the end, and in all cases these gardens now look as
bad or worse than before the money was spent for the simple reason that
the original garden was neglected because no one liked to garden in the
first place and was not about to start, they had no idea of the ongoing
care required for something to look nice all year.
--
Charlie Pridham, Gardening in Cornwall
www.roselandhouse.co.uk
Holders of national collections of Clematis viticella cultivars and
Lapageria rosea