An Iowa Garden

Considering that gardening is one of the most popular hobbies in the country, it is odd that there are so few television shows catering to gardeners. HGTV used to have a couple of very nice garden shows, which after being re-run a couple of hundred times, disappeared altogether, to be replaced by yet more home remodeling shows... I call this channel "HTV", now. I would imagine that it's a question of ad dollars, in that much of the gardening industry is still dominated by smaller businesses, which do not have national advertising budgets. The one show I miss most of all, though was called, I think, Garden Architect, and had three sections each week; the first was the garden architect host (Michael?) touring a garden, the third part was a gorgeous Australian gal making birdhouses and such, wielding a saw and paint while in full makeup, and a silk blouse. The middle segment was my favorite, though: a fellow who would each week stop by somebody's urban home to solve their outdoor decorating problem; usually a dreary little backyard with a view of a garage, or perhaps just a deck overlooking an alley. He obviously had a VERY modest budget for his segment, as his creations were equally modest, bordering on cheesy, and quite similar from week to week. If there was a deck or patio, you could count on him first laying down a square of some type of cheap carpeting (which with the first rain would undoubtedly become permanently wet and mildewed). His next addition was always some inexpensive plastic furniture, then the finishing touch: a couple of old pieces of wrought iron, like a piece of fencing and a couple of iron trivets, which he would nail to the side of the garage, with maybe an old, rusting birdcage hanging from a tree. At the end of his segment, he would show the client around his creation, and here's the part I always watched the show for: with the plastic furniture and whatnots that he placed down, there were naturally certain paths that you would have to take to walk by or through them, and in his presentation, these became grand walkways; it was as if an English Lord was showing you through his 500 acre formal garden. The host would dramatically cast his hand towards the plastic chair and table he had just put down, and say "and as you walk down here to the shady area, you can either walk THIS way, or you can take the longer route and come around THIS way, to go out to the main yard" (meaning you could walk to the left or the right of the plastic chair to get to the garbage can in the alley). God, I loved that show. Once in a while, when I'm showing somebody around our garden, I'll point to a bush or something and say "and here at the rose bush, you can either walk THIS way, or you can take the more scenic route and walk around THIS way", but I know that nobody ever knows why I think that's funny.