Helen’s Blog

If gardeners want to buy-in mail-order bumble bees, please don’t try to put them off.

Normally I am pretty much a Ken Thompson fan, enjoying immensely and learning a lot from what he has to offer in the way of really helpful stuff for gardeners.

I would, however, like to register a bit of a protest about something Ken wrote in Telegraph Gardening on June 15 about the ecologically pointlessness of the gardening public buying-in bumblebee nest-lets to keep in their gardens and allotments – because what he had to say absolutely missed the point, I think, about why many gardeners (as opposed to commercial tomato-growers, for example) buy bumble bees in the first place.

It is surely all about the very simple pleasure the bees bring as they go to and fro from their little boxes (or their slightly twee ‘hives’).

Bombus terrestris, the buff-tailed bumble bee is our commonest species, apparently. And even though the little chaps we see around the place abuzz on the alliums or reeling drunkenly around on the sedums may not actually be ‘ours’, it is fun – and totally harmless – to imagine that they are.

And for households with children, a visibly busy bumble bee community can provide a useful reminder to the next generation of how important – and actually how gentle -are these charming little creatures whose presence we usually take for granted.

Only the silliest gardeners would imagine that by buying a box-full of bees they will be doing anything to save the planet or even much to pollenate our crops. And there are, after all, plenty of less responsible ways to spend money on your garden: on obtrusive garden lighting, extravagant and inappropriate ‘water features’ and colonies of nasty Chinese plastic meerkats and other atrocious nicknackery.

Nothing more to add. I leave everyone else to fight about the science.

• Bumble bees and their wooden ‘hives’ and lots of instructions for bee-ginners can be purchased from Dragonfli.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Gardening in Pyjamas, out on 11th April

As anyone who looks at this regularly must know, I have gone off blogging a bit – it suddenly seemed to be an ego-trip too far.

But I have just popped in because – as my helpful son points out – it just daft to miss the opportunity to flag my new book ‘Gardening in Pyjamas’, which will be officially available from April 11, published by Simon & Schuster , RRP £12.99 – less on Amazon, of course).

Essentially it is a complete re-vamp and up-date of ‘Gardening in Your Nightie’, which I wrote in 2000.

A modest book of words that pre-dated my Thorny Problems page in the Telegraph, ‘Nightie’, hit the spot for a lot of gardeners – those keen enough, daft enough, to get out there in all weather first thing in the morning (usually inappropriately dressed, hence the title) but didn’t quite know what to get on with and how to go about it – and why.

‘Pyjamas’ is updated to deflect criticisms about sexism, reflect 21st century wardrobe refinements and, more importantly, modern ‘greener’ gardening habits. It’s got no glamorous pictures, no ‘helpful’ pruning diagrams, minimal mumbo-jumbo, Latin and science. And, of course, the new book also benefits considerably from 12 more years of my own experience as a gardener and writer.

I’m really proud of it, and I hope you like it.

Helen

• Order a copy of Gardening in Pyjamas from Telegraph Books

Not how gardening journalism works

And now for something a bit precarious, professionally speaking –  a little bit out on a limb:

A reader of my Telegraph page wrote to me about my lawnmower, a Bosch  lithium-ion cordless model that  I have been using for about four years and about which I cannot speak too highly.

Referring to it recently on my page, I mentioned the liberating effect that lightweight battery tools have on gardeners.

I bought my first lithium-ion battery gadget five years ago –  a hedge trimmer that is still going strong:  no more wrestling with a filthy stinking heavy noisy petrol monster, nor the alternative – fiddling with infuriating and seemingly inevitable cord-splicing every time I cut my hedges.  I have been an Battery Evangelist ever since.

Bosch happen to be the market leaders in this particular field, so both mower and hedge trimmer are made by them. The reader, wanting to get a bit more low-down from me,  wanted to know if I had been given my mower or whether it was on loan. It obviously never occurred to him that it was just ‘my mower’.

It would seem that now that more and more writing in newspapers and magazines is pretty much ‘advertorial’,  the opinions and judgement of writers of columns like mine that occasionally mention gardening products and tools, and indeed the feature I did for a couple of years for the English Garden Magazine, may appear to the reading public to be very, very suspect.

In fact, in the time I was the writer of the tool-testing feature for the English Garden, I had a remarkably free hand.  I asked not to be told the price of the goods I was testing,  so that I wouldn’t know which were the posh and expensive ones (although it was often obvious, of course), and it was left completely up to me to decide which was my ‘favourite’.  It was, all in all, a bit of a dream job.

On only one occasion since then have I been offered a significant ‘inducement in-kind’ – in the form of a discount on a product in return, presumably, for a big, glowing ‘mention’ in the feature.  Nothing was specifically said about it, but the implication was clear.  In the event, the item did get its mention, but even with the discount on offer the item was still extraordinarily expensive and – even if I had been tempted to ‘glow’ in print –  I couldn’t possibly have afforded it. (The fact that garden writers earn a diminishing pittance for their work is another matter entirely, and one that I won’t air here).

So how do we deal with all this?    I admit I don’t really know how other writers carry on, but certainly for lesser fry like me there aren’t many ‘freebies’ kicking around these days anyway.  When I need a major item for the garden I ask for – and generally receive – a trade discount.  I am, however loosely it may be perceived, ‘in the trade’ after all.  When I am sent something to ‘try out’, I am generally happy to do so.  But only if I really like the product or gadget after using it and it is appropriate to write about it in the context of Thorny Problems (or whatever else I write, or when I am lecturing),  will I personally recommend it to other gardeners. Very occasionally I take the opportunity in print to suggest improvements or modifications to products or packaging, and I like to think that in one instance at least,  my comments have been influential.

The other side of the coin is that if I consider the item I am offered or sent unsolicited to be really ghastly and useless (and this happens quite often, believe me), I will not slag it off.  I just keep absolutely stum.  And eventually I might slip it into a Horticultural Society raffle or something… (oops!)

Anyway, in my view this is a reasonable deal, and one which keeps my integrity intact in a world of journalism that is increasingly dominated – you could say ‘tainted’ –  by marketing.   And I think, judging from my mail and from the general vibes I get, that the majority of my readers understand that this is where, somewhat naively perhaps,  I stand.

My first, and I hope not my last post for the BBC gardening blog is up and running – about posy pickers. Here’s the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/gardening/2011/06/lets-hear-it-for-the-posy-pick.shtml

Commenter Stephanie Donaldson is obviously a dedicated PP like me, and on her blog, ‘The Enduring Gardener‘, there are some pictures to inspire, of extremely tasteful garden posies she has put together – and a slightly more lavish thing for her recent wedding. Do have a read of that too.