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The Garden Quiz

Gardening equipment
  • Posted at 10:46am
  • 10 January 2008
  • by SarahDempster-RT

Gardening, eh? Never understood the point of it myself. All that mud, bending over and Latin always struck me as precisely the opposite of fun, and exactly the sort of pastime I'd embark upon only if a) my friends, TV, family, book collection and Scrabble board were to be lost in a house fire, or b) my brain were to fall down the back of my trousers and get stuck in my trainers.

As a result, my knowledge of gardening is somewhat limited. Actually, for limited, read pitiful. And crap. To be honest, all I know about gardening is that it's got something to do with sheds and that Percy Thrower had one and it had a tortoise in it that died. In gardening terms, I'm an absolute bloody moron. I am, in a very real sense, Botanicus imbecilicus.

It was with some trepidation, then, that I approached BBC Radio 4's new lunchtime garden quiz - an 11-part loam/plant bee entitled, with typical R4-ian chutzpah, The Garden Quiz (what cards!). Presented by Anna Ford, it aims to find Britain's "leading all-round botanical brain". While I have no idea what an all-round botanical brain looks like, let alone what to do with one were I to dig it up in the reeking rectangle of rotting foliage, stones and faded drink cartons that passes for my back garden, this had the effect of making the show sound quite exciting.

As did the studio audience, which tittered, clapped and fidgeted its way through Ford's introduction in the manner of a studio audience that has been told by a researcher with an earpiece that something quite interesting is about to happen. There was even an excitable violin theme tune, which put one in mind of novelty wellingtons and the sort of look-at-the-size-of-that-hoe earthiness that colours the cheeks of the actually-really-good Gardeners' Question Time.

Alas, it was a ruse. The Garden Quiz (Mondays, 1:30pm, BBC Radio 4) wasn't fun. It was peppered with horrible pauses and baffling explanations of gardening terms that could only have been of interest to people who consider heavily padded polyester jerkins acceptable outdoor wear.

Worse still, it was impenetrable. There was Latin everywhere. Few words weighed in at less than 40 letters. The questions lunged between the vaguely comedic ("What's the difference between a panicle and an umbo?") and the breathtakingly wordy ("The RHS Plant Finder is published annually and lists commercial sources of almost all plants in cultivation in the UK. The current 2007/2008 issue lists how many different species and varieties?")

We longed for the intervention of Alan Titchmarsh who, upon surveying such windy boffinry, would've snapped his braces and set about the proceedings with his incomparable sense of the ordinary ("Now then, about those flowers that are fuchsia and sort of droopy and leave powder all over your nose when you try to sniff them…") But Titchmarsh, there was none.

As it stood, The Garden Quiz left us as botanically dense as we were when we'd wandered in. That said, we did learn that rhubarb leaves are poisonous, and that some (all?) lilies have got beards, so at least we'll have something to talk about next time Diarmuid Gavin turns up at the front door, asking to borrow a cup of fertilizer.

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