You watch an hour-long gardening show about growing lilacs,
taking tedious notes
all the way, so you can have the fragrant, flowering shrub
in your yard.
You plant them. They die.
You plant them again, carefully following your notes this
time. They die.
Finally, you call your local University of Georgia Extension Service agent or
gardening center and find out
you can’t grow lilacs in Georgia.
That will never happen to viewers of The Georgia
Gardener.
This new TV series is designed with Georgia gardeners in
mind. The UGA College of
Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is
producing it, in cooperation with Georgia
Public Television and Peachtree Film Company.
A pilot of The Georgia Gardener will air on GPTV Nov. 18
at 7 p.m. A second show will
air Dec. 10 at 7 p.m.
“Conditions in Georgia are different from Connecticut or
Michigan or Florida or
California,” said the show’s host, Walter Reeves. “A TV show
like this addresses
the immediate gardening needs of Georgians.”
Reeves is a familiar voice to many Atlantans. He’s the
host of WSB 750
AM‘s top-rated Lawn & Garden
Show, which airs every Saturday morning from 7 to 10 a.m.
He’s a frequent featured speaker
on gardening and a best-selling author and has appeared on
Discovery Channel‘s
Lynette Jennings Show.
“This show will also be different from other gardening
shows,” Reeves said,
“because it will be friendly, open, enthusiastic, yet down-
to-earth.”
The show, in part, will be geared toward the minimalist
gardener.
“We’ll have lazy-gardener tips, as well as new techniques
that even gardening
veterans will appreciate,” Reeves said. “We’ll have
conversations with gardening
gurus, for those who want to know what the best minds in
gardening are doing right
now.”
The home garden for The Georgia Gardener is being built
on the college’s Griffin
campus. But the show won’t stop there.
“We will use the whole state as our garden,” Reeves
said. “We will go to
Vidalia to see onions planted and harvested, and we’ll tell
gardeners how to plant their
own onions. We’ll go to Ft. Valley’s Massee
Lane Gardens, the
headquarters of the National Camellia Society, to see
camellias in all their glory, and
we’ll tell home gardeners how to achieve it in their own
backyards.”
Each show will take a road trip to see what’s going on in
Georgia gardening.
Reeves, a UGA horticulture educator, will draw on his
heritage as a seventh-generation
gardener and his 25 years with the UGA Extension Service.
He’ll also tap the wealth of knowledge of the university.
Researchers and extension
specialists have the technical know-how and latest
developments to make your garden a show
place.
The show will offer publications and a World Wide Web
site that will give more in-depth
information about most segments of the show.
GPTV, an Atlanta-based, nine-station public television
network, is dedicated to
creating and distributing quality programs that celebrate
Georgia’s culture and history.
For nearly 40 years, GPTV has been Georgia’s storyteller,
producing award-winning local
and national programming. It is on the cutting edge of TV
technology as the producer of
Jessye Norman: A Holiday Homecoming, the first-ever High
Definition Television performance
special to air nationally on PBS. More than 4 million people
watch GPTV each week.
