The Victory Garden (TV series)
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The Victory Garden is an American public television program about gardening and other outdoor activities, produced by station WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts and distributed nationally by PBS.
The show debuted on April 16, 1975. It was originally produced and hosted by James Underwood Crockett and was entitled Crockett's Victory Garden. The garden was located at WGBH's studios in Allston, Massachusetts. Crockett died July 11, 1979, soon after the show became successful. At this point, the title of the show was changed to simply The Victory Garden and over the years, the scope of the show expanded considerably to include all aspects of gardening, including: landscape design, history, growing perennials, annual, vegetables and garden travel.
Bob Thomson hosted from Crockett's death until 1991 when failing eyesight prompted him to step down as host. He died on October 2, 2003, following a battle with Alzheimer's disease. Also appearing was Marian Morash (the producer's wife) who was featured in a weekly "cooking fresh" segment from the garden.
Roger Swain began appearing on the show in the mid 1980s, and hosted it from 1991 until 2001. In that year, longtime producer Russell Morash decided to end his tenure, leading to a complete turnover in the cast and crew. Swain has differentiated between the show he was on and the current Victory Garden show: "If you get rid of Ernie and Cookie Monster and Big Bird, you don't have Sesame Street anymore," he said. "So let's call the new show something else, because whatever it is, it ain't The Victory Garden."
Roger Swain was succeeded by Michael Weishan. A nationally recognized gardening author and landscape designer, Weishan was brought in to update the program's image, which had become to be widely perceived as old-fashioned and dowdy. With a brand new garden and new cast, including gardener Kip Anderson who had spent the last 17 years working off camera, Weishan worked to stabilize the show's ratings and attract new viewers. These goals were largely, though not entirely achieved, and after five successful seasons, including the release of the first new Victory Garden book in over a decade, The Victory Garden Companion, Weishan decided to return full time to his design firm, Michael Weishan & Associates, based in Southborough, Massachusetts.
Weishan, in turn, has been succeeded by Australian TV personality Jamie Durie, a horticulturist who was also a former member of the male stripper group Manpower Australia, and in 1994 he posed nude for the art magazine Black+White alongside former fiancée Terasa Livingstone. It has been publicly speculated in newspapers such as the Boston Herald (August 8, 2007) that his selection as host for the abbreviated 2007 season (only 13 new episodes are planned – down from more than 30 during Swain's tenure, and 26 during Weishan's) is a risky attempt to revive the show's failing fortunes. This new season will be the first one to air in high definition on PBS HD. In recent years, funding has been a major handicap for The Victory Garden; several sponsors such as Ace Hardware have dropped out and not been replaced, and competition with cable television for advertising dollars and viewers has been fierce.
In the first years of the series, there was a yearly contest that allowed viewers to send in their photos of "their" Victory Gardens and the Morashes (and series hosts Thomson and Swain) had to pick a winner, with the winner usually letting WGBH film crews use their garden as an example of what most people should do to improve their landscaping. The contest lasted from around 1982 to 2000.
[edit] Trivia
- There have been four main Victory Gardens over the show's history; the first beside WGBH's Allston, Massachusetts, studios; the second at Lexington Gardens Nursery in Lexington, MA; the third was at the home of producer Russell Morash somewhere in the Boston area. The fourth garden was also located west of Boston.
- Calloway Gardens near Stone Mountain, Georgia was home to the Victory Garden South.
- The series has won 3 Emmys, most recently for Outstanding Achievement in Single Camera Photography (Film or Electronic), awarded to director of photography Joel Coblenz.
