Curl Up with a Good Video

By Alicia Tyler, KCMG 1998

Want a tonic for the winter blahs?  How about some good gardening videos?  They’re available free through your local library.

Whether you’re looking for instruction or inspiration, the Kanawha County Library has a good selection of gardening videos, which can be checked out for a week.  Some were even purchased by donations from the Kanawha County Master Gardener Association. 

Want to improve your gardening skills?  Then check out any of a number of “how-to” videos on growing plants in sunspaces, warm-weather vegetables, growing and cooking fresh herbs, proper rose care, and flower gardening.  Want to know more about square-foot gardening?  You can find out in a video on small space gardening. 

Ready to tackle a landscaping project?  There are videos on basic landscaping and topics such as soil preparation and planting, low maintenance landscapes, and stone and wooden retaining walls.

Want to interest children in gardening?  You might try “My Amazing Garden,” or “Look What I Grew: Windowsill Gardens.”

 The Victory Garden video series covers a variety of topics: West Coast landscape gardening, organic gardening, vegetables, and garden recipes. For inspiration, the same series tours the gardens of Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, and American gardens in the South and Midwest.  Another in this series, “Great Contemporary English Gardeners,” features interviews (in their gardens) with gardening luminaries Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd, and Allan Bloom.

For new ideas and inspiration, my personal favorite is the series hosted by the English gardener, Penelope Hobhouse.  Each video covers two topics as listed below and may spark your own gardening creativity:

New Garden Ideas; Nurseries and Plant Collections

Structural Elements; Visions of Nature

Roses for the Garden; The Smaller Garden

Planting the Bones of a Garden; The Summer Garden

The Country Garden; The Useful Garden

Color in the Garden; Flower Gardens

Two other personal favorites are “English Cottage and Country Gardens” and “The Great Gardens of England,” which features a charming segment on the gardens of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson at Sissinghurst Castle. It’s the next best thing to seeing the famous “white garden” in person.

These are some, but by no means all; of the videos you can savor in the dreary winter months when our plants, but not our dreams, are dormant.

Searching for Videos

You can search the Kanawha County Public Library on-line catalog by going to HYPERLINK "http://kanawha.lib.wv.us."

Click on “Search the On-line Catalog;” then click on “Or Switch to Power Search.”  On the “words or phrase” line, enter “video-recording” and on the “subject” line enter “gardening.” You will get almost 50 listings. You can also enter “gardens” and get some duplication, but also additional videos.