Is the credit crunch being made worse by the media?

In conversation with one garden centre boss this week, he asked why no-one was reporting slow sales by wholesalers and garden centres owners’ fears for the future.

Another boss I spoke to said: “The problem is we’re all the same. We want to talk the market up. Things are going to get tough and people need to realise that.”

Then he added: “There’s too much doom and gloom. If we’re not careful we’ll talk ourselves into a recession.”

That's the issue encapsulated. No-one wants to talk sensibly about how to face the future.

The HTA have told me garden centres are recession-proof, then said they're recession resistant and then that they're holding their own in the face of recession. Garden retail sales from June-July were 26 per cent up on 2007. But comparative sales in 2007 were poor and year to date sales are 13 per cent down.

Many say grow your own is the salvation - but it will not make the industry’s fortune. Seed, fruit trees and young plant sales less than five per cent of hardy stock returns. Chems and peat are under growing pressure from green lobbyists. BBC Gardener’s World is pushing my former colleague Alys Fowler’s zeitgeisty thrifty. largely organic and peat-free gardening message. This requires experience and skill – but little spending, so is not good for the industry.

All a bit gloomy, so a bit of fun in the media comes from Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’ prank phone call to Manuel out of Fawlty Towers.

I’m told by friends in papers this has been got up as light relief from endless recession stories.

Of course these phone calls are neither “disappointing”, “inappropriate” or “unacceptable” to use the parlance every mealy mouthed sucker from the Prime Minister down now spouts.

While Brand and Ross’ prank is a media hype, the forthcoming recession is not. The industry must prepare for the worst. And then anything better than that will be good news.

Enjoyed AA Gill’s Sunday Times dissection of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall latest garden, grow your own and cook it programme.

TV critic Gill's unusual view is: “Growing your own vegetables is a bit like making your own fridge or whittling a car. Possible, but stupid. And no furrow has been as intensively and commercially ploughed as Fearnley-Whittingstall’s back garden.

“Self-sufficiency is not an admirable goal, it’s small-minded, selfish, mean, mistrustful and ultimately fascist. We live in a complex, mutually reliant society, and the answer to our problems is not each to his own cabbage patch.”

I don’t necessarily agree – but Gill’s delivery is funny, succinct and makes a worthwhile point.

And it creates a debate - something sadly lacking in gardening - particularly in the nether world of blogs, as I’ve recently found (and you can see if you have a quick skip through the last few posts).

The HTA conference last week lacked opportunity for debate, said Webbs Garden Centre’s Boyd Douglas-Davies. But Dougal Philip of New Hopetoun Gardens disagreed and says the new-style conference at the Stock Exchange gave much food for thought. Dougal said he picked up on the “stand apart, but not at a distance from your customers” message. Boyd was surprised the HTA did not set out a vision for the future and answer questions on it.

Both look to differentiate in their businesses-Dougal with his quirky centre set among the woods and Boyd with his new Christmas shop at Merry Hill shopping centre in Birmingham- certainly something different for garden centres.

It certainly would be a shame if we all thought the same.

I was at the Horticultural Trades Association Garden Leaders conference this week at London’s Stock Exchange, where highlights were ideas from Jeff Randall and Jean-Philippe Darnault.

President’s night speaker Randall told me Tesco will do well with Dobbies, that Sir Tom Hunter has been burnt in share investments that not everyone knows about and that any upturn in the economy won’t happen until at least 2010. Oh, and that he would rather visit his local garden centre in Essex than any destination centre nearby.

He said he didn’t envy his successor as BBC business editor, Robert Peston, because he reckons Peston is close to burn-out.

Randall stopped after five years in the role to work as editor at large at the Daily Telegraph and to present for Sky.

Darnault is boss of French horticulture group Nortene and former chief of Truffaut, the Euro garden centre and leisure chain. He told me in an interview on stage that French garden centre chain Botanic had lost 20 per cent of sales by dropping pesticides. This has wide ramifications as the EU will come another step closer to banning up to 85 per cent of active ingredients on 5 November.

To dodge the green accusations of being branded as polluters, garden centres must rebrand as lifestyle centres, he said. This means wind turbines, solar panels and crafts for sale-the latter great as gifts in these hard-pressed times.

The HTA seems to be moving towards a better conference formula, with 1,000 attending events spread over the year after ending its big three-day conference format in 2007. But there is still fine-tuning to be done to attract the numbers speakers like these merit.

Has anyone noticed how unsearchable the RHS website is?

It's high time somebody in the industry took them to task for it. It’s a dog’s dinner. Utterly, utterly ghastly usability – can’t find anything, even though you know the site has EVERYTHING... If only the navigation let you find it.

The RHS site is very similar to the Wimbledon Tennis Club site. They’re both seem old fashioned organisations whose sites reflect this.

Neither has a search function (absolutely basic to any decent website these days – and essential to one as big as the RHS). Both of them seem slightly half-hearted and poorly designed (Wimbledon home page, with its news offering drifting down the page in one centre column, is particularly ghastly). Neither seems to understand what people will actually be visiting for.

The Wimbledon one kills me by insisting that you get application form by post to acquire tickets... and that you then enter the draw also by post.

Er... What’s the point of having a website?

Why do gardeners hate wild animals so much?

I was at a Q&A by Joe Swift the other day and almost all the questions form the audience were about getting rid of animals and birds from the garden.

Rats in the compost bin. Fair enough. Solution: chicken wire under it, no meat/dairy in it and a good cover on it.

Squirrels digging bulbs up. Can you shoot them with an air rifle? Just stick a plank over bulbs until they come up. Pigeons and parakeets nicking stuff. Use nets as protection. Foxes and other people’s cats. Live and let live I say.

There is a mysterious tipping point when a wild animal becomes so numerous it is a pest. Tourists take photos of squirrels. Locals take pot shots. Only grey squirrels, mind you. Red are ok because there are hardly any. Get them to breed and get strawberry roan squirrels to end this squirrel racism. People used to hate starlings. Now they’re a pleasant rare site. Even enlightened gardeners-Jane Owen, Anne Wareham-are anti-animal.

It’s all about mankind wanting control of nature. A bit like gardening. So no wonder gardeners, having spent plenty of time and money on their plots, want their gardens as they want them. And buried mammals are good compost.

The £750,000 tree story emerged again the other day. The Observer's enviro writer Lucy Siegle wrote a long piece on the state of Britain's public woodland. It included the old chestnut about Britain's most valuable tree being in Berkeley Square in London's Mayfair.

The origin of this London Plane being chosen as Britain's most valuable tree comes from a round of phone conversations between me, Andy Tipping and Jim Smith. Andy and Jim don't get a mention in Lucy's piece btw.

They had been working an CAVAT, with Chris Neilan, to find out which is Britain's most valuable tree. To get it in the papers, I needed a pic of the tree. To be frank, I guessed which one it was. The tree may even be in another borough. Yet it has now been crowned with the title for good.

What Siegle should have asked is what is happening with CAVAT. Who has taken it up and what good is it doing? She could also usefully have asked if new cankers are hitting London planes yet.

Over to Andy and Jim for more on those.

Ran the Royal Parks half marathon the other day. Ben Fogle was the star turn, introducing and running the race. He said in his plummy tones: "Remember that when you get back into Hyde Park you have only gone six miles, so it's still seven or eight to go." Actually seven, Ben. Six and SEVEN is 13, not six and eight.

Which leads me to ask, why does Fogle get any TV presenting work? As a reality show contestant from several years ago, Fogle should surely be forgotten about by now. Yet he appears on the admirable Countryfile etc regularly. I know Countryfile is a retirement home for has-beens and never will bes, such as John Craven, Michaela Strachan and that ginger bloke who never fails to mention he has a farm, but wouldn't it be better with some decent presenters. Fogle can't even read a script.

The half marathon attracted 12,500 runners to raise money for the Royal Parks Foundation and other charities. They wanted more but in these times whatever you can get is a success.

And my time? 1.34. Worst ever, but at least I beat Fogle. And it was a lovely day. So let's look on the bright side.

GW presenter Toby Buckland is stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. B'twixt a rock and a hard place. And it's all thr BBC's fault.

HW ran an interview with Toby on 18 Sept where he looked to support peesticide and peat sales through the trade.

The Daily Telegraph followed up with a p3 news story that added some criticism form Pesticides Action Network etc. An offended Toby threatened the Press Complaints Commission when I spoke to him last week but the BBC played this down, not wanting to make any more fuss.

Other publications used HW's story. The industry loved it. Well done HW for promoting the industry in the national press. Then the Sunday Times gardening pages, showing the traditional meekness of the national gardening editor, decided that it was all too controversial and ran a piece, written through the Beeb's press office, that blanded out Toby's comments.

It's all because the BBC want Toby to be more popular than his predecessor Monty Don, who, as we know, was organic and anti-industry. But the Beeb's dogma says it can't support peat and pesticides. So while it wants Toby to support them and be popular with ordinary gardeners, he has to do it tacitly. Hence caught between two stools and open to criticism from pressure groups.