One of those tropical storms has made it to New England so it is raining… and wicked muggy. As a result, I’ve been relegated to the indoors where I have to watch some old guy with the most career interceptions in NFL history play against my Brady-less warriors. (Ha – he threw another pick!)

This is the photo of someone that you may not know. Why? Because she used to have a gardening show on HGTV. Her name is Kathy Renwald and she is a Master Gardener who worked for the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario. She had a lovely garden show called A Gardener’s Journal. The show was a Northern countpoint to the lovely Erica Glasener’s A Gardener’s Diary which tends to focus on Southern gardens.

Why mention Kathy Renwald? Elizabeth of GardenRant points out that the dearth of gardening shows on HGTV has been noticed. It is a point that I have made several times in the past.

HGTV does still carry A Gardener’s Diary on Thursday mornings at 7:00 AM Eastern Time. It is a gracious show, a show that captures much of the heart of gardening. A Georgian gardener and author, Erica Glasener visits interesting gardens and talks about unusual cultivars and how gardeners began their gardens.

There is the very interesting “The City Gardener” with Matt James (Fridays @ 7 AM). And, of course, there is the irrepressible Paul James, “the Gardening Guy” and his “Gardening by the Yard” show. James gets dirty and shows how to do things, what tools are useful and all sorts of practical advice. Some people find James’s enthusiasm off-putting. I think he’s fun and interesting. (And I’m deliberately ignoring Susie Coelho’s wretched and derivative dreck.)

But after that… nothing. Why?

I don’t count all of the landscaping shows – “Ground Breakers“, “Landscape Smart“, “Landscapers’ Challenge” or “Curb Appeal“. While they occasionally provide some useful information, they mostly explain how to spend a gajillion dollars paying landscape professionals to set up a yard. With a water feature.

There are wonderful gardening shows on TV around the world. The BBC has Gardener’s World. BBC (and BBC America) used to have Ground Force. HGTV doesn’t have to develop them. They could just show them. Like Jim Crockett’s old Victory Garden shows (rather than the God-awful, former stripper, Jamie Durie.)

Which allegedly explains why HGTV doesn’t have gardening shows: money. It is the interior shows, painting rooms, upgrading kitchens, etc. that get the air time. Why? How many kitchens can you re-model? How many times can you re-model it? You can spend hundreds annually on soil amendments, tools and plants. Doesn’t that count?

Actually, it does. The HGTV sister network, DIYnetwork, mentioned that $40 billion is spent annually on gardening and landscaping. That’s “billion” with a “B”. Container gardening alone is an annual $3.1 billion business.

Has anyone ever watched these home improvement shows in sequence? The first one has some designer telling you how to paint the living room with a gaudy color that I wouldn’t use in the inside of my coffin. And then the subsequent show has some ladies who wander into homes and tell the homeowners why those gaudy colors in the living room are the reason that their home hasn’t sold for the past ten months. Yeeesh.

Of course, these expenditures on homes is why Americans are careening on the brink of fiscal disaster. Oh yeah, I know that the predatory lenders, mortgage brokers and all the rest have a role in this crisis. But HGTV is to aiding and abetting this fiscal nonsense as it helps people build monstrous houses, make useless and expensive “improvements” and then flip them. This is how HGTV is destroying America.

Of course, if they had more gardening shows, there would be fiscal sanity, more harmony, less global warming and peace in the Middle East.

Hey — it could happen.