Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Outdoor Disaster with Jamie Durie

I just watched a show on HGTV called "The Outdoor Room with Jamie Durie," and couldn't help thinking how lost this man is. He's from Australia where he... "revolutionized" the outdoor room movement?

Basically he meets people with and they go over the usual problems: privacy, low maintenance, kid and pet friendly. ect... All well and good.

Then he travels to someplace exotic to get inspiration and imports plants from other countries to make his unsustainable remodels. This man is what's wrong with the world! He's based in California which as far as North America is concerned has a fair amount of unique plant life, along with all up the west coast. In one show he traveled to Australia to "get inspiration." And he wants to plant all these plants native to Australia in this couple's yard. What an asshole! I understand going on vacation and falling in love with a plant. But would you pay your landscape designer to go on vacation for inspiration?

The show goes on with Jamie giving his assistant, this poor girl named Beth, a list of plant and says go buy them. Australia is a massive island with fairly unique plant and wildlife. Finding half of that stuff in North American nurseries is an effing challenge. I think the show should be his assistant attempting to find half this crap at nurseries. She must travel all over the state tracking this stuff down.

Meanwhile Jamie is back at the yard looking over the hard-scape which I think is the more boring part of the show.

In another show he worked on a couple's tiny yard. To give you an idea this tiny two bedroom home has a walk way for a side yard. There is a massive patio and their yard is maybe 2 as big as the patio. This is enclosed with a massive fence. Jamie didn't think they had enough intimacy in the yard so he wanted to put a large wooden box of a patio in the middle. The home owners thank god told him he was an idiot and they hated it on the show. So the wooden box for them to eat in had it's walls lowered which looks a 1000 times better.

Along the sides of their yard he planted crape myrtles and pink roses in tree form to accent the pale orange umbrella for their pick nick table, situated in the middle of the box. This all is well and good but those crape myrtles are going to take over the yard and seriously shade out everything he planted below.

Beth was asked to get full sized 6' tall sunflowers. I love the fact he picked a native plant but he's so out of touch with the US it's hilarious. Not surprisingly she wasn't able to find any that tall being sold in pots. I was actually shocked she found 3' tall ones though but Jamie didn't like them. One wonders if he knows Sunflowers are an annual.

Again and again he travels around the world to get inspiration. It's like he had a failed series on Travel Network or something.

Here is a link to his series index.