A new shade of green
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday August 24, 2009
SBS's garden guru is a television novice but he's set to bloom, writes Sacha Molitorisz. Last year, when Costa Georgiadis was in discussions about hosting a gardening show, he wanted to make one thing clear."I said: 'Look, if you want someone that's going to do Battlefronts or that kind of glitzy show, that's not my philosophy.' The garden is about nature's pace and the cycles and the seasons. It's not about coming in, hosing the paving, taking a sexy shot and saying, 'Isn't that nice?"'Four seasons later, Costa's Garden Odyssey is set to premiere among SBS's new Thursday night line-up of homegrown fare (which also includes My Family Feast, ADbc and Dave in the Life). It's unlike the forced fairy tales of Backyard Blitz and Battlefronts; it's also unlike the venerable sobriety of Gardening Australia. Instead, it's a vehicle for a bearded, excitable eccentric to share his passion for vegie patches and community gardens.In episode one, Georgiadis visits a community garden in Brisbane where volunteers practise permaculture, then tackles a drainage problem for a house below street level. In Pimp My Plants he fixes up his own dad's backyard and in Zen Shed he talks gardening with a Buddhist monk. The approach is holistic: the idea is to garden the soul as well as the soil.The show could not be more green. Nor could Georgiadis, who had no other television experience. "Actually, I have an extensive range of TV credits," he says. "I was on Red Faces on Hey Hey It's Saturday with the Hellenic Rebirth Brothers. My other credit was on The Ray Martin Show, singing in a bathtub."Georgiadis is larger than life, a laughing landscaper brimming with joie de vivre. Growing up in Bondi, he inherited his love of gardens from his Greek grandfather, whose backyard opposite Centennial Park overran with chickens, ducks, fruit and vegies. "Permaculture, organics, biodynamics ... these are terms we use but he was living it back then, with no sprays, no nothing. He had everything in balance. That's where it all began for me."He began an arts degree but transferred to landscape architecture, his studies culminating in 1990 with a thesis titled Green Cities of the Future: Ecology, Sustainability, Awareness and Responsibility for the Enrichment of Human Settlements.He's been putting that thesis into practice ever since, spending most of the '90s in Prague and Vienna, working for a company installing "eco" swimming pools and rooftop gardens. In Sydney, he now runs his own landscaping business.When we meet, he has traces of yellow flowers in his hair. "That's wattle," he says. "It's in my hair, it's in my van. I've just been doing a job in Petersham. One of those makeover shows was there a while ago and they planted this wattle and they placed it about that far [he holds his hands 10 centimetres apart] from the water main and that far from the fence. So I had to take it out."Endearing and exuberant, Georgiadis is a television natural. Still, he says he made several mistakes during the filming of the series.For the first episode, he leapt into a puddle of water and simulated swimming breaststroke."This was all new to me and I forgot the lapel mic was on me. Dave the sound guy said: 'You've wrecked it, you've wrecked it!' I said I was sorry but then he looked at it and said: 'You didn't wreck it!' My beard must have saved it."Television's need for brevity also caused problems. "Early on the crew would say, 'That was great but you just spoke for the entire segment. Can you do that in one-tenth the time and also say this, this and this?' That drove me crazy for a little while but then I realised I've got to learn to focus ... I want to inspire people to think in a different way, so I don't want to cut the exuberance, just to focus it."Georgiadis hopes the timing of his show is right. "What I'm trying to do with this show is to say, just have a look at this parallel universe."For so long it's been the domain of hemp-wearing, Kombi-driving, north coast commune-living, dope-smoking hippies but my grandfather wasn't a hemp-wearing, dope-smoking, Kombi driver. He was an organic city farmer providing for his family and he instilled that in me. I get so excited about growing stuff."Costa's Garden Odyssey begins on SBS One on Thursday at 8pm. See preview, p 12.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald