When it comes to planning my garden, I've not found anything better than an old fashioned notebook, pen and a pile of plant reference books. So what did I make of the new RHS-endorsed Gardening Guide - How to Get Green Fingers from Koch Media on the Nintendo DS?
Well, I guess it would take something exceptional to change my mind about the old-fashioned pen and paper route, and the Gardening Guide wasn't it.
The idea is you sit down with your digital assistant, Paul the "virtual gardener" (grumpy aside: this guy looks more like a stereotypical farmer Giles than a real gardener, and where's his female equivalent?) to plan your garden. The game guides you towards plants from its 400-strong encyclopaedia that suit your soil, garden aspect and your preferred planting style; then you can add the ones you want to your virtual plot. The guide dispenses timely tips and useful information for the plants you've chosen, and you can also test your knowledge with quizzes and add your own reminders to the calendar.
Several things let the Gardening Guide down. There's no getting away from it, the tiny-screen format just doesn't do plant pictures justice. In some images it was hard to see any detail at all other than a green smudge. Some of the seasonal tips were so vague as to be useless: for instance "Insects adore this time of year, so be vigilant" - do they mean good insects, pests or what? And there were some odd anomalies - should I describe my soil type clay or clayey? Who knows.
After playing around with this for a while without getting much further than adding half a dozen plants to my rather pathetic virtual garden, I was still wondering who would want to fiddle around with this when you can look a plant up online and immediately have a wealth of information and high quality images at your fingertips. Or consult a book, which can give you planting schemes and pictures that give you an idea of size and scale. The Gardening Guide also won't tell you how to combine plants together, what to put where and so on.
That said, I can see this flying off the shelves this winter as a Christmas gifts for difficult-to-buy-for gardeners who've bought Brain Training on the DS already and want something new to play with. And if you like proving you know your hosta from your hellebore, this could help you hone your gardening knowledge. Just don't expect to use it to plan your new border.
