Morris mixes humor, TV in Spokane

If everything had gone right in Ciscoe Morris’ gardening life, we never would have gotten to know him. But, events didn’t go right and gardeners from across the Northwest, Alaska, northern British Columbia and northern California, regularly enjoy his irrepressible humor and encyclopedic gardening knowledge on KING television in Seattle and the Northwest Cable News network. On Friday, Morris will bring his humor, and his television show to the 32nd annual Spokane Home and Garden Show at the new Convention Center.

Morris got his gardening start at the age of 10 in his native state of Wisconsin (“Wis-cheese-kin”) when he bugged his local priest into hiring him as a lawn boy. Morris moved to Seattle and worked his way up to the position of head gardener at Seattle University.

His radio career started when a local radio garden show host got sick and recommended that Morris take his show.

“I said ‘I don’t know’ so many times it became a comedy routine,” Morris said

The station asked him back.

Morris’ television career began in the late 1980s. Morris’ name was handwritten at the end of the list of candidates. The day of his audition, he got caught in Seattle traffic and was so late they had only a few minutes to get him in.

“I got to say about three words and they said that was it,” he said. He went home thinking he had failed. But he got a call early that evening to be at the first broadcast the next morning.

“I went and walked around a bit, and nobody paid any attention to me,” Morris says. Finally, he went up to the producer and told him he was there to do the show.

“(The producer) asked who I was and I told him,” says Morris.

The producer responded, “You’re not Ciscoe; the other guy was Ciscoe!” Then turned to the crew and said, “We have to do the show with this yahoo.”

“I was on the show for nearly five years and to this day I don’t know what happened to the guy that was supposed to be there,” Morris said.

Morris considers himself an environmental gardener who works with nature.

“I think it makes gardening way more fun if you don’t use a lot of poisons,” he says. “When you work with nature, you learn to appreciate the spiders and the different bugs and what they can do for you.”

Morris feels that even people with “black thumbs” should garden just little bit for the soul, “even if it’s only for 15 minutes.”

Friday morning, Morris will film his weekly NWCN show while at the Spokane Home and Garden show.

“We find fun things to do and make up little skits as we go,” Morris said. “It’s like TV jazz.”

That evening at 6 p.m., Tom Sherry, chief meteorologist for KREM, will join Morris for a question-and-answer session.

And a healthy dose of humor.