‘Explorer’ Digs Up Death And Mayhem In The Garden
National Geographic gives up all pretense of genteel sophistication tonight when its “Savage Garden” airs on “National Geographic Explorer” on TBS.
This is a wildlife documentary such as you have never seen: a black comedy built on death and destruction, yet including the amazing natural-history photography that viewers have come to expect from National Geographic.
Much of that photography was done in the garden of British-born Olwen Woodier and Richard Busch in Vienna, Va.
Woodier, who accommodated a film crew over several days of work in her garden, cringed at times when she saw host Leslie Nielsen and director Chase Newhart fall repeatedly into her carefully tended flowers. Later she discovered that a weed whacker Nielsen tosses cavalierly in the documentary actually ripped the lining of her pond.
Nevertheless, she thinks the show is “hysterical. It’s a brilliant script. I was very happy with the way it looked. It’s very different for the Geographic.” But she added, “Let’s hope they’ve (viewers) had dinner first.”
Woodier also was entranced with Nielsen, who brought his tongue-in-cheek humor and pratfalls to the production that also starred the denizens of her garden - and probably many gardens, truth be told.
And therein lies the horror of it all. There’s a bat that zeroes in on a graceful praying mantis, a small but venomous shrew that manages to kill a snake, fire ants that decapitate and eat a dragonfly, a spider that risks her life to kill a bee and burrowing beetles that haul the carcass of a much larger shrew to their den, carefully embalming it to serve as sustenance for their grubs.
The score is by The Insects, a pair of British composers who drew from symphonic music - Stravinsky and Vivaldi - as well as Warner Bros. cartoons and other songs. (When the beetle grubs hatch, they feed on the shrew to the tune of “Rockabye Baby.”)
“We’re going for the gross-out quotient,” acknowledged National Geographic publicist Ellen Stanley. “That’s the stuff that appeals to the kids.”
True, children may be watching at that early-evening hour. So if you hear shrieks of “That’s disgusting!” don’t be surprised.
It was Busch, editor of National Geographic’s Traveler magazine, who nominated his wife and her garden for the project. Woodier’s garden was the 20th the producers inspected, she said. It seemed to have everything: butterfly beds, perennials, borders, shady areas, grass, a pond - and plenty of creatures.
Even so, that was not enough. Woodier was instructed to plant two identical, U-shaped, raised-bed vegetable gardens and specific flowers (gladioli, daisies, passion flowers in pots, among others).
“I was absolutely fascinated by the whole procedure,” she said. “For me, it was very educational, the way they went about everything.”
When they moved to the Washington, D.C., area nine years ago, Woodier and Busch chose their house partly because she thought its existing garden was “magical, but very manicured. Now my garden is not manicured at all. The edges have become very soft. If there are weeds, I don’t mind, because they attract beneficial insects. It’s not what you would get with a garden design. I don’t want to live with fences. It’s a wildlife habitat.”
Two of Woodier’s 3-1/2 acres are garden, the remainder left as meadows and woods. Because she had allowed plants to grow naturally, the filmmakers found many creatures to film, such as shrews, moles, raccoons, bees, praying mantis, spiders and daddy longlegs.
“People are very weed-conscious,” she said, “so they eliminate weeds in their yard. Weeds support butterfly larvae. Tiger swallowtails lay their eggs on dill and parsley. I let a lot of the wild milkweed grow. In the summer sometimes I can count 100 swallowtail butterflies.”
A free-lance writer, lecturer and teacher who specializes in creating habitat gardens that attract wildlife, Woodier works at home, getting up at 6 a.m. to garden before beginning her desk work.
Leslie Nielsen, she said, “was charming. He’s delightful. All he has to do is roll his eyes or curl a nostril.”
Nielsen has narrated 14 National Geographic specials since 1971; this is his second for “Explorer.”
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