The news that Monty Don is stepping down from Gardeners’ World after more than two decades marks the end of an era. Few figures have become quite so fixed in the national imagination: the corduroy trousers, the muddy boots, the docile golden retrievers padding beside him through the borders of Longmeadow, his rambling Herefordshire garden where the show is filmed. It felt like that would be the case for ever.
Alas, it was not to be. Don announced today that the current series will be his last, 23 years after he first began presenting the programme. In that time, he estimates he has made around 700 episodes, all through which he has dispensed wisdom on roses, frost, compost and the rhythms of the seasons – and become not merely a television gardener, but something close to the custodian of Britain’s gardening soul.
“I have had the privilege of sharing my own abiding passion for gardens and gardening with an equally passionate, and often equally knowledgeable audience,” he said, describing that connection with millions of viewers as something he had “always treasured”. Now, though, “the right time” had come for a change. He will continue working with the BBC, he added, with “more books to write, more programmes to make” – and, naturally, plenty more gardening at Longmeadow.
Yet when we spoke to Don at the start of this summer, he was strikingly candid about the gap between his place in the nation’s affections and the man he sees himself as. For all the calm authority he has projected from our screens, he was quick to dispel the idea that he possesses some kind of horticultural infallibility.
“This myth that I am somehow the perfect gardener is complete nonsense,” he said. “I make mistakes all the time. Literally every day.”
Take this year’s crop of sweetcorn. “I’ve grown sweetcorn all my life. I know how to do it – I’ve done it hundreds of times with success. Last year, they were fantastic. This year, they’ve not germinated. I don’t know why, because they were perfectly good seeds. But something has gone wrong.”
Horticultural mishaps might be frustrating to some, but Don regards them as essential. “I remember – god, 45 years ago now – I set out to write a book about head gardeners,” he says. “I interviewed about 20 of them around the country, all in their eighties, and they all said the same thing: they didn’t really begin to get good at gardening until they’d had some serious failures.
“Because if you succeed at something, you stop working out how you do it. Whereas if you fail, you really have to think: what am I doing wrong? And that happens to me all the time – every day.”
The book itself was never published, though many others followed – from manuals such as The Weekend Gardener and The Complete Gardener to memoirs including The Jewel Garden, co-written with his wife of four decades, Sarah, and Nigel: My Family and other Dogs, about the beloved golden retriever, whose death in 2020 prompted a kind of national mourning.
His latest publication, British Gardens, is the sister project to last year’s BBC Two series of the same name and follows Don (along with his long-time photographer collaborator Derry Moore) as he travels from northern Scotland to Cornwall to understand what the nation’s gardens reveal about the country itself.
Now is “the right time” for Don to step down from Gardener’s World, he says (Photo: BBC Studios / BBC Picture Archives)“I’ve done a lot of books and shows about gardens around the world – Japan, America, Italy, France, Spain – and without being too pretentious, I’ve always seen those trips as an anthropological exercise as much as a horticultural one,” he says. “So I don’t know why it took until recently for me to think: why am I not looking at British gardens?” There would be a lot to learn. “And nice not to have to travel so much. Anything to avoid airports.
“I’ve always felt,” he continues, “that Britain is very beautiful and that we should celebrate that. It also reminded me that by and large we’re a very tolerant society. It’s easy to say we’re becoming more binary and antagonistic – and I think there is some truth in that – but actually, we’re pretty good at living alongside one another.”
His journey also showed him that gardening occupies a uniquely important place in British life. “We think our gardens are normal and that we garden normally, but the truth is we are far more interested in gardening than almost any other nation. There are three things that are a lingua franca in Britain: football, dogs and gardening. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can talk about one of those things, and the chances are it will cross any class, race or religious divide.”
He thinks part of that stems from Britain’s relationship with the countryside. “Our view of the countryside is very romanticised,” he says. “The reality is that it smells of poo, it’s muddy, it’s hard work. Agriculture can be industrial and deeply unromantic. But that doesn’t square with most people’s imagination of the countryside. So our gardens become this little piece of Arcadia; often the only real connection people have to that imagined world.”
It also goes some way towards explaining the enduring success of Gardeners’ World, which has been going since the 60s and which Don presented since taking over from Alan Titchmarsh in 2003. “People always say the programme is a sanctuary,” he says. “It’s a still point in a turning world. Even if you’re not a gardener, with the world as it is, when the lunatics are running the asylum, this is a moment of sanity.”
Still, he insists none of its success can be taken for granted. “Television is changing all the time. If Gardeners’ World is good, it’s because people work really hard at it. We never just turn up and say: people liked this in 1968, let’s churn it out again. You try to make every programme as good as you possibly can.”
He laughs recalling the bafflement of foreign friends at the scale of Britain’s obsession with gardening television, particularly during coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, which he has also presented for years. “They said: ‘You have a whole hour of primetime television covering a flower show?’ I said: ‘No – we have 17 hours in a week.’ They just couldn’t believe it. I mean, Chelsea is overkill. But the idea that a flower show could command that kind of audience is completely alien to them.”
When I ask what he is looking forward to about this year’s show, he pauses. “If I’m really honest, I don’t think about it much until I get there. I’ve got too much else going on. But in a way I quite like that, because it still surprises me.”
What about the much-discussed lifting of the long-running ban on garden gnomes? “It will provide a headline or two. But it’s not that interesting.”
Monty is the first self taught gardener on the BBC show ‘Gardener’s World’ (Photo: BBC Studios)What continues to astonish him, though, is the level of effort involved. “I’ve done a show garden there myself, so I know what it takes,” he says, referring to his dog-friendly collaboration with the RHS and BBC Radio 2 last year.
“There is extraordinary talent there. Although the interesting thing about Chelsea is that it is this weird, very British combination of extreme professionalism and amateurism. I’ve always felt it feels a bit like a cross between Trooping the Colour and a village fête. That is both its charm and, perhaps, its complacency.”
Part of this view might be shaped by the fact Don has never been much interested in the showier end of gardening. “My happy space is planting something, but I don’t really care what,” he admits. “I get the same pleasure from planting something very ordinary as something very exotic. I’m not someone who gets real joy from growing something rare or very difficult. For a long time I was only really focused on growing vegetables. That is what got me into it in the first place. And I haven’t lost that, though it’s expanded now.”
Don grew up in rural Hampshire, in a home with a sprawling garden which he and his siblings were expected to help maintain. It wasn’t an easy childhood: he has spoken candidly about being raised by a “frightening” father, a heavyweight boxer turned career soldier, who suffered from PTSD from the war. Don was sent to boarding school at seven, and was treated for bone marrow cancer at 10.
“You can’t undo your childhood,” he says now. “Of course those experiences shaped me profoundly, but I am also as much a product of my adulthood.”
Adulthood brought its own challenges. While studying at Cambridge, he met Sarah, with whom he would build not only a family but a jewellery business that became hugely successful during the 80s, attracting celebrity clients including Princess Diana and Boy George. Then came the 1987 financial crash. The business collapsed; the couple went bankrupt. They lost their home, Don was on the dole for two years and it took seven years to repay their debt.
“It was obviously a catastrophic failure – we lost everything – but I can look back on it as just part of life’s movement,” he says. “If that hadn’t happened, I don’t think I’d be doing what I’m doing today.”
By the early 90s, with three small children and huge pressure to rebuild financially, Don found himself pulled into a new career almost by accident. After beginning to write articles about gardening, he was invited to screen-test for a live gardening slot on This Morning. “I certainly never intended to do television. I only agreed to do it because they offered me £300, and I needed £300 because we were broke.”
More TV work followed, alongside columns and books. “I worked seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he says. “I needed to earn money to get back on my feet, to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. So it was purely practical: if people are prepared to pay me quite well to do something that I know I can do, great. I’ll take it. It wasn’t until a long time after that I could relax and say: ‘I’m doing this because I want to.’”
How did he manage the work-life balance over the years? “Ask my children that and they probably wouldn’t answer,” he says dryly. “Every parent makes mistakes. Every parent, with hindsight, would do things differently. But Sarah and I raised our children as well as we could, and I don’t really have regrets.”
Those children are now grown up with families of their own, and becoming a grandfather of three has clearly brought him enormous happiness. “Being a grandparent is an unmitigated, unalloyed joy,” he says. “I’m a very different grandparent to a father. Being a parent is utterly exhausting. Being a grandparent is much easier. You can just relish it. So we sit back and bask in it.”
Now 70, Don understands how important that is. “When you get to my age, you realise the only things that matter are love and friends and family and looking after each other. Everything else is a distraction.”
Though that doesn’t mean he is ready to stop work. “I never really plan more than about a year ahead. The one thing I know is that I have absolutely no concept of retirement. If my body and brain hold out – and as long as people want me to – I’ll go on for as long as I can.”
‘British Gardens’ by Monty Don and Derry Moore is out now (BBC Books, £35)
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