Gardener, television presenter and author Monty Don talks about his new book, how he fell into writing and TV presenting and why UK gardeners are ‘millionaires’
Monty Don: ‘We underestimate in this country how privileged we are in terms of climate, soil and general horticulture conditions’
Tell us about the book and why you wrote it.
It’s connected to the BBC TV series, Monty Don’s Spanish Gardens. Spain was somewhere that I didn’t know terribly well and I certainly didn’t know its gardens well. I had the great privilege of being able to film the series and write about it at the same time. The root of my books is not to tell people what I already know, it’s to share what I find out.
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And what did you learn from writing it?
About the incredible diversity of Spain itself – the geography, climate, language, food and customs. And the incredible diversity of gardens and gardening. The vast majority of the country is dealing with conditions that are very, very different to our own, except for the north west corner – Galicia, Asturias and the Basque country. The centre of Spain is an enormous high plateau, with very poor soil and extreme temperatures – there are vast areas that can be minus 15°C for weeks on end in winter and in the 40s in summer, on very poor soil. That’s not Mediterranean gardening – it’s extreme gardening. Spain is also a country that has reinvented itself since the fall of Franco in the mid 1970s. Particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a great burst of creative freedom, and that was expressed in gardens as in everything else.
Is there one piece of advice or idea that you’d like to share from the book?
From a horticultural point of view, it’s accepting and adapting and dealing with the conditions you’re given. We completely underestimate in this country how privileged we are in terms of climate and soil and general horticulture conditions. One garden designer said to me: “The biggest problem you have in Britain is that you have too many plants. You’re like billionaires going shopping. You can buy anything you want and you can grow anything you want.” As a result, we don’t we don’t use plants that creatively. We tend to just chuck them in – we grow them because we can. We revere the range and diversity of plants in the garden, and we overplay our hand.
Many years ago, I interviewed [landscape architect] Fernando Caruncho, and he said, slightly playfully, that no garden needs more than seven plants. Obviously that’s not something to be taken literally, but the principle is good. I think it’s a very Spanish thing to have to use a very limited palette of plants that look good, grow well and are healthy, and that makes you more creative. I think it’s a wake up call for British gardens really – we overestimate our creativity and underestimate the fortune we have in the conditions that we grow in. We make wonderful gardens – I’m doing a series at the moment about British gardens – but true creativity comes from having to overcome obstacles. And we don’t have that many obstacles.
Too much rain, too little rain – we don’t know we’re born! My garden flooded last winter, but compared to some of the floods in Spain, particularly in summer, it’s nothing. And, our droughts are non-existent – we simply don’t have drought in this country compared to that. For most people here, in winter it doesn’t often get below -10°C and it doesn’t often snow for more than a week and it doesn’t often get above 32, 33°C in summer. To put it in context, when I was filming in Seville in April, it was 43°C.
I’ll read anything about or by…
I read a lot of history, particularly medieval or 16th or 17th century. I read a lot of novels. I tend go through authors – I’m reading a lot of William Boyd at the moment. Were he still alive I’d read anything by Cormac McCarthy. I read a lot about the countryside, and in particular, the history of the countryside and farming. James Rebanks, I think is wonderful. I read all his books with huge admiration.
What books are on your nightstand right now?
I usually read about four or five books at the same time – some poetry, a novel, and a biography and some reference books as well. I tend to only read gardening books for work. I’m reading a novel by Kate Atkinson called Death at the Sign of the Rook, a history book called Arise England, about Plantagenet kings. I just finished a book by Patrick Joyce called Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World which is rather wonderful – it’s about the culture of peasants in Ireland and Eastern Europe. I dig into the Selected Poems of R.S. Thomas a lot.
What first sparked your interest in gardening?
I grew up in a house with four or five acres of gardens, and my brothers and I gardened from a very early age. We were given jobs – mowing the lawn, weeding the strawberries, sieving compost or potting up chrysanths. By the time I was about 16 or 17, I was running the vegetable garden and knew what to do. I had learned gardening in the same way that I could chop wood and pluck a chicken – it was a household thing.
It took about 10 years for me to realise that I really did love gardening. My brothers are also very good, very keen amateur gardeners. In the the 1980s it was very unusual to have a pair of 20-somethings with a nice garden [Monty gardened in London with his wife Sarah]. It’s a long story, but somebody saw our house, took pictures of our garden, and then someone else, and that became a story in itself. And then magazines did articles, and gradually I find myself in the media world. And then I got asked to do television, and gave it a go, and found I could do that. And so one thing led to another. But it was all based upon this fact that at home, in my private life, gardening has always been a key part of my life. I’ve always said I’m an amateur gardener. And I mean that, not as a kind of false modesty or anything. I mean it really literally – I garden for love.
Can you share a gardening mistake or failure?
I’m not somebody who ever has regrets – I’m a great believer in doing things with the best of intentions, and then you learn rather than regret. There are lots of things I’ve learned by doing the wrong thing, but I don’t regret them.
The garden I have now was made from a field 33 years ago and I planted far too many trees and hedges close together. This was a very open, windblown site, but now that the trees and hedges have grown, the ventilation is very poor and there are all kinds of fungal problems. An experienced garden designer plants 10,15, 20 or 30 years ahead, but I tackled the bare field with huge enthusiasm and couldn’t wait for the trees to grow.
When we moved here, our children were very little and I made a play area about 50 yards from the back door. I thought it was brilliant, and it had all kinds of things in it. And of course, they never touched it. They wanted to play within five yards of the back door. If you’re going to make an area for children to play, they want to run in and out of the house, they want to see you and hear you and they want you to hear and see them. I modified it later, but it was a classic mistake.
Also, every single year I am late ordering seed or plants or bulbs. Invariably there are some varieties I can’t get because they’ve all sold out.
Do you have a favourite garden or landscape to visit?
I don’t really have favourites, but I really love Rousham – it’s almost perfect. It has a kind of purity about it, its history, its proportions, deceptive simplicity, its Englishness. And also, I love [designer] William Kent’s chaos. I love the fact he drank too much and ate too much. He would come when he felt like it, rather than when you needed him, and then when he did come, he’ll stay too long, drink all your wine and eat all your food. You can’t help but love somebody like that. The other day, I was writing about Woollerton Old Hall and I do think it’s sublime. Ninfa [in Italy] is incredible and extraordinary. But to me, it’s like sort of saying, what’s, what’s your favourite apple? One of the great pleasures of gardens is the variety.
What is in the pipeline?
I’ve also just finished filming a series on great British gardens. I’ve visited 60 British gardens – it’s going to be a five parter, a big series. It’s actually been one of the hardest things I’ve done because it goes back to what I was saying about Spain. If the great lesson there was from of the diversity of the conditions, the difficulty of a British garden is that its homogenous. All British gardens share similar characteristics, and that’s partly to do with our climate, partly to do the fact we have a certain style and we can grow so many plants. In Spain, herbaceous perennials are as rare as hen’s teeth. You get them in the north west but there’s no culture of a perennial border in Spain. Whereas there’s barely a good British garden that isn’t full of all kinds of perennials, ranging from Knepp to Woollerton Old Hall. When you start looking at them, as I have done the last 12 months, there’s a lot of similarity. To craft a five-hour narrative was a bit more tricky. But I think we’ve done it, and it’s been fascinating.
Anything else coming up?
I’m filming for BBC Gardeners’ World and I’m doing a talks tour in November – I’m doing 26 dates all around the country. I’ve got the British gardens book to write and various other projects. At the end of next year, hoping to film South American gardens but it’s not yet signed off. There’s a lot on, let alone just gardening.
Shortly after this interview it was also announced that Monty is designing a garden for Chelsea 2025 – read more about his dog-friendly Chelsea garden.
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