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’ <\/p>
Tell us about the book and why you wrote it.<\/strong><\/p> It\u2019s connected to the BBC TV series, Monty Don\u2019s Spanish Gardens<\/em>. Spain<\/a> 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\u2019s to share what I find out.\u00a0<\/p> SQUIRREL_13146886<\/p> You may also like:<\/strong> And what did you learn from writing it?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p> 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 \u2013 there are vast areas that can be minus 15\u00b0C for weeks on end in winter and in the 40s in summer, on very poor soil<\/a>. That’s not Mediterranean<\/a> gardening – it\u2019s 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.<\/p>