Sarah pulled on her Wellington’s and strode out the front door. She saw her husband lovingly teaching Adam the ancient art of topiary, a skill that would be vital when he started at Eton next year. He grew up in an inherited pile in Hampshire—five acres, cottages on the house’s grounds—against the gloom of his father’s money worries and “profound” depression. Freedom came in the woods that surrounded the village, where Don would walk the family dogs for hours. At seven, he was sent to boarding school, thanks to a trust fund left by his grandfather. Home, he wrote, became “an absence, a heartache, where all the things I loved lived.” I like the way that at this time of year the garden fills its spaces on its own. The poppies grow inches every day and marigolds seed everywhere. The garden becomes almost unbearably beautiful. Every second is precious. But time goes so fast and I can hardly breathe with the pace and excitement of it. I keep thinking, this is it. This is the moment.” I have had issues with " volume " my entire life but never equated it to being connected to my depression... this has been a weight lifted from me.

I recieved this Book as one of my 20th Wedding Anniversary Gifts, the other being a Beautiful Porcelain Palette for my Watercolour Painting. Next year will be a year of garden painting I feel.I ate it up! If you haven't ever heard of Monty Don, I would recommend watching an episode of Gardener's World prior to reading this book. You'll enjoy it a lot more. It's also a story of the depression that has dogged Monty Don throughout his life, and about which he is pretty open. Naturally this depression found what I hope was its low point during the early years of their new home, when they had practically no money and small children to look after, and the garden at Longmeadow served as a lifeline, a creative outlet, and, eventually, the inspiration for a new career in garden writing and TV presenting. That attitude still gets him in trouble now. As well as raging at the use of chemicals and peat for profit margins, he keeps himself in the headlines with unpopular, and sometimes unthinking, social media updates. There have also been skirmishes with the BBC over pest control on Gardeners’ World. “Without being too grand,” he said in a statement at the time, “it is my show. With my views and my methods of gardening.” And one suspects he will continue to do so for some time. While he may say he’s old enough to “guide other people to make the noise—I don’t have to be the irritant screwing up the party,” he won’t be passing Gardeners’ World’s top job over to Adam Frost—his current deputy—any time soon: he’s just signed another three-year contract with the BBC. “The way I try to make that work is by constantly reinventing it,” he said, letting the steel crest through the surface. “I try to make each programme the last, the best, really keep the edge sharp.” Has BBC gardening ever sought a sharp edge before? Don brings it up swiftly when we speak, shortly after I ask if the frequent claims of his workaholism are legitimate. “We had to sell everything we owned, including our house, our furniture, everything. Literally everything we had to sell, we did sell,” he told me. “That was a pretty traumatic experience. I don’t think that ever leaves you. That spectre is always slightly over your shoulders, you want to go against it.”

He’s capable of incredible unhappiness at the same time as this large embrace of the world and all its beauties,” said his old university friend Nicolson. “How those two things are related I don’t really know, but it’s very important for who he is, that they co-exist.”Don admits that this familiarity, the well-meaning questions, can get behind the avuncular demeanour—and under the skin. And on those occasions when he’s not away working, he likes to be at home, in the Tudor-framed doer-upper that he moved into, in 1992, with his wife, Sarah—an architect who has long kept the fires burning and greenhouses tidy during his frequent absences—and their three now-grown children. “The truth is I don’t go out and about very much,” he told me. “I certainly never go for a meal locally, I don’t go to pubs.” At home, and with friends, Monty is Montagu, and there is one rule: don’t talk about work.

He broke a seal when he wrote about his depression in 2000, for the Observer. Jenkins, who commissioned him, said it “changed the way that people saw him.” Don confirms: “There was a very immediate response of people writing to me… “And I realised there was a great pool of unhappiness because people felt they couldn’t talk about it.” It was a few years later, while speaking at an event at the nearby Hay Festival, when he was touched by the bravery of “young men from farming communities” standing up to ask about mental health, that Don realised “that one must never stop championing it. I’m in an incredibly privileged position to be able to talk about these things.” Unemployed and with bailiffs at the door, Don started the 1990s in a cloud of debilitating depression. Sarah, who was also struggling with crippling ill-health, in her case physical, gave him an ultimatum: to go and see a doctor, or the marriage is over. A greenhouse had fallen down after 20 odd years in one part of the garden so when we cleared it away and found we had a new and empty part of the garden I decided to make my own Paradise Garden based upon the influences I had seen across the Islamic world. He wrote this book with his wife, Sarah, and I must say I enjoyed her contributions as much as I did Monty’s . Here is a good example.Sarah walked over to the Aga and poured her self another cup of tea into her Wedgwood Jasper Conrad Chinoiseries teacup. A single tear rolled down her cheek and landed, sizzling, on the Aga’s surface. I do really love this book. I've been watching "Gardener's World" on the BBC for several years now, and it main allure, aside from learning a great deal about gardening, is, of course, its main figure and chief gardener, Monty Don. I tell my friends he makes me think of Lady Chatterly's Lover. He looks just enough rough on the edges to make him interesting, but he can touch a flower like it were a lady's cheek, and when he speaks, ah when he speaks, and says something like, "and look at the lovely lush, blushing pink of this dahlia.." you (ladies) are nearly thrown into a swoon. So I was a little jealous of Sarah, who never appears on screen, and to be honest, I bought this book to find out more about this wonderful man. But surprise surprise, Sarah holds her own very well, so well in fact that in the end, I have to admit that she is (to me) just as appealing as he, and it is no wonder that they found each other.

He remains as outspoken on the Chelsea Flower Show, the centrepiece of the BBC’s annual coverage. “It’s a strange and rum do, this funny cross between a village fête and the Trooping of Colour,” he said with entertaining precision. “There’s no question that it is the highlight of the gardening year. But there’s also no question that it is horrendously overcrowded, that it’s based upon money and sponsorship and our relationship with broadcasters. I mean, a flower show, that has something like 17 hours of television a week on it, really?” He said the BBC would be better spending the money on “other gardening programmes, whether encouraging young people or different things.” Due to Covid-19, Chelsea went virtual this year, which may or may not prompt the corporation to rethink. But it takes some chutzpah for someone whose own success also relies on “our relationship with broadcasters”—indeed, to someone who is handsomely paid for fronting Chelsea itself—to point this out. To engage with gardening in the UK today is to engage, unavoidably, with Monty. And when gardening occupies such a sacred spot in the national mindset, the Don supremacy can be contentious. While his predecessors—the pipe-smoking Percy Thrower and the chipper, can-do Alan Titchmarsh—seemed at home in suburbia, Don took Gardeners’ World to his own sprawling, oft-flooded, semi-wild Herefordshire garden, Longmeadow. He’s a lifelong proponent of organic gardening and his dismissal of pesticides, weedkiller and peat is deemed unsupportive and unrealistic by many in the horticultural industry. He is in the midst of one of several long answers. Don speaks as he does on television. He vocalises his thoughts elegantly; the parables tumble out with the energy of a bounding Labrador, landing with heavy emphasis. “They’ll say, ‘it’s not real suffering, our planet is suffering, so what does it matter if you miss a holiday.’ And until you realise that human happiness is made up of little things, and you do respect that and look after it, then I don’t think you’re going to win hearts and minds.”And by the mid-1990s things did start going his way. A few writing gigs interrupted two years on the dole, including a piece about his escape to the country for the Daily Mail. He then landed a column in the Observer and his first regular television gig on ITV’s This Morning. Richard Madeley, who co-presented with his wife Judy Finnigan, still remembers Don’s first day. “The first thing that occurred to both of us was how all the women really fancied him. Here was this horny-handed son of the soil coming in. He had this sort of Mellors kind of sex appeal,” Madeley said, referring to gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, the titular character of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.