Monty Don - The Complete Gardener

In January 2002 I found myself, for the first time in twelve years, with no television project lined up for the year ahead. So I set out to write what I thought would be my definitive work on organic gardening.

The book, which until a month before publication had the working title of Completely Organic , would cover every aspect of this garden that was then in its tenth year, and it was to be my final horticultural will and testament. Once it was published I would never write another gardening book because there would be no more to be said. I could give it all my time and attention and when it was done, I would devote myself to writing about landscape and perhaps novels, and garden just for myself and my family.

But, as ever, things did not go quite to plan. Throughout spring I worked away, the photographer Ari Ashley came weekly and photographed every aspect of my garden life, and the book steadily accrued in the laborious way that all books do.

But at the beginning of June I received a phone call from the BBC asking if I would like to take over the helm of Gardeners World . Although I had made many gardening programmes for ITV and Channel 4 and had also worked a great deal with the BBC over the years, I had never previously had any connection or contact with Gardeners World , had no idea that the job was vacant and had no designs or plans in that direction, so I was a little surprised. However it was, and is, the countrys flagship gardening programme, arguably the most influential and important of its kind in the world, and it took me all of one second to accept.

This changed a number of things, some in ways I had not remotely considered. For a start it imposed a deadline on what had hitherto been a steady writing progress, influenced as much by the weather as anything else. When it was sunny, I gardened and when it rained I wrote. That had to be replaced by a more rigorous writing regime in order to have the book finished, edited and ready for publication before I began work on Gardeners World at the beginning of the year. It also meant that the underlying fundamentals of the book organic gardening would come under much closer scrutiny. I realised that this was an opportunity to stand up and be counted and spread the organic word to a much wider audience than I had access to when I started to write the book. So the organic aspects were paramount.

Back in 2002 organic gardening was still seen as a slightly subversive activity by many in the horticultural establishment, and especially by the trade whose income derived hugely from the use and sale of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, as well as from the almost universal commercial use of peat. But over and above the practical aspects, there was a cultural attitude that nature was the gardeners enemy. Good gardening involved conquering and subduing nature so that it would not spoil a lovely garden.

I am glad to say that now, in 2020 as I write this, only the very cynical, very stupid or very ignorant seriously believe these things. All of us are aware, through the evidence of climate change, the extinction of and decline in so many species, the increase in atmospheric pollution, the effects of plastics on the oceans, the rise in allergies and asthma in children, and so many other signs and signals, that we are starting to pay the price for mistreating this planet. Gardening (although sadly not farming) organically and holistically is now mainstream and the militant anti-organic gardeners are a diminishing minority.

I took a break from Gardeners World in 2007 after suffering a minor stroke. Over the previous eighteen months I had travelled the world visiting gardens for a series and book, Around the World in 80 Gardens , and was exhausted. I recuperated in this garden, pottering gently and re-establishing a connection that had become stretched thin by other commitments. I realised that gardening had most meaning for me from a personal, subjective viewpoint and decided that if I ever returned to practical television gardening, it would have to be from here, in this deeply personal garden.

However, I returned to work with enthusiasm, made television series about Italian gardens, smallholding and crafts, and wrote a couple of gardening books as well as a second cookbook with my wife Sarah. I was enjoying the liberation from a weekly, instructive television series. Then I had another phone call from the BBC. Would I return to Gardeners World ? This time I thought long and hard. In the end I agreed, but only if it was filmed here, in this garden which it has been since February 2011.

This has inevitably changed the garden a lot. We are now a very private garden which millions of people visit most weeks even if few ever set foot in it.

We have had to smarten up. Until we started filming here every week, we would usually have at least one part of the garden that was not at its best or even lying fallow. We would get round to fixing it in our own sweet time and it was extremely rare for all the parts of the garden to be looking good all at the same moment. That does not work for filming. Television has an insatiable appetite for content and every corner of my two-acre plot is potential filming material every week so it all has to look good all the time.

To that end I started to employ two full-time helpers and, with various personnel changes over the years, this is still the case. It means that we now garden as a team, dancing to the demands of television as much as according to our own whims, but it has brought opportunities to do and grow more.

I have also had to dramatically increase the range and variety of both the plants we grow and the different gardens within the garden. Only the Spring Garden, the Dry Garden, the Jewel Garden and the Coppice have remained more or less unchanged. Over the past ten years I have added the Cottage Garden, a large pond in the Damp Garden, the Grass Borders, the Mound, the Orchard Beds, the Soft Fruit Garden, the Writing Garden, the Paradise Garden and the Wildlife Garden. I have also moved the vegetables to a new location, made a completely new Herb Garden, added a new greenhouse and dramatically changed the Cricket Pitch. Box blight has meant ripping out the box balls and many of our hedges and many more will have to go shortly.

Twenty years has added a huge amount of growth to all our trees and deciduous hedges and as a result we have much more dramatic and splendid specimens but rather less light. I had not foreseen this or at least not thought it through, and quite a lot of our planting has to change as a result. Also, 20 years of heavy mulching means that our soil is now a joy to work with. Heavy, intractable clay has become a rich, crumbly loam.