After 23 years at the helm, Monty Don announced that he is stepping down from the BBC’s long-running Gardeners’ World series, bringing an end to one of the longest and most recognisable chapters in British gardening television.“I have decided that the current series of Gardeners’ World is to be my last,” Monty Don, 71, confirmed earlier this month. The broadcaster and gardener joined the programme in 2003 and has spent the past 16 years presenting it from his 2-acre private garden, Longmeadow, transforming the once-abandoned field into the garden that millions of viewers have come to know. “I will still be gardening, dog by my side, here at Longmeadow,” he said while making the announcement.
How Monty Don built Longmeadow into the world’s most watched garden
In 1991, Monty Don and his wife, Sarah, bought a Herefordshire property. At the time of the purchase, there was no garden to speak of. Just an overgrown field, builder’s rubble and a single hazel tree. Most people would have hired contractors, drawn up plans and planted hedges. Don, however, chose to wait. For an entire year, he did almost nothing but observe. “I spent the next spring and summer just cutting the rough grass and clearing the rubbish. I raked every inch three times, got to know the lay of this land intimately. All the time I was planning, dreaming and drawing,” Monty Don wrote on his website.During those first months, he learned a lot about the land, which became the blueprint for Longmeadow. The northern exposure meant brutal winds from three directions. Rather than fight them, he spent autumn 1992 building defences. He knew he needed windbreaks. “I bought a hundred 6ft chestnut stakes and quartered them (chestnut cleaves beautifully down the grain) to make 400. I also bought 2,000 bean sticks and wove these between the stakes to make solid fences. The young hedging plants were then planted in the lee of the fences and grew much faster as a result,” he recalled. The planting began in earnest in 1993 and has not stopped since. “The changes have been dramatic and may seem astonishing to some. But in my mind, that early field with its pattern of woven fences protecting the little plants, so small yet filled with dreams, still remains beneath the skin, is still there beneath all the years,” he added.
Longmeadow began as a private project. Don and his wife spent the first years developing the garden for themselves. He had started a gardening column and was building a reputation as someone who took both horticulture and prose seriously. Television came later. In 2003, he took over Gardeners’ World as the first self-taught gardener to present it. After a stroke in 2008, he returned to the show in 2011. This time, something shifted. The show was filmed at Longmeadow itself. And just like that, his private garden became the nation’s garden.
Over three decades, Don and his wife transformed the 2-acre abandoned land into a series of characterful spaces: the Cottage Garden, Jewel Garden, Paradise Garden and Vegetable Garden. Millions of people watched Longmeadow change through the seasons. While some grew fond of the Jewel Garden, the spiritual centre of the entire garden, some viewers found the Cottage Garden riveting. They watched the spring bulbs emerging from the beds and the summer bringing the garden into full bloom, with roses, large-flowered clematis, iris, foxgloves, alliums and lupins crowning the borders. They watched how he pruned, how he placed colour and how his golden retriever, Nigel, became as much a fixture as the borders. The viewers resonated with him. Don told them why choosing the right plant for the right space mattered. As Monty Don leaves the show after 23 years and 700 programmes, he certainly is not leaving gardening behind. Longmeadow will continue to flourish. For Monty Don gardening is not just about beautiful gardens or growing plants. It is about the sense of purpose, freedom, and empowerment it brings. “The real importance of gardening is the empowerment that it gives people, however small or seemingly insignificant their gardens might be. It is surprising how liberating it is, if you can grow anything at all.”
