Fresh from a tour of America’s green spaces, the Gardeners’ World presenter broadcast from home during lockdown. He talks about horticulture, history and loss
‘I’m not a great musician, but I often feel there’s an analogy with music,” says Monty Don, describing his process of interpreting a garden for the first time. “When you’re learning a piece of music, your efforts go into playing the right notes with the right fingers. But until you stop thinking about how to play it, you can’t really hear the music. So when I get to a garden, I try to stop thinking about my research and let my mind freewheel: ‘What does it look like? What do I feel?’”
The main presenter of BBC Two’s Gardeners’ World and all-round champion of thrusting hands into the earth, Don is our gardener at home. Regular viewers (3.8 million people tuned in to one episode during lockdown, the highest figures for a decade) will know his Longmeadow garden as intimately as their own. But, unlike other horticultural television staples, he is also an intrepid gardener abroad. Most recently, it is American gardens that Don has been contemplating, in a book of the same name. “You have this vibrant creativity and this sense of the possible – that you can cut a clearing and be the first person to make a garden there. And that is beyond exhilarating.”
