All the World's a Garden ; GARDENING Monty Don Lost the Habit of Gardening, He Tells BEN FALK

Jan 26, 04:14 PM

Monty Don likes gardening. A lot. In fact, when the 52-year-old went travelling last year in order to shoot his new television show Around The World In 80 Gardens, he got withdrawal symptoms.

"Not only did I suffer but since I started gardening again I'm actually having to slowly get back into it," he says. "I lost the habit. It's like being a musician, you're rusty and you have to get acquainted again. We're going to have to get to know each other again, the garden and I."

Journeying across the globe for six months out of the last 18 examining "people's lives via their gardens" led him to establish a very strict routine.

"When I was away the first thing I'd do every morning would be to get out my laptop and look through pictures of my own garden and go for a walk round it, via digital technology," he reveals.

"I never went anywhere in the world where I wanted to be more than I wanted to be at home."

Though he admits that he doesn't have the travelling bug (despite four years on the Holiday programme), the new show did open his eyes to a world of gardens - and gardening - he didn't know before.

"There's certainly a universal language of gardens," he says. "Even in the Amazon jungle with someone speaking to me in some very obscure dialect, you could see what they were doing and understand them. There's sign language. There was some level of communication.

"Most gardens can and should be an unembarrassed artistic expression. We should relish them as works of art. And I think they are. I think gardening is an art form and in this country we're rather obsessed with it as a science and as an aspect of horticulture."

"The obsession with gardening is certainly something that's completely unique to us," he says. "No other culture I came to found it necessary to put on the wellies and go out and get their hands dirty in the way that we do. We talk about a 'proper gardener' but I never came across that concept anywhere else in the world.

"Gardens are viewed for aesthetic pleasure or productivity, not for one's personal role in it. It's very rare for someone who could afford to pay someone else to do their garden to do it themselves."

Getting involved with gardening was crucial to Monty, who didn't want to be painted as some dilettante foreigner with a film crew. The result is a reflective and beautiful travelogue, focusing on parts of countries we don't usually see.

Though he's glad to have done it, it's clear that Monty is relishing being home, with wife Sarah and the children. Mid- interview, his mobile rings - his son making sure that Dad is coming to pick him up from school.

It's a tricky balance though, juggling his work commitments to the BBC's Gardeners' World, which begins at the end of February and his journalism, with trying to rectify the damage done to his beloved garden while he was away.

"It did go into disrepair," he sighs. "It's never been so shaggy. But gardens have great powers of restoration; they're very robust."

He won't be utilising any of the designs he witnessed on his trip in his own back yard.

"No, because you've got to be true to yourself," he says. "I make my garden because I like it. And if anything, I've got to have confidence to do my own thing. I've come back with no desire to make a garden that's a parody of another country's garden."

But does he ever wish he was able to escape the mantle of "celebrity gardening expert"? Apparently not.

"I've always gardened," he says. "I was in my 30s before I even thought of earning money from gardening. I never dreamed of being on television.

It came to me and it will leave me." Around The World In 80 Gardens is on BBC

Two on Sunday, at 9pm.

GARDEN CHORES

Complete the pruning of greenhouse vines and remove loose bark.

Bring in pots of forced bulbs for indoor flowering when ready.

Protect winter-flowering bulbous irises in the garden from severe cold or damp.

Start forcing pots of lily bulbs.

Give perennial vegetables such as asparagus, artichoke, rhubarb and seakale, a dressing of general fertiliser.

Water patio pots occasionally if it is windy and dry.

Cut off old leaves of hellebores at ground level.

(c) 2008 Birmingham Post; Birmingham (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. All the World's a Garden ; GARDENING Monty Don Lost the Habit of Gardening, He Tells BEN FALK
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