Farewell, then, Monty Don, the Gardener’s World presenter who didn’t seem to like gardeners very much. By gardener, I don’t really mean the kind of people who watch the programme Don has fronted for the past 23 years, and is now retiring from, much to the sadness of his many fans. The BBC’s flagship gardening show is aimed at amateurs, and for many of them, Monty is a national treasure and his garden at Longmeadow is the stuff of dreams. I’m not quite so sure.
Even the amateurs didn’t really get as much from Monty as they deserved. He left them feeling inadequate by comparison to his garden, which wasn’t less aspirational than incredible. Every week during the growing season, Don would stride about Longmeadow, picking up plants with his huge, rugged hands, watched on by one of his dogs. And every week, he managed to forget to mention that it wasn’t just him gardening this huge, beautiful site, but a team of trained, paid horticulturalists. Occasionally these gardeners would come up in interviews, but the rest of the time, they were entirely invisible. Perhaps they preferred to stay out of shot, but it was strange that Don never thought to mention them, unlike the BBC’s (much better) Scottish gardening programme, Beechgrove Garden, where the presenters pointedly say ‘now the gardening team have prepared this bed for me’ whenever they’re at work.
Even in the behind-the-scenes peeks he offered on his Instagram, Don would give the impression that it was just him and the dogs mastering the yew topiary, preparing the spring bulbs or keeping the compost heap ticking over. Of course, there is always artifice in television, and most people will never have a garden the size of Monty’s anyway, let alone the means to staff it. But viewers might have come away with the impression that it was possible for one man to stay on top of a garden this ornate and beautiful, and in turn wondered why they were so behind and their garden was so messy by comparison. Why not celebrate how much work Longmeadow took, rather than suggest that it all happened by magic?
The other effect of these invisible gardeners was that Don never did much to celebrate the skill of horticulture – a sector that is currently facing pretty severe shortages of labour. In fact, he seemed pretty sniffy about the idea that professional gardeners were people to look up to at all. Back in 2024, he wrote on X: ‘There are lots of words and expressions in current use that irritate me… but one that is particularly pertinent seems utterly unnecessary: since when did the term “horticulturalist” replace gardener? And why?’ He thought the term was an ‘unnecessary and pompous inflation’ – and said he disliked being referred to as one himself.
This might have been modesty, or it might have been because Don isn’t a trained gardener. He seems quite happy to suggest that this training is unnecessary: and it is for most amateur gardeners who are happy to bumble along with his advice on a Friday night and a few checks of the RHS website to make sure they’re pruning their roses correctly. It often is too for the man-with-a-mower type of gardener who most people are happy to pay peanuts to cut their lawn and butcher all their shrubs into weird bun shapes at the wrong time of year, thus eliminating both their beautiful natural form and often their ability to flower properly. But full-time gardeners spend as long training and honing their craft as accountants – just without the commensurate pay or respect. They take RHS exams in plant science and practical horticulture, are timed as they plant trees, and are expected to know the two dozen or so pruning groups for shrubs which dictate when and how these plants should see a pair of secateurs. Why couldn’t the most famous gardener in Britain help them along a bit?
Don said yesterday that ‘now is the right time for a change’, but that seemed quite obvious even a couple of years ago when, in the middle of the BBC’s Chelsea Flower Show coverage, he decided to be sniffy about the decision to give Best in Show to a young woman rather than another posh-sounding older man. Ula Maria, who is an established designer with a gorgeous portfolio of gardens that have imaginative hard landscaping and beautiful, textural planting, won that award for her Muscular Dystrophy Forest Bathing Garden. Immediately after she had been presented with the award, the cameras cut to Don and Joe Swift looking surprised on the BBC sofas. Don, pulling the sort of sniffy expression you’d expect to see if one of his dogs had gone to the toilet on his sweet peas, complained that the judges had got it wrong, and that they were now making best in show ‘a procedure that is like passing a driving test’ rather than about ‘that sense of delight that makes a garden’. He’d expected Tom Stuart-Smith’s (also magnificent) garden to win. But Ula Maria, who was incredibly dignified and quiet in the row that followed, had designed an imaginative, delightful garden, filled with densely-planted trees and with a stunning knapped flint wall inspired by microscope images the designer had viewed of the effect muscular dystrophy has on the muscles. She didn’t deserve that sniffiness – and neither do professional gardeners, horticulturalists, or whatever Don thinks we should call them.
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