The Jewel Garden: A Story of Despair and Redemption

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Monty Don is perfectly content whenever he is working in his home garden. It is when he is away from it too long or the winter months make it impossible for him to putter as he likes among the flowers, the vegetables, and the trees that his crippling depression, always lurking like a beast in the shadows, seizes the opportunity to storm the cells deep in the dungeons of his mind and release the creatures of self-doubt, dissatisfaction, recrimination, and lassitude and allow them to run freely through his mind, overturning pots, tearing up rose bushes, and smashing down fences.

That attitude still gets him in trouble now. As well as raging at the use of chemicals and peat for profit margins, he keeps himself in the headlines with unpopular, and sometimes unthinking, social media updates. There have also been skirmishes with the BBC over pest control on Gardeners’ World. “Without being too grand,” he said in a statement at the time, “it is my show. With my views and my methods of gardening.”Their life settles down and together they plan the garden(s) that viewers now see week in, week out. This is a brief précis of what is a marvellous book, that details their trials and successes in life and business, but also really interesting details of their planting, which to me as a gardener are sheer magic. Don brings it up swiftly when we speak, shortly after I ask if the frequent claims of his workaholism are legitimate. “We had to sell everything we owned, including our house, our furniture, everything. Literally everything we had to sell, we did sell,” he told me. “That was a pretty traumatic experience. I don’t think that ever leaves you. That spectre is always slightly over your shoulders, you want to go against it.” Sarah walked over to the Aga and poured her self another cup of tea into her Wedgwood Jasper Conrad Chinoiseries teacup. A single tear rolled down her cheek and landed, sizzling, on the Aga’s surface. And by the mid-1990s things did start going his way. A few writing gigs interrupted two years on the dole, including a piece about his escape to the country for the Daily Mail. He then landed a column in the Observer and his first regular television gig on ITV’s This Morning. Richard Madeley, who co-presented with his wife Judy Finnigan, still remembers Don’s first day. “The first thing that occurred to both of us was how all the women really fancied him. Here was this horny-handed son of the soil coming in. He had this sort of Mellors kind of sex appeal,” Madeley said, referring to gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, the titular character of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Don admits that this familiarity, the well-meaning questions, can get behind the avuncular demeanour—and under the skin. And on those occasions when he’s not away working, he likes to be at home, in the Tudor-framed doer-upper that he moved into, in 1992, with his wife, Sarah—an architect who has long kept the fires burning and greenhouses tidy during his frequent absences—and their three now-grown children. “The truth is I don’t go out and about very much,” he told me. “I certainly never go for a meal locally, I don’t go to pubs.” At home, and with friends, Monty is Montagu, and there is one rule: don’t talk about work.

Unemployed and with bailiffs at the door, Don started the 1990s in a cloud of debilitating depression. Sarah, who was also struggling with crippling ill-health, in her case physical, gave him an ultimatum: to go and see a doctor, or the marriage is over. And one suspects he will continue to do so for some time. While he may say he’s old enough to “guide other people to make the noise—I don’t have to be the irritant screwing up the party,” he won’t be passing Gardeners’ World’s top job over to Adam Frost—his current deputy—any time soon: he’s just signed another three-year contract with the BBC. “The way I try to make that work is by constantly reinventing it,” he said, letting the steel crest through the surface. “I try to make each programme the last, the best, really keep the edge sharp.” Has BBC gardening ever sought a sharp edge before? Don is not though—quite—in the militant mould when it comes to the climate crisis. “You don’t get anywhere by alienating people. If you stop people from going to work, they’re just going to get pissed off. I think the great danger of groups like Extinction Rebellion is the self-satisfaction and smugness of the moral high ground, which justifies other people’s suffering.” It is more than a tale of a garden - wonderful and encouraging as The Jewel Garden is but also a story of a marriage in all its unsanitised honesty.It’s this kind of thing that’s has made Don one of horticulture’s more intriguing personalities: he doesn’t just tell how to grow your veg, he shows you why you should do it organically—something that genuinely matters at a time when insect populations are diminishing rapidly.

I like the way that at this time of year the garden fills its spaces on its own. The poppies grow inches every day and marigolds seed everywhere. The garden becomes almost unbearably beautiful. Every second is precious. But time goes so fast and I can hardly breathe with the pace and excitement of it. I keep thinking, this is it. This is the moment.”Born George Montagu Don in Germany in 1955 (alongside a twin sister, Alison), by the age of 10 he had lost his first name. His “tyrannical” paternal grandfather, also called George, refused to have his own name associated with “Montagu,” a name he deemed preposterous. Don’s father Denis was an army major who left the forces when Don was five, and “never really found his feet in civvy life,” Don said on Desert Island Discs in 2006. Janet, his mother, declared that once her children had reached the age of five, she wished she wouldn’t have to see them again until adulthood, a wish the English public school system can go a long way towards fulfilling. “I’m certain she loved all of us, but she found it hard to show it,” he said, adding that he doesn’t “remember being cuddled much.” It sounds like the sort of reflection that might take years of therapy to unearth, and with Don there is always an air of uneasy depths, a sense that the “nature cure” is far more than a fashionable phrase. 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. Writing as someone who suffers from Depression and has suffered from S.A.D since before it had a name, this book has given me a reset and removed some angst in regard to how I view myself. He’s capable of incredible unhappiness at the same time as this large embrace of the world and all its beauties,” said his old university friend Nicolson. “How those two things are related I don’t really know, but it’s very important for who he is, that they co-exist.”

To engage with gardening in the UK today is to engage, unavoidably, with Monty. And when gardening occupies such a sacred spot in the national mindset, the Don supremacy can be contentious. While his predecessors—the pipe-smoking Percy Thrower and the chipper, can-do Alan Titchmarsh—seemed at home in suburbia, Don took Gardeners’ World to his own sprawling, oft-flooded, semi-wild Herefordshire garden, Longmeadow. He’s a lifelong proponent of organic gardening and his dismissal of pesticides, weedkiller and peat is deemed unsupportive and unrealistic by many in the horticultural industry. I do really love this book. I've been watching "Gardener's World" on the BBC for several years now, and it main allure, aside from learning a great deal about gardening, is, of course, its main figure and chief gardener, Monty Don. I tell my friends he makes me think of Lady Chatterly's Lover. He looks just enough rough on the edges to make him interesting, but he can touch a flower like it were a lady's cheek, and when he speaks, ah when he speaks, and says something like, "and look at the lovely lush, blushing pink of this dahlia.." you (ladies) are nearly thrown into a swoon. So I was a little jealous of Sarah, who never appears on screen, and to be honest, I bought this book to find out more about this wonderful man. But surprise surprise, Sarah holds her own very well, so well in fact that in the end, I have to admit that she is (to me) just as appealing as he, and it is no wonder that they found each other. This book is a reflection on how the Jewel Garden, and the garden in which it is set (known as Longmeadow on the TV although I don't believe that's its actual name), came into being, after the Dons' original jewelry business failed and left them broke and jobless. A chance bequest gave them enough money to put down a deposit on a house, and being (evidently) considerable risk-takers they went for an ancient, unrenovated farmhouse and two acres of field, near a river that turned out to be rather good at flooding.

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The interplay between what he writes and then what she writes adds depth to the story of their garden. For they are a team effort. They began designing jewelry together, and their company became wildly successful, only to have the company fall upon its own bejewelled sword when the economy went bust. That part of their life is reflected in the section of their property they now call The Jewel Garden.