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. 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? I have been becoming more and more obsessed with my garden over the last 5 years - this year it, quite literally - saved me. 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. 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.”

He is in the midst of one of several long answers. Don speaks as he does on television. He vocalises his thoughts elegantly; the parables tumble out with the energy of a bounding Labrador, landing with heavy emphasis. “They’ll say, ‘it’s not real suffering, our planet is suffering, so what does it matter if you miss a holiday.’ And until you realise that human happiness is made up of little things, and you do respect that and look after it, then I don’t think you’re going to win hearts and minds.” Sarah pulled on her Wellington’s and strode out the front door. She saw her husband lovingly teaching Adam the ancient art of topiary, a skill that would be vital when he started at Eton next year.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. 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. I blow through French Gardens and then find his series on Italian Gardens. I have now started watching an episode of Gardeners’ World several times a week, while drinking a cup of Earl Grey and ruminating on what I’m learning from Don that can be applied to my own feeble efforts here in the States. Despite his primetime prominence, Don still sees himself primarily as a writer “who happens to have lots of television work.” (And in his younger days, he actually wrote a couple of novels though, in his own words, he soon “destroyed” them because they were “excruciatingly bad.”) He is finishing his next book, about wildlife at Longmeadow, when we speak over the phone, and so I picture him at the desk that he has described in his books, in a converted hop kiln, with the beds of his adored dogs at his feet.

He wrote this book with his wife, Sarah, and I must say I enjoyed her contributions as much as I did Monty’s . Here is a good example. It's also a story of the depression that has dogged Monty Don throughout his life, and about which he is pretty open. Naturally this depression found what I hope was its low point during the early years of their new home, when they had practically no money and small children to look after, and the garden at Longmeadow served as a lifeline, a creative outlet, and, eventually, the inspiration for a new career in garden writing and TV presenting. I have had issues with " volume " my entire life but never equated it to being connected to my depression... this has been a weight lifted from me.I ate it up! If you haven't ever heard of Monty Don, I would recommend watching an episode of Gardener's World prior to reading this book. You'll enjoy it a lot more. This Book, it turns out, chosen for being about Gardening and having the word " Jewel " in the title - not the year to be given jewels that there is no where to wear them to... So a compromise, was a perfect choice! 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. 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.

He grew up in an inherited pile in Hampshire—five acres, cottages on the house’s grounds—against the gloom of his father’s money worries and “profound” depression. Freedom came in the woods that surrounded the village, where Don would walk the family dogs for hours. At seven, he was sent to boarding school, thanks to a trust fund left by his grandfather. Home, he wrote, became “an absence, a heartache, where all the things I loved lived.”The despair as per the title, refers to the collapse of the business, but also of Monty’s battle with depression. It’s brutally honest; his description of depression is the best I’ve ever read. 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.”

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. Jewel garden" is a phrase that seems to have entered into British lingo, and I find myself wondering if the Dons were following a trend toward bright, clashing flower colors in gardens or whether they actually helped create it. Monty Don is the lead presenter on the above-mentioned venerable TV show for gardeners, so I've seen the actual Jewel Garden any number of times--brilliant flowers, often on absolutely huge plants, set off by towering grasses, the whole thing entirely over the top and yet entirely satisfying even when the plants flop over into the paths as they frequently do by midsummer. 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.”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.” 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. I recieved this Book as one of my 20th Wedding Anniversary Gifts, the other being a Beautiful Porcelain Palette for my Watercolour Painting. Next year will be a year of garden painting I feel. 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. 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.