The Jewel Garden: A Story of Despair and Redemption

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He remains as outspoken on the Chelsea Flower Show, the centrepiece of the BBC’s annual coverage. “It’s a strange and rum do, this funny cross between a village fête and the Trooping of Colour,” he said with entertaining precision. “There’s no question that it is the highlight of the gardening year. But there’s also no question that it is horrendously overcrowded, that it’s based upon money and sponsorship and our relationship with broadcasters. I mean, a flower show, that has something like 17 hours of television a week on it, really?” He said the BBC would be better spending the money on “other gardening programmes, whether encouraging young people or different things.” Due to Covid-19, Chelsea went virtual this year, which may or may not prompt the corporation to rethink. But it takes some chutzpah for someone whose own success also relies on “our relationship with broadcasters”—indeed, to someone who is handsomely paid for fronting Chelsea itself—to point this out. He broke a seal when he wrote about his depression in 2000, for the Observer. Jenkins, who commissioned him, said it “changed the way that people saw him.” Don confirms: “There was a very immediate response of people writing to me… “And I realised there was a great pool of unhappiness because people felt they couldn’t talk about it.” It was a few years later, while speaking at an event at the nearby Hay Festival, when he was touched by the bravery of “young men from farming communities” standing up to ask about mental health, that Don realised “that one must never stop championing it. I’m in an incredibly privileged position to be able to talk about these things.” 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. A greenhouse had fallen down after 20 odd years in one part of the garden so when we cleared it away and found we had a new and empty part of the garden I decided to make my own Paradise Garden based upon the influences I had seen across the Islamic world. 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.

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.Then, a combination of Prozac, time and the enormous challenge of transforming two acres of “scrubby, abandoned field” into Longmeadow, lifted the gloom. Don still suffers from depression now, particularly during winter months, but said he has “learned how to manage it.” Work, keeping busy, helps considerably. “Sarah always says that nothing has made me weller than success,” he told me, with a wry laugh. “It’s really crass but it’s much easier to feel mentally healthy if the world is going your way.” 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. And there is no doubting Don’s passion for protecting the land, rooted in having watched a kind of arcadia “literally being ripped up in front of my eyes” in boyhood. “Hedgerows going, wildflowers going, birds disappearing, trees being cut down,” he said. “In today’s climate it is unbelievable what farmers got away with then in the name of greater productivity.” At 18 he “was the youngest by about 40 years” when something stirred him to attend a meeting of the Campaign to Protect Rural England “in somebody’s rectory in Hampshire” and realised he felt an “affinity with what they were talking about. Surely, we should be looking after the natural world and working with it, rather than destroying it in the name of commerce.” 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.

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. 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. There are two summer seasons in this garden. The first starts at the end of May and continues to mid July and then there is a noticeable shift as the light changes slightly and the whole garden heats up until September.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 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.” 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.” 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.

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.” 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. 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.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.”