The Jewel Garden: A Story of Despair and Redemption

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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.

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. 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. 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.”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.

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. 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.

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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? It wouldn’t, yet, make him rich. While his classmates were going to university, Don took a job at a pig farm, working there in the mornings and spending the afternoons going through old Oxbridge entrance exams. At 21—the age when friends who had stayed on the conveyor belt would graduate—he was accepted to Magdalene College, Cambridge, after spending eight months in Provence, gardening for an eccentric old woman in exchange for lunch and lessons in worldliness. 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. 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.

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.” 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.” 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. 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.

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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 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.