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.
