Monty Don Quotes

My father was an army officer who left the forces when I was six and never really fitted back into civilian life. My mother had five children and a mother with Alzheimer’s, who lived with us, so I imagined that she had a lot to do.

The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man.

I do wear gloves for things that sting a lot or prick a lot. But I just like to feel with my hands. I find gloves cumbersome and uncomfortable and I’ve got tough old hands so the old cut doesn’t matter.

I loathe nowheres – airports and bland hotels. I would rather be in an unpleasant, uncomfortable place rather than one just adrift, floating around.

A plant I have grown for years without really taking much notice of is epimedium. You know how it is: someone gives you a plant, you stick it in the ground and somehow it never presses the trigger. There is no intimacy.

A healthy plant is one that adapts best to the situation in which it finds itself. There is no objective measure of this.

Chickweed is regarded by most gardeners as just that – a weed – but is excellent in sandwiches or salads.

I love high summer as well, but nothing beats a perfect May morning.

I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.

You would be surprised at how many letters I get criticising me for straying outside the strict limitations of horticulture or even for expressing what is clearly an opinion.

I think we put far too much interest in trying to get ten to 20 year olds interested in gardening. I think you should do everything you can to try and get them interested up to the age of 10.

In my teens I wanted to be a rock star, I really did. At that time there was nothing I wanted more.

Coppice management depends upon the chosen tree being cut when the shoots are straight, vigorous and, critically, not shading out new growth.

We undervalue food in this country, yet Britain has beautiful food and beautiful growing conditions. It is astonishing the range we can grow.

Many gardens are hijacked by their plants and end up looking like a room overstuffed with furniture.

By starting from the ground and tapping into the absolute, uncheatable truth of nature we can make ourselves better

Tony Blair is a dreadful man; really truly dreadful.

Ground elder, introduced by the Romans as a vegetable, is difficult to get rid of because it regrows from the smallest trace of root.

Earth heals me better than any medicine.

By having a direct stake and involvement with the process of plants growing, of having your hands in the soil and tending it carefully and with love, your world and everyone’s else’s world too, becomes a better place.

A column is a curiously intimate affair. For a start, you know by default that you will have regular readers, so it gives the writer the privilege of continuing a running conversation with them.

I think that the essence of a Christmas wreath – of all Christmas vegetative decoration – has to be green and, if possible, living. So the basis of a wreath is ideally holly, laurel, ivy, rosemary, larch, fir or whatever is to hand.

If I’m honest, the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.

I like dogs because they are not humans.

Apples hate strong wind and damp, cold soil so try and place them on well-drained, rich soil in a sheltered position.

The Romans brought with them spices such as ginger, pepper and cinnamon, and herbs including borage, chervil, dill, fennel, lovage, sage and thyme, all of which have remained staples of the British kitchen.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise.

My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark’s fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.

Organic is loaded with a sense of rightness, with a set of rules. I would much rather someone bought food that was local and sustainable but not organic than bought organic food that had to be shipped across the world.

Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves.

You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful.

Once you engage with the simple enough business of feeding yourself, of soil and water, weather, season and harvest, it becomes personal. It is about you, your family and friends. Food becomes an aspect of those relationships as well as your intimacy with your plot.

I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.

It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.

I was brought up a strict Christian. My father was a lay preacher, my mother a church warden. The rhythm and ritual of the Anglican Church was part of our lives.

I’m bad at sleeping. I get somewhere between three and six hours a night.

When our jewellery business went into receivership we avoided bankruptcy by selling our houses and possessions.

Visiting gardens is bad for you. Not only does it encourage too much eating of cake but sets up all kinds of false notions that are ruinous to your garden back home.

Modern man has a very abstract idea of what a wood is. I guess that if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what a wood actually was, they would see it as a place where big trees grow.

As you get older your own problems are not that interesting.

I wouldn’t want to be known as Mr Depression, but I found that when I did dip a toe in the water and talk about it, the response from the public was incredible.

I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man’s-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.

When you’re 15 whatever your parents tell you you should do, you’re not going to do it.

The divide between a ‘wild’ plant and what is suitable for the garden is unnatural and meaningless. Gardens begin and end in the mind, and the Western way of thinking is not good at accommodating that.

There is a British assumption that you mustn’t speak evil of anyone’s garden because it is rude – it is like criticising their home, their children or their pets.

In the end, color combinations come down to our personal preferences, which we must discover through observation and experiment.

Any British household with a scrap of land has always grown herbs for the kitchen. From the superb monastic herb gardens down to the humblest cottage, a supply of fresh herbs would have been considered essential.

I myself did not officially become organic until 1997, although I was always hopeless at using chemicals.

What I love about French gardens is the combination of formal elegance and intellectual questioning.

You can trace the entire history of Britain by looking at gardens.

Intellectually the French are wonderfully open, in a way the British just don’t begin to be. You can question ideas in France, endlessly. In Britain, two things happen when you do that. Either you’re branded an intellectual, which is fundamentally mistrusted, or you’re branded a phony and pretentious, which people despise.

My basic philosophy is never do anything with the word ‘celebrity’ attached to it. Without being overly pompous, if you have worked hard to have an audience trust you a bit, why blow it? That is my currency.

I had a difficult relationship with my parents, who died young, but they instilled self-discipline and a sense of honour and loyalty and accountability. I’m grateful for that.

I have been growing vegetables since I was a boy. When I was about 17 I was the only one of five children living at home. My parents were ill and I took over the vegetable garden and I have had one ever since.

Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.

We don’t value food in Britain, so therefore the cheaper it is the better it is. We all eat far too much, we all pay far too little for our food. We have environmental problems, we have health problems, we have food transport problems.

Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour.

The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.

I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn’t make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.

Absorbing a healthy amount of dirt builds your immune system.

I think that most people are aware that it takes so much oil and water to produce what they’re eating. But the problem is inherent within the solution, in so much as you don’t want to tell people what to do.

The truth is that wreaths have never really been part of my creative life. I like them and want them and know how to do them.

Plant breeding has been going on for millennia and it’s a gradual process.

Bamboos can go from shining health to shabbiness in weeks. The problem is too much wind, too little water and tired compost.

I think that’s my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I’ve read about it, I’ve written about it, I’ve done it all my life but at heart, I’m just a passionate amateur gardener.

I live in the middle of country so I walk a lot.

I love filming. I love the teamwork. It’s a tight-knit group spending months on the road together. All the experience is shared.

That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are smallthings but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic.

Trees are complicated, fascinating things, usually older and more beautiful than any of us.

Daffodils, blossom and tulips jostle to the front of the stage in April. I love these early perennials: they may be more modest but they nearly all have that one special quality that a plant needs to transform your affections from admiration to affection – charm.

Some plants become weeds simply by virtue of their success rather than any other factor. You merely want less of them.

People are increasingly realising that what they eat is important. You can’t put junk food in your body and be healthy. All sorts of problems can develop, like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, strokes. Gardening not only helps with exercise and mental health, but it can improve diet as well.

For every gardener there is a minimum level of engagement that is needed to sustain and develop the relationship. There is no magic figure to this and it will vary from person to person and season to season, but it is there.

As September rolls into October, I become obsessed with apples. Now obviously this is provoked by the ripening fruit clustering on the trees in our orchard, but it is as though all things pomological ripen in me, too.

I don’t think about being the Colin Firth of the gardening world. I live a very insular world based around my family and my home, and to them I’m not the Colin Firth of anything.

A weekly column is not always a treat. It can be a tyranny. There are times when I have very little to say. There are times, every year, when I am weighed down with depression. At these times it takes days of slog to force the words on to the page.