Monty Don: The Gardening Mentor America Needs

I started watching Gardener’s World in earnest after putting my garden to bed in the fall of 2020. An episode or two each night — watching week by week, finding a rhythm and balance from episode to episode. The show’s deliberate, beautiful slowness soothes and comforts -- an antidote to the frantic miasma of cortisol-soaked media in the world beyond Longmeadow’s hedges. Monty carefully contemplates the best soil mix for each seed. He gardens organically, inviting wildlife into his gardens, and preaches balance in all things -- even slugs and snails, bugs and birds. He advocates for ponds, for example, not as pretty show places, but as breeding grounds for dragonflies and frogs, dipping ponds for birds, and beautiful habitats for water plants, too. He demonstrates how to take cuttings in hopes that next spring he will have more salvia and roses and rosemary. And there will be a next spring, a summer, a fall -- for the seasons of the garden are sure and steady and drenched in color and hope. 

Perhaps the most important part of Monty’s teaching comes in his approach: gardening isn’t perfection. His huge, five acre gardens have -- gasp -- weeds! He has a small staff of three who help him garden, but it is clear from his dirty, unmanicured hands and smudged, slightly disheveled clothes, that this man spends as much time in the dirt and compost as he possibly can. Unlike Martha Stewart he is gardener first, presenter a distant second. 

When bindweed, the bane of my existence, invaded the centerpiece of his gardens -- the Jewel Garden -- he and his staff pulled out every single plant, rinsed their roots, and replanted the entire garden. No, I probably won’t be doing that. I’ll be doing battle with bindweed in other ways, but here’s the lesson: even Monty Don ends up with weeds in his garden. Even Monty Don has bare patches that need to be filled. Even Monty Don chooses the wrong plant sometimes and has to pull grasses out of his Paradise Garden and replace them with something less floppy. Even Monty Don has powdery mildew and pests in his vegetable garden. Even Monty Don. And Monty shares his failures as well as his successes as a good teacher does. At the heart of his work is an honesty and a genuine love which oozes from every pore. 

Monty has also been forthright about his personal battles with depression, something which has been particularly poignant during this pandemic. Having been honest with his viewers about his own mental health and the role gardening plays in keeping him healthy, he conveys genuine compassion when guests and viewer videos allude to their own mental health challenges. And as a guide for a nation which has suffered through the COVID-19 pandemic, Monty’s leadership, eloquence, and empathy often bring me to tears. For even at Longmeadow, the realities of COVID-19, lockdowns, sickness, and death are inescapable. Instead of ignoring them, Monty tenderly cares for his viewers with the same love he shows his dahlias and his sweet dogs.