Monty Don

[pigletwillie]

Your right Lizzie,

I remember reading that Monty developed his Jewel garden with his wife as therapy to try to surmount his depression after their jewellery business went pear shaped.

Mental illness has such a social stigma attached to it, which is a shame as not many people are brave enough to talk about it publically. I like his style, but wish he was a little more tolerant of us none 110% organic gardeners in his presentation.

[The Grock in the Frock]

piglet i know why you have changed your signing off words with what you wrote ,but can i please have back the nice one,ye know The hand that gives manure stinks.its a lot more posative.

[pigletwillie]

for you Grock, anything

[The Grock in the Frock]

well i'll TRY to pm you with my demands xxxxx

[Chez]

I agree with The Grock, Piglet. Your original signature is much better - the other one did look a little on the negative side.

Funnily enough, I had the same problem with putting my first signature on yesterday. I tried 5-6 different ones over the course of the day. Once I had read them on my posting they just didn't come across in that vein. Either too spiritual, too tongue in cheek, too ambiguous or too Shakesperian/Dickensian. Went for the fun option in the end with good old Ogden Nash. I'm a great fan of his!

[pigletwillie]

Thanks chuck, yours matches in well with your avatar. They are quality beasts, are they from your estate?

[The Grock in the Frock]

now thats more like it chuk,glad to have the old u back

[Quote]

Life is a bed of roses

From randy ducks to seasonal depression, Monty Don's weekly column is more than just a

horticultural diary. It is a memoir of a life measured out with seeds and compost heaps and

nurtured by a deeply rooted love for the soil. Here, he introduces an extract from a new

collection of his Observer articles from the past 12 years

Sunday October 30, 2005
The Observer


I first heard that The Observer was looking for a new 'gardening editor' from a friend. I had

written a couple of pieces for the paper over the previous few years and she said that I

should apply, so, emboldened, I did. I was asked to supply a couple of columns as a kind

of literary audition. None I have written since have been so agonised over, but a few

months later I received a call from the editor to say the job was mine. I was to supply 52

columns a year, each of around 1,200 words. A figure was mentioned with the apologetic,

'It will hardly change your life, I am afraid.' He could not have been more wrong. The

money, although meagre by journalistic standards, was a lifeline. But it meant more than

just money. The job itself was - and remains - completely life-changing.

Article continues

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The really important aspect of it to me was that The Observer has always had an

honourable tradition of valuing and nurturing good writing - regardless of the subject

matter. I grew up wanting to be a writer, not a gardener. From childhood I wrote

obsessively - poetry, plays, short stories, long stories and a journal that ran to thousands

of words daily. A lot of this was cringingly dreadful, but I was learning the trade and through

it I made sense of the world, and this is as true today as it has ever been.
Gardening in some newspapers is seen as the very outer reaches of purgatory - indeed

the phrase 'gardening leave' is a metaphor for banishment from the centre of all worldly

business - whereas The Observer has fostered a long line of garden writers dealing with

the centre of their own universe.

I suppose that is at the heart of my pages. It all really matters to me. Because I am a rank

amateur, without any formal training and, crucially, with no links to the world of commercial

horticulture in any guise, there is no point in being anything other than subjective. As a

consequence, I nearly always write about my own garden and the effect it has on myself

and my family. Everything here is personal.

It is pure coincidence that The Observer job exactly coincides with the making of our

garden. It was an open field until April 1993, and now, 12 years on, has 20 separate areas

or gardens that probably appear ageless to most visitors. Making all this has been grist to

The Observer mill - about a million words of grist - but absolutely nothing has been done

for the column. I have merely used it as an excuse to justify some of the expense of what I

was going to do anyway.

I was recently quoted as saying that I prefer my own garden to any other that I have seen,

and I do. But I mean this in exactly the way that I prefer my wife to anyone else's wife that I

have ever met, or my children to any others. The bond is inextricable and soil-deep.

Everything in my garden has meaning and memories attached to it, from individual plants

to the broad sweep of design. Therefore my family, animals, meals and events are all

important and crop up within these pages along with the unhorticultural bits and pieces of

life that don't suddenly vanish when I set foot in the garden.

These extracts are from the second volume of my Observer pieces, My Roots. The first,

Gardening Mad, was published in 1997, so the bulk of this new selection is chosen from

the last eight years, although I have tried to get some kind of representative spread to

span the entire period since I wrote the first article. The format of the book is based upon

the calendar, with the 52 pieces starting on New Year's Day and running sequentially

through the year, although quite happily leaping years or even a decade in the process.

Between September 1998 and July 2004, I wrote a 500- word extra bit each week, called

'My Roots', which was a kind of blog of what I had been up to in the previous seven days.

What follows is a selection from the section that makes up November.

I have a good life. I get paid well to do what I love. But sometimes I am subject to

profound, irrational depression. So far I have lived with it and it has always passed with the

arrival of spring. I have shared this through these pages and have learnt a huge amount as

a result. There is no question that at certain times of the year my column amounts to

therapy. These columns from the November section are unremittingly gloomy in tone, but

anything else would be a denial of the way it is with me and my garden at this time of year.

I assure you that I regret this more than anyone else, but perhaps out of that dark the

words might create a glimmer of light.

[morefromAllan]

Sunday January 1, 2006
The Observer


It was 10 years ago that I last wrote a New Year column for New Year's Day. Normally the pegs that we weekly columnists hang things on veer a little one side or other of publication day. But today, bull's-eye. I guess most people will have bleary heads but I usually go to bed sober and early on New Year's Eve and treat New Year's Day as the first working day of the year. This is not Puritanism but relief. 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.

But there is an inevitable taking stock of the year that has just slipped away. I gardened less in 2005 than I have done since 1992. 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. I need around 10 hours a week spread across no less than three days. Less than that and I lose the plot, in every sense.
It might be down to this comparative lack of private, untelevised, unpaid horticulture, but I have been less interested in plants this year and much more fascinated by stone, wood and the spaces between plants. This is influenced by the Welsh hill farm we bought in the summer, but also a slight lack of engagement has meant that I have looked more objectively, finding simplicity and natural forms equally attractive. Many gardens are hijacked by their plants and end up looking like a room overstuffed with furniture.

I have also found myself increasingly irritated by the constant celebration of 'new' plants, the vast majority of which are produced to try and stimulate flagging sales. Although no one figure is agreed upon, there are between 250,000 and 420,000 plant species in the world. The RHS Plant Finder (Dorling Kindersley, £12.99) quotes 72,000 named plants, most of which are bred varieties. Clearly no garden begins to use more than a tiny fraction of these. Is there really a call for more - especially when their aesthetic worth is often contentious, to say the least?

A friend of mine was at a conference recently where growers were crowing about the development of a new clematis. Its claim to fame was that it would stack and therefore be cheaper to transport and display. You can bet that the horticultural trade will launch this marvellous 'new' plant next spring as a vital addition to our gardens. It is junk horticulture, I'm afraid, and one is right to be deeply suspicious and cynical about it. Collect your own seeds and take your own cuttings. Swap these with friends and neighbours who have done likewise. Some 'new' plants will inevitably occur - for free. Growing plants offers twice the pleasure of caring for already-grown ones. And if you must buy mature plants - as sometimes we all must -buy local. Support local nurseries and buy plants that have a human connection and which you know have been raised in similar conditions to your garden.

This year will bring gardeners ever more to the front line of environmental issues. After all, the effects of climate change work most immediately in the back garden. For at least 10 years I have been trying to get television interested in doing a serious but watchable magazine programme about the environment. It has so far met with endless rebuffs. The irony is that gardening - with attendant programmes, and articles - is unavoidably moving into that territory.

There is a range of issues to consider, from sourcing local plants, not using peat, generating wind and solar power for our greenhouses, to fossil fuels used by strimmers and mowers, to composting and, most vitally of all, growing our own, local food.

This is - or damn well should be - the age of the allotment. We need to Dig for Sanity. There is, rightly, a lot of hostility to the way that supermarkets operate a food tyranny pumping out bland, uniform products with little respect for health, taste or provenance and killing local growers and shops in the process - despite the occasional cheeky young chappie brought in to sanitise their image. But small shops are growing. Farmers' markets are particularly successful in cities, and for the first time since the war it is reckoned that vegetable seeds will outstrip flower seeds in 2006.

The importance of this is the empowerment that it gives people, however small or seemingly insignificant their gardens might be. If you can grow anything edible, be it running multiple allotments (this summer I visited a man in Nottingham who had had nine on the go at one time, but at 76 he was now restricted to three crammed with superb vegetables) or a pot by the back door, you can step off the remorseless food treadmill. It is surprising how liberating this is. A few lettuces, nectarines, spuds or artichokes suddenly free you up. You don't have to knuckle under the brutal supermarket regime. 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 prefer to garden and eat organically, but I would rather have really good non-organic food that is raised and sold locally by people I know than impeccable organic credentials raised as a cynical marketing exercise and distributed in a mass, indiscriminate way. If you know where something has come from, it suddenly has meaning. It does not have to be food, either. These mass-produced 'new' plants are simply a floral version of junk food; your own seeds, gathered in a brown envelope, modestly but carefully grown and shared with friends, are always going to be the real thing.

I am more convinced than ever that the way to challenge the global hegemonies is through small, local action. It makes no sense at all to put your trust in politicians of any hue, who are hopeless in these matters. Likewise, I suggest being wary of all organisations, even the seemingly good ones. They can - perhaps almost inevitably do - become corrupted. I think individual action working within a loosely linked social consensus is the way to combat the clunky global destruction that has steamrollered out unchecked over the past 50 years.

The garden is the place for this to happen. It is beautifully simple and modest. Gardens are now the front line of the environment, of climate, of food and, I would argue, of some kind of social sanity. I have no illusions that this will change much, but then again it does not have to. A lot of little change will do more to transform society than grand, but almost invariably empty, political gestures. Very small is very beautiful.

monty.don@observer.co.uk

Please note that he is all for the small local producer.I have been one such for 15 years and I can assure you that to do that and cope with the legal requirements under the Organic certification is a financial no go.
Allan