Monty Don

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Montagu Denis Wyatt "Monty" Don (born 8 July 1955) is an English television presenter, writer, and speaker on horticulture, best known for presenting the BBC television series Gardeners' World.

Early life and education

George Montagu Don was born in Iserlohn, West Germany, on July 8, 1955. Denis Thomas Keiller Don, a career soldier stationed in Germany at the time of his birth, and Janet Montagu (née Wyatt), is the youngest of five children to be born. Don's parents changed the name on his birth certificate to Montagu Denis Donis Don shortly after Don's birth due to a family feud over the name. When Don was ten years old, he gave it the name of his mother's maiden name, then Montagu Denis Wyatt Don. Don is a descendant of botanist George Don and the Keiller family, who are best known as the product of Keiller's marmalade. He descends from the Wyatt family of architects on his maternal side. Don's twin sister, Alison, was nearly killed in a car crash and suffered with a broken neck and blindness.

The family migrated to Hampshire, England, when Don was a boy. His parents were described as "very strict" by him. He attended three independent schools: Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, and Bigshotte School in Wokingham, where, at seven years old, he was asked to leave school for being too loud. He then attended Malvern College in Malvern, which he looked, and the Vyne School, a state-wide comprehensive education in Basingstoke, followed by a state comprehensive college. While waiting for retakes at night school, he spent time on a construction site and a pig farm by day. He had been a keen gardener and farmer throughout his childhood. Don spent several months in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he worked as a gardener and played rugby in local teams in his late teens. He returned to England, determined to attend Cambridge University out of "sheer bloody-mindedness" and passed the entrance exam. He studied English at Magdalene College, where he met his future wife Sarah Erskine, a qualified jeweler and architect, during this period. Don decided on boxing to surprise his father, a former heavyweight boxing champion in the army, who became a Cambridge Half Blue for boxing. After being knocked out and suffering concussion, he gave up.

Personal life

In 1983, Don married Sarah Erskine. Adam and Tom, as well as daughter Freya, have two sons. The couple lived in Islington, north London, while Don pursued postgraduate study at the London School of Economics and worked as a waiter at Joe Allen's Covent Garden restaurant and later as a binman. The couple then moved to Hackney's De Beauvoir Town district, where they planted their first garden. They migrated to The Hanburies, a country house in Herefordshire, in 1989. Don's first book, The Prickotty Bush, chronicled the garden's construction and subsequent loss of the house as a result of the jewellery company's demise. The Dons bought a house in Ivington, Herefordshire, where they started to plant a new garden named Longmeadow in 1991. At the time of purchase, the house was unfit to live in, so they rented a Leominster house that was infested with rats and had no heating. At the end of 1992, they moved to their Ivington home.

Don has owned many dogs throughout his adult life. He currently owns three children, Nellie and Ned, Golden Retrievers, and Patti, a Yorkshire terrier, who were caught on camera with Don on Gardeners' World. He also has dogs that are not on the show. The cops at Longmeadow have the graves of Dons' other dogs, Beaufort, Red, Poppy, and Barry, as well as cats Stimpy and Blue. Don also owns a sheep farm, on which he raises 500 ewes.

Don's Nigel was a male Golden Retriever dog. Nigel appeared on Gardeners' World, often with Nellie. The puppy was adopted as a seven-week-old puppy from a litter in the Forest of Dean on July 1st, 2008, and was a hit with viewers who were concerned when he was removed from the show in September 2012. He had back problems after vehiculating sideways while attempting to catch a tennis ball and had ruptured an intervertebral disc in his spine. Nigel recovered and resurfaced on television appearances.

Don said he had chosen Nigel because the domestic dog symbolizes both good and bad human relationships with nature; humans can prioritize fluffy animals over others. An autobiographical book entitled Nigel: my family and other dogs was published in September 2016, chronicling Nigel and the other dogs in Don's life, including the female golden retriever Nellie. Don's website and Instagram pages revealed that Nigel died six days before his 12th birthday on May 11, 2020. Nigel had been more than a companion and had assisted him with his depression, according to Don, who appeared on BBC Radio 4 Today. "He was a bear with a small brain," he said, "he had this absolute sense of purity." He exuded a certain innocence and that we all love our dogs; everybody agrees that their dog is special, I've had a lot of dogs, and Nigel is something special. Nigel is buried in the Longmeadow garden, as with Don's other dogs.

Don has suffered with depression since his mid-twenties. In a piece for The Observer in 2000, he first wrote about his experiences with it and its effects on his personal life. His editor recalled that it "changed the way people saw him," and Don's book prompted "a fast reaction" from readers. Don recalled "lengths of muddy time" in his life and discovered that gardening "heals me better than any drug." William Doyle's 2021 album Great Spans of Muddy Time was inspired by this quote.

If Don's wife did not request assistance, she feared to leave their children. Don quit both when he found that his depression was mostly seasonal and attributed to seasonal affective disorder, and sought solace with a lightbox.

Don's problem in August 2007 was caused by a bout of peritonitis, or an abdominal infection. His wife discovered him unconscious on the ground and rushed him to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Don suffered a minor stroke at home in February 2008. He had been sick since the Christmas season, largely due to exhaustion from flying to film Around the World in 80 Gardens. A brain scan weeks later revealed a temporary blockage in one of his arteries to the brain, which caused his symptoms to decline. In May 2008, he put his work on hold to recover.

Don said in 2015 that years of gardening had left him with swollen knees, one of which causes continual pain and needs to be replaced.

Don had COVID-19 and had been bedridden for four days as a child in May 2022.

He appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in July 2006, selecting an eclectic mix of pop and classical music; the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" was his favorite album, and his luxury item, the painting Hendrikje Bathing by Rembrandt, was his favorite piece.

Don had founded the Monty Don Project, a charity that helps persistent convictors and heroin users recover by working the land right away from being sick with his stroke.

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Career

Don and Erskine founded Monty Don Jewellery, a London-based company that created, manufactured, and sold costume jewelry. The corporation was a success, and over the five years, it operated from a store in Knightsbridge employing hundreds of outworkers and having grown to 60 outlets around the United Kingdom, including Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Liberty. Boy George, Michael Jackson, and Princess Diana were among their clients. However, the 1987 stock market crash resulted in a near-total bankruptcy, as it cut off American sales, the country's largest market. Don was inspired by the situation to begin a career in writing and broadcasting. "We were lambs to the slaughter and we lost everything," he said, "We lost our house, our company." At Leominster's market, we sold every stick of furniture we encountered. He was unemployed from 1991 to 1993, and he spent all of 1992 on the dole. Some of the jewellery on display at the V&A Museum is on display.

Don had written several gardening books and even provided writers access to his back garden, which had been featured in various journals by mid-1989. Due to this increased exposure, Don wrote a gardening column for the Mail on Sunday, a book contract, and an invitation to a screen test for a new weekly live gardening segment on ITV's This Morning. Don landed the show and his first segment aired in October 1989, earning £100 a show. Don landed additional television work as a host on the BBC Television shows Holiday and Tomorrow's World after 26 spots on This Morning. Although he had reservations about being a host, he took the jobs as he was hungry for work. Don and his wife appeared segments on growing and preparing organic vegetables in November 1999. Don Roaming's three other series were broadcast between 1999 and 2003: Real Gardens, Lost Gardens, and Don Roaming.

Don has been the new lead presenter of its long-running series Gardeners' World from 2003, succeeding Alan Titchmarsh. Don is the first self-taught horticulturist host in the show's history. Don hosted the show until he had to recover from his minor injury in 2008, and the program continued with Toby Buckland as host. During Don's first stint, viewing figures fell from 5 million to 2 million, with the BBC's decision to change the show's format shortly after Don's arrival. Following viewer numbers that dropped below two million in 2009 for the first time in 2009, the BBC revealed further updates to the show in order to entice viewers back. Don announced his return as host for the 2011 series in December 2010. On the program's blog, reactions to the news were split.

Don started filming episodes of Gardeners' World in Berryfields, a rented garden in Stratford-upon-Avon. Don began to host Longmeadow in Ivington, Herefordshire, in 2011. Until the dog's death in May 2020, just before its 12th birthday, he was often seen on film with his Golden Retriever Nigel. Don introduced viewers to Nell, his latest golden retriever. In April 2020, Patti, a Yorkshire Terrier, was introduced to the family. Don signed a three-year deal with the BBC in 2020 to continue presenting Gardeners' World.

Don is also known for writing and presenting his own book. He established a 6-acre (2.4 ha) smallholding in Herefordshire in 2005 to house a group of young drug offenders. The initiative was chronicled for the BBC series Growing Out of Suffernce, which first aired in 2006. This was followed by the 2005 BBC series Around the World in 80 Gardens, where Don visited 80 gardens in a variety of styles around the world. Don established My Dream Farm, a Channel 4 series that taught people how to be successful smallholders, and Mastercrafts, a BBC series that celebrated six traditional British crafts. Monty Don's Italian Gardens aired on the BBC in 2011, which was followed by Monty Don's French Gardens in 2013. Don performed an episode of Great British Garden Revival later this year. Don became the lead presenter for the BBC's flagship Chelsea Flower Show coverage in 2014, replacing Titchmarsh.

Don hosted the four-part BBC series The Secret History of the British Garden, charting the growth of British gardens from the 17th to the twentieth century. Don has authored three series of Big Dreams, Small Spaces, where he assists amateur gardeners in designing their own "dream spaces" on a domestic basis. Don's next series was Monty Don's Paradise Gardens in 2018, who travelled around the Islamic world and abroad in search of paradise gardens and contemplating their place in the Quran. Monty Don's Japanese Gardens in 2020 were followed by Monty Don's Japanese Gardens, Monty Don's American Gardens in 2020, and Monty Don's Adriatic Gardens in 2022.

"Who happens to have a lot of television work," Don has referred to himself as a writer. Don had written two unpublished books, The Clematis Affair and An Afternoon in Padua by the early 1990s. Later, he referred to them as "excruciatingly bad." Allen Jenkins, then editor of The Observer, invited Don to write a weekly gardening column for the newspaper in January 1994. Jenkins began in February and ran until May 2006; he was his editor for seven years. Don wrote a piece from 2004 to celebrate the column's tenth year "It has been more life-changing than any other work I've done in my adult life." Since 2004, Don has written articles for the Daily Mail and Mail Online.

Routledge published The Jewel Garden: A tale of Despair and Redemption, a joint autobiography and the tale of their home and gardens at Longmeadow, by Don and his wife Sarah in 2005.

In 2016, Hodder Books published Don's Nigel: My Family and Other Dogs, a book about the author.

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