When the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of the “noble savage” – a type of man in total communion with primordial nature – he may not have had Monty Don in mind. But with his curled locks, rolled-up sleeves and perpetually muddy fingernails, the Gardeners’ World presenter is a vision of humanity in concert with Mother Earth. Don has been the steward of Gardeners’ World – which returns this week, just as magnolias burst into bloom across
Britain – since 2003, when he picked up the trowel from Alan Titchmarsh . Where Titchmarsh was an almost mole-like presence in the garden, Don was pure Toad of Toad Hall. Often found wearing a French worker’s jacket or his signature braces, Don brought a more classical masculinity to the garden. “When Monty Don does this,” Jeremy Clarkson recently said on Clarkson’s Farm , as he attempted to drive a shovel into the hard earth, “it always looks so incredibly easy.” And therein lies Don’s secret: he makes things look easy. Don’s CV also serves as an explainer of his carefully calibrated appeal. He studied English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, giving him the ability to describe flowers like an opium-riddled Romantic poet, but he also boxed for the university – half artist, half pugilist. Don’s approach to the garden is equally hands-on. On his estate (a regular character on Gardeners’ World ) Don is as likely to be found dredging the pond or turning the earth with an old fork as he is eulogising his topiary after another blitz of box blight. Even the name – Monty Don – is butch. It sounds like both a thin-moustachioed 1950s movie star, and a mob boss. Born Montagu Dennis Wyatt Don, he stumbled into gardening in the way that listless poshos often do, mysteriously transitioning in the 1980s from running a jewellery business to being a noted horticultural columnist. Since then, it’s been three decades of becoming, as Alice Vincent wrote in Prospect magazine, “the nation’s gardener”. This delicate balance of macho tactility, aristocratic loquaciousness, and innate self-confidence makes Don as close as Britain has ever come to a figure like Anthony Bourdain . They say that every generation thinks that it invented sex. Perhaps the same is true of Monty Don. Each cohort – from his peers to Gen Zers joining his 1.2m following on
Instagram – sees something new in Don. Masculinity, which is perpetually described as “in crisis”, comes easily to him. He looks like he could fix your car. He seems like he would brew a perfect – strong yet unburnt – pot of Assam tea. He feels like the sort of bloke who’d be equally comfortable gelding a bullock or curled up with a paperback of Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? . Read Next The 10 best TV shows to watch this week, from the
Oscars to Love Rat For millennials, he is an example of what their parents’ generation could be: practical but not patronising, as ready to embrace new political ideas as he is to champion tradition. In short, he is a very old-fashioned version of the modern man. I grew up in a household where gardening programmes provided a rare opportunity for family television viewing, and Don became an esteemed figure in my perception of male sexiness. His appeal is not difficult to explain. He is like your husband, but better. He is like your husband if he committed to actually cleaning out the gutters, rather than just talking about it. He is like your husband if he walked the Labrador, rather than just snoozing together on the couch. He is like your husband if your husband knew the Latin binomial of daffodils, rather than the name of the guy who played centre midfield for Wolverhampton Wanderers in the 1960 FA Cup final. But while
Women (and some men) have always wanted to date him, there are an increasing number of disillusioned millennials who want to be adopted by him. Part of this appeal is the openness of his life. The garden at Longmeadow, his home in Herefordshire, has become as iconic as the man himself. Don and his garden – which is split into individual units known as the Cottage, Jewel, Paradise and Vegetable gardens – function as a double act, like Nigella and her kitchen, or Nigel Slater and his writing nook, offering the consolation that property-owning boomers know how to look after their land. And his relationship with his dogs offers an insight into his emotional availability. When his beloved Golden Retriever Nigel (well known to Gardeners’ World watchers) died in 2020, it engendered the sort of national mourning that gets Phil and Holly in queue-skipping mood. When another dog, Nellie, died last October, Don’s Instagram post commemorating her life received more than a quarter of a million likes. New canine stars, like Ned and Patti, have filled the void left by Nigel and Nellie, and they appear on Don’s
Social Media with the sort of loving regularity usually reserved for over-achieving children. Read Next Comic Relief challenges fast-track national treasure status – look at Mollie King Even now, a new generation is discovering Don. He is popping up, increasingly, in TikTok memes (often accompanied by disturbingly thirsty comments). And Gardeners’ World itself has become something of a hygge meme for young people disconnected from the natural world. This is the landscape in which Don operates, one where the comedian Joe Lycett, when confronting
David Beckham about the 2022 Qatar
World Cup, cites Don and Kim Woodburn as England’s gay icons. Far from being a cultural shapeshifter, Don is resolute and stubborn. It’s just that our social mores keep adapting in his favour, allowing his branches to stretch out. The garden is about change. Snowdrops give way to wisteria, delphiniums to chrysanthemums. The desiccated trees gain and lose their leaves, the tadpoles and caterpillars glow up and become frogs and butterflies. And, in the midst of all this seasonal turbulence, the unsteadiness of the garden world, Monty Don is the hardiest of all perennials. ‘Gardeners’ World’ is on
BBC Two at 8pm