How TV made gardening blooming fashionable

From Ground Force to Gardeners’ World, television has transformed gardening’s image from stuffy and dull to aspirational and fun over the last 25 years, says Monty Don

Back in 1993 I was a young, upstart gardener on television – well, as opposed to the ‘proper’ gardeners of Gardeners’ World and the RHS anyway. It was also the year that my wife Sarah and I began to plant our own garden here at Longmeadow, starting the process of turning an empty, overgrown field into the garden you see on Gardeners’ World today.

Back then I was the gardening ‘expert’ for ITV’s show This Morning, doing weekly live items from the studios in Liverpool docks as well as making pre-recorded film segments. I also began to make travel films for the BBC’s Holiday programme that year, and in 1994 I started work for Tomo r r ow’ s World as a roving reporter.

I c er t a in ly never set out in life to be a TV gardening presenter. I thought of myself as an obsessive amateur gardener and a professional writer, and the fact that the two could come together was, and is, a joy. I garden because I love it and I have to. If a few days go by without getting out into the garden I feel out of sorts and at odds with the world and myself. However, transferring that private passion onto the screen is as much a technical process as it is natural. Television is a slow, painstaking process. You assemble the parts, often out of sequence, that are then put together in the edit room.

But I was fascinated by the craft of television and I am immensely grateful for the very mixed apprenticeship that I served in a huge variety of locations and circumstances. It is an opportunity and t ra ining that few have access to nowadays. Then, in 1998, I was offered the chance to front a new gardening series on Channel 4 called Real Gardens. This was my big break and part of the shift in attitudes to gardens which was heralded by the appearance of Ground Force on BBC2 the previous year.

Ground Force – in which Alan Titchmarsh, Charlie Dimmock and Tommy Walsh made over a viewer’s garden in each episode – hit the sweet spot in a way that no other gardening programme had done before, or arguably has done since. A whole new generation had bought homes and gardens for the first time and it exactly chimed with the transformative sense of making your house and home brighter, better and, although this was unspoken, more valuable. Until then the image of gardening was worthy, but dare I say a bit stuf fy and dul l . The RHS and grandees with large gardens ruled the roost with Gardeners’ World, either kowtowing to them or offering decent, honest fare for the rest of us who knew our place. Then In 1993 on This Morning

‘I love to travel but my base is in my own back yard’

the programme’s presenter Geoff Hamilton, who exemplified decency and honesty, tragically died in 1996, and by the late Nineties the world was changing to becoming more consumer-driven and the old establishment felt increasingly irrelevant.

Real Gardens ran for three years

in direct competition to both Ground Force and Gardeners’ World and was a fine programme that could and should have run for much longer.

Between 1998 and 2000 we took over the coverage of all RHS shows, including The Chelsea Garden Show from the BBC. I was involved in a number of other really good series for Channel 4, such as Lost Gardens and Fork To Fork, made with Sarah from our own garden and celebrating the conjunction of growing and cooking. Ground Force was getting huge audiences on BBC1, and BBC2 had a range of gardening programmes over and above Gardeners’ World. The gardening viewer had never had it so good.

Then, in 2001, Channel 4 lost the shows contract from the RHS and decided, overnight, to end all its gardening programmes. So in 2002, for the first time in 12 years, I had no telly work lined up and I settled down to write what I thought would be a definitive and final gardening book,

The Complete Gardener. However in June 2002 I had a call from the then head of BBC2, offering me the job of taking over from Alan Titchmarsh on Gardeners’ World, although at that point I had no idea that Alan was thinking of leaving the programme.

So began five years of Gardeners’ World from Berryfields, which was a private house just outside Stratford- upon-Avon. I would go there for a couple of days every week, make the programme, then return to garden at home. It was like having a slightly surreal allotment. During that five years I also made the ten hours of Around The World In 80 Gardens, which was a major, 18- month undertaking, I wrote two books, began writing for this magazine, set up a charity with drug addicts, and burnt my candle in the middle as well as at both ends.

Something had to give and with hindsight I was lucky just to have had a minor stroke. But it was enough to make me stop all filming for a year and spend time recuperating in my own garden. It made me realise that although I love travelling and have since then made programmes about Italian, French and Islamic gardens, am now in the middle of making a two-parter about Japanese gardens and next year will make a series on American gardens, my base is here, in my own back yard.

I love writing about gardens, I love filming them and I love talking about them, but most of all I like my hands in the soil of the garden we have made here over the past 25 years. I have always written about my own garden but I realised that there also had to be a connection with my own private gardening experience and my television work.

So when I was asked in 2010 – again out of the blue – whether I would like to return to Gardeners’ World, I said I would but only on the condition that I filmed it in my own garden. I have learned a great deal about the crafts and tricks of television over the past 30 years but there is no substitute for honesty. Some things cannot be faked and

for me it is the long love affair with my own garden.

Since then I have made three series – and intend to make more – of Big Dreams Small Spaces, where I help others make the most of their own gardening dreams. I think that this,

more than Gardeners’ World, shows the real change over the past 25 years. Ground Force showed change could be quick, dramatic and aspirational. Real Gardens worked with the dayto-day issues of back gardens of folk from every walk of life. Now Big

Dreams shows that not only can anyone be aspirational, but that they can be empowered to do it themselves – regardless of budget and situation.

Twenty-five years ago gardening was still largely driven by large gardens, often magnificent, that most

of us could only admire on the television or by visiting. Now it is much more democrat ic and geared towards anyone, anywhere who shares the passion for growing things and making a beautiful space outside. I call that progress.

‘Most of all I like my hands in the soil of our garden’

Monty with his dogs Nigel (front) and Nell