Full Monty: the fine art of filmmaking

A master at the art of gardening, social distancing has forced Monty to apply himself to the craft of film making – with mixed results

It has been a deadly serious and often tragic time but, humanity being what it is, there has also been a lighter side to the experiences of the past few months. One of the more entertaining aspects of this dreadful virus has been my fumbling efforts to film myself. The BBC deposited a black case outside my door containing a camera and microphone and tripod. The only instruction was that it would be best to set everything to automatic – having correctly worked out that the internal technology was a lot more competent than me.

The humour is in watching a naturally clumsy man trying to coordinate tripod, camera setting and framing, the tangle of headphones to make sure sound is working and then the sprint in front of the camera to act as though nothing out the ordinary is happening. The education is in how damn good cameramen and women are. In gardening shows there’s a rule that comes before all others: it must look beautiful. It doesn’t matter how interesting the garden or plant is; if it’s not as lovely as possible on the screen everything else is reduced. I’ve worked with superlative cameramen for over 30 years now and admired and revered their work. I am now also equally in awe of their dexterity.

I’ve learnt that a pan – a simple little move from left to right, or up to down – is ridiculously difficult to do well. I now know that zooming in or out hardly ever works. Changes of light are a nightmare. In fact, when we film properly, with real camera operators, we invariably stop and redo anything where the sun comes out from behind a cloud mid-take. Then there are the tiny buttons that were not made for a gardener with hands like spades. I repeatedly pressed the record button and either missed or hit two buttons simultaneously and ended up with my finest work going unrecorded.

But I am finding myself going out with the tripod over my shoulder and headphones clamped to my ears at dawn, dusk and at various points of the day when I should be working on completing the book that was due two weeks ago. Some of this is an honest desire to share what I think of as the beauty of this garden with as many people as possible. This is not pride in what I have done, but a simple celebration in natural beauty, because I feel that the garden is a living entity outside of me or anyone else – it is almost as though it has its own brain and pulse. Much of it is a determination to try and master this lark. I started out astonishingly inept and bad and have now risen to the dizzy heights of occasionally tolerable. I am drunk with this wild success and want more.

For years I have taken still photographs of this garden – I am an unashamed camera geek and have lots of them. But the ones I use most are those that feel most intuitive and simple. You can love a camera in the same way that you can love a good fountain pen. It moulds to your hands in the same way and just feels right. It will not make you a better photographer, but it might make you use it more and, critically, with more care. However, regardless of your choice of camera, the way to take good pictures is by looking. If you cannot see the shot then neither will the lens.

My good friend Derry Moore – who took the photographs for our books on Italian, Paradise, Japanese and American gardens – mostly travels with one ordinary camera, one lens, a small tripod and one spare battery. He has no interest in kit whatsoever, but he does have a fanatical and obsessive interest in capturing light and beauty. I have often watched him stalk a picture as though it was a rare and elusive wild animal. I have equally known him to travel for hours to a location but not even take his camera out of its bag because the light, to his eyes, was no good.

I am a lifetime of application away from that state of artistic grace with the camera that I have been issued for the self-filming experiment. But it nags away at me, and I keep trying to capture that sense of the sublime that my eyes and brain are seeing. I fail every time but, as Samuel Beckett said, the only thing to do is to fail again. Fail better.

The tiny buttons were not made for a gardener with hands like spades