MONTY DON’S Secret garden world
Monty Don’s new book is a glorious hymn to the plants and animals he shares his garden with – as our first delightful extracts reveal
OVER the past 30 years, I have written millions of words about my garden, but the subject matter has nearly always been plants and how to grow, control and nurture them for maximum beauty or productivity. Yet from a very early age I loved the countryside as much as any garden and was fascinated by the life I saw around me, whether that was trees, wild flowers, birds, insects or mammals.
I have kept notebooks and journals ever since I could write, and have drawn upon these for my new book, My Garden World, as well as on the events of the past year. I have used the calendar months because these fit with the rhythm of my gardening year — and some creatures are present on a number of occasions, while others fail to appear at all, although they might be the stars of somebody else’s garden.
But that is the point. All our gardens, streets and patches of sky are part of our own perception of the world. We are all enlarged by our connection to them.
If, in our own modest back yards, we can help preserve and treasure our natural world, then we will make this planet a better place — not just for ourselves but for every living creature.
SEPTEMBER Pipe dreams
The only clematis native to the British
Isles, Clematis
vitalba, commonly known as old man’s beard, grew everywhere around my Hampshire childhood home. Individual plants could grow enormous, with a massed tangle of stems like jungle vines, and its fluffy seedheads — the old man’s white beard — festooning the hedges and trees for miles along the roads.
It is also known as traveller’s joy and baccy plant. The latter name derives from the fact that the stems could make a substitute for tobacco. I discovered this when I was about 11. An old boy who worked as a farm labourer in the village — this was over 50 years ago and he would have been well into his 70s, so he was talking about a world around the time of the First World War — told me and my friend that if they ran out of tobacco they would cut a plug of old man’s beard for their pipes and smoke it. ‘Bit harsh like,’ he said, ‘but better’n nothing.’
Beware of the cows
Walking the dogs in the fields behind the garden as dusk settles over us, I see that there is a lone cow in a field by the river.
As I get nearer and come up to the hedge I see that she is standing, perhaps ten yards from me, over a tiny calf, umbilical cord still trailing. It struggles to its feet, staggers, reaches for an udder, fails and then drops back to its knees.
The cow gently licks its nose while never taking her eyes from me and the dogs. I know that she is the most aggressive and dangerous animal you could ever come across in this part of the world. She would happily attack me and the dogs if she thought there was any danger. Only the gappy hedge and very wonky fence stop this.
I murmur some soothing words and the dogs and I beat our retreat.
OCTOBER Hurrah for hops!
By the end of summer, the hedgerows around our present garden and all along the lanes and fields nearby are wreathed with long strands of hops twining themselves amongst the hawthorn, dogwood and blackthorn.
These are the ghostly descendants of the hop ‘yards’ that once occupied a few — and sometimes nearly all — fields on every farm in this part of Herefordshire. (Herefordshire hops are grown in a field called a ‘yard’, whereas in Kent, the identical set-up is known as a ‘garden’. We have hop ‘kilns’; they have ‘oast houses’.) When we moved to this part of the world in the 1980s, there were thousands of acres of these yards, with their grids of poles held by wires and strung with tens of thousands of strings to support the hop vines. Hops climb heroically and will put on 15ft to 20ft of growth each year before dying back completely in winter. I am writing these words in one of the two hop kilns attached to this house, which, until 1990, was a working farm. The kilns were last used before the First World War and the interiors were left to decay. I write in the upper part, where the hops were once spread to dry, and below me, in what was the furnace, with its brick floor still stained dark from the fires, is where the garden tools are kept.
My father brewed his own beer and the distinctive smell of hops ran through my childhood. He would stew it up once a month on the stove, filling one of my mother’s stockings with fresh hops that he draped into the simmering pan of malt, yeast and sugar. The resulting intense mixture was watered down and decanted into old, two-pint cider bottles made of thick brown glass that were screwed tight and taken down to the cellar to mature for a few weeks. Occasionally, there would be an explosion and one would burst, leaving a hoppy smell lingering around the cellar for months.
DECEMBER A mink – or a polecat?
I am of a generation that was brought up to think of mink mainly
as a symbol of ostentatious luxury, of trophy wives or film stars draped in fur coats assembled from scores of pelts harvested from mink ‘farms’. But the animal itself as an individual, wild creature, was much too remote, too foreign to be reality.
That changed when we moved here. Wild mink were spreading fast — generations of offspring of farm escapees meant that they had become more common than otters. From the very beginning we kept poultry — chickens, ducks and guinea fowl — and because we live so near the river, mink became something we had to worry about protecting the birds from.
One night there was an attack in the henhouse, with the only possible point of entry through a tiny hole at the corner of the door. Inside was a horrific scene, with slaughtered birds huddled and twisted all over the floor. All six of my lovely ducks had been killed, as well as five hens.
Given the tiny hole and the mass carnage, I assumed that it had to be the work of mink. I went to the game shop and bought a humane trap. The man who sold it to me said the secret was to bait it with sardines. ‘Your mink cannot resist a sardine,’ he assured me.
So I did as I was told and that night set the trap, duly dripping with sardine oil. At first light I went to check and saw what looked to be an alive and very angry mink that had made the mistake of opting for sardines rather than chicken as his first course.
But when I got nearer, I saw that it was not the pure dark chocolatebrown coat with little white goatee of a mink. Although the coat was dark brown, it had an under layer of cream, and the face was cream with a dark brown mask over its eyes and cream tips to its ears. It was not a mink, but a polecat.
I was delighted on two accounts. The first was that I had caught the little b ***** d and stopped him killing more of our birds. The second was that polecats are much rarer than mink and it was fascinating to see one — albeit very, very cross.
I carried the trap back to the house to show the children, with