MY SECRET GARDEN

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 Walking the dogs in the fields of words about my behind the garden as dusk settles garden, but the subject over us, I see that there is a lone cow matter has nearly in a field by the river. always been plants and how to grow, As I get nearer and come up to control and nurture them for maximum the hedge I see that she is standing, beauty or productivity. Yet from perhaps ten yards from me, over a a very early age I loved the countryside tiny calf, umbilical cord still trailing. as much as any garden and was It struggles to its feet, staggers, fascinated by the life I saw around reaches for an udder, fails and then me, whether that was trees, wild drops back to its knees. flowers, birds, insects or mammals. The cow gently

I have kept notebooks and licks its nose while journals ever since I could never taking her eyes write, and have drawn from me and the dogs. upon these for my new I know that she is the book, My Garden most aggressive and World, as well as on dangerous animal you the events of the past could ever come across year. I have used the in the UK. She would calendar months happily attack because these fit me and the with the rhythm dogs if she of my gardening thought year – and there was any some creatures danger. Only are present on a the gappy hedge number of occasions, and very wonky while others fence stop this. fail to appear at all, I murmur although they might be some soothing the stars of somebody Old man’s beard is a words and else’s garden. magnet for butterflies the dogs

But that is the point. All our gardens, and I beat our retreat. 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.

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.’

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

Monty in his Jewel Garden. Below: a polecat

Walking the dogs at 4.30am – dark but noticeably lighter than even two weeks ago – I noticed a large bird flying towards the house from across the fields. It looked black, so I thought at first it was a crow – but all the birds looked black in that light, silhouetted against the sky and I quickly realised it was too big for a crow. Probably a buzzard then, but there was something about it that was not buzzard-like in its shape and the way that it was flying. The tail was longer and its head stuck out a little more. I realised with a flush of excitement and triumph that it was a goshawk.

Although they have become much more common over the last 20 years, I still think of goshawks as our rarest raptor and something that I would be lucky to see just once in my life. So, although I now see them once or twice a year and sometimes more, every time is like that first time, that moment fulfilling my dreams. Ever since I read TH White’s The Goshawk when I was 17, I have been obsessed with birds of prey of all kinds and goshawks became totemic for me, representing all that was untameable, pure and exquisitely beautiful, yet honed to kill.

This gos flew quite slowly and casually but in a dead straight line, perhaps 100ft up. Its wings had an almost deliberate flap that rose as high above its back as below, quite unlike a buzzard. It passed directly over the house, and then was swallowed up by the dark sky. But my day was made.

of killing it, but did not want it to come back and finish off the rest of the hens, so I drove about ten miles to remote woodland and released it. I hope it went on to live a long and happy life, albeit one that did not include hens or ducks – or sardines.

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