HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Discover the 30-year story of Monty's garden- from bankruptcy to Paradise
1991 welcomed not only this magazine into the world but also, serendipitously, the birth of the TV garden that we know and love today. Monty shares the story of Longmeadow – of hard work, inspiration and a moment’s madness – as it, too, approaches its 30th anniversary
Longmeadow and BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine are roughly the same age – both sharing a 30th birthday this year. We bought this house and garden in autumn 1991, and because building work took up all of 1992, I did not start planting in earnest until April 1993.
I had spent all of the previous year designing the garden and clearing the land that – other than being grazed by a bad-tempered horse that was stabled in what is now the potting shed – was a field of tussocky grass containing a hazel tree in what is now the Spring Garden, and a single hawthorn, where we now have the coppice. Because I had such a long time to think and plan, endlessly drawing, measuring and marking out plans with string and canes, by the time spring 1993 came round, I knew what I wanted to do. The garden as you see it now has evolved and there have been many changes over the last three decades, but the layout and basic design is substantially the same now as the plans set out on my drawing board 30 years ago.
The biggest problem we had in making this elaborate garden was not any lack of ambition, enthusiasm, confidence or energy – I was a fit man in my mid-30s prepared to work 12 hours a day doing something I loved and Sarah was as involved as I was. We both spent every possible spare moment outside making our garden – and I must stress that it has always been ours and never just mine. No, the major hitch was an almost total lack of money. We were stony broke – as
I’ve written here before, our jewellery business had gone spectacularly bust.
Intemperance and irresponsibility, however, came to the rescue. In April 1993, I went to a sale in Hereford by a nursery whose lease of a large field had come to an end. It was a filthy wet day and by lunchtime most people had retired to the pub. I had agreed with Sarah that we could spend £200 – but not a penny more – on what was a fantastic chance to buy really good trees, topiary and hedging plants. That was a lot of money for us but would, we agreed, transform the garden. That afternoon, with £50 of my budget unspent, I went back out into the pelting rain and bid casually for
The biggest problem we had in making this elaborate garden was not lack of ambition, enthusiasm, confidence or energy – we were stony broke
a few lots here and there – some Tilia cordata, a bundle of hornbeam hedging, good box specimens – and then went to settle up. A man with a stub of a pencil and a piece of paper did lots of scribbling and sucking of teeth, then said: “Let me see, yes, that’ll be £1,253, Mr Don.” If I had admitted that I had overspent to the tune of over £1,000, it would have been embarrassing but I could have exited, shamefaced, with my £200-worth. If, however, I wrote a cheque for the full amount, it would – with absolute certainty – bounce, followed, at the very least, by a reputation locally as a chancer to whom credit should never be given. Despite this, I heard myself say: “Who do I make the cheque payable to?”
To cut a long story short, I managed to clear the cheque, which in those days took two full working days, by borrowing money from my family and an extremely accommodating bank manager (remember
them?), and later that week over 1,000 trees, shrubs and hedging plants were delivered to Longmeadow. These supplied the bones that you see now. All the pleached limes, hornbeam, field maple and hawthorn hedging, trees of the coppice, topiary yews and hedging of the front (that we do not film) arrived on that day, three decades ago.
Impetus for change
For many years, most of our gardening was divided between the vegetable garden (now the Cottage Garden) and the Jewel Garden (which then extended across where the Grass Borders are now, making it bigger by a third). The Spring and Damp Gardens played seasonal cameos. Everything beyond the coppice was orchard, save for a mown strip where we had a cricket net, so becoming known as the Cricket Pitch.
Longmeadow now consists of 27 or 28 separate areas or gardens. Some are small and flow almost without a break into other areas (hence the ambiguity of the count), but most are distinct spaces or garden ‘rooms’. This is many more than I had originally planned. Filming has driven the expansion as much as anything, as television has an insatiable appetite for new projects and dramatic transformations. I have made the Paradise Garden, the Mound, the Grass Borders, the Cottage Garden, the Soft Fruit Garden, the Orchard Beds, a second veg plot, two ponds and a wildlife garden all explicitly for Gardeners’
World. But I have enjoyed these changes, and would never do anything that Sarah and I did not want within what is still very much our private, family garden. The key to having lots of different rooms or sections in a garden is that each must feel coherent and integral without being out of kilter with the rest of the garden at large. The sum must always amount to more than the parts.
The first change was to take the bottom section of the Jewel Garden and turn its four large borders into beds dominated by grasses. From the moment it was planted up – one evening in June 2011 after I had returned home from speaking at Gardeners’ World Live, planting on until finally it was too dark to see – the Grass Borders have been a success and remains one of my favourite parts of the garden that is, to my mind, getting better and better.
The Mound was first made 20 years ago from all the spoil that had accumulated from landscaping and building work. Until about eight years ago, it was just mown grass – making a refreshingly empty, clean space among all the intense planting around it. But that also got the makeover treatment and, although it took a few years to find itself, I now think it works well as a space with its own colour scheme of pale yellows and blues, with the sense of it being
Longmeadow consists of 27 or 28 separate gardens. Some are small and flow almost without break into other areas, but most are distinct spaces
a little floral castle set in a moat of wild flowers. The Writing Garden became a separate area as the hawthorn hedges around it matured, enclosing a space once part of the orchard. It was made specifically to try and capture the light frothy spirit of cow parsley and, as such, is a ‘white’ garden – although the key to this planting lies in its range of green foliage rather than white flowers, because a so-called ‘white garden’ is really a green garden touched by white.
We began the Orchard Beds about five years ago to provide an area where we could grow more shrubs and use the apple trees as part of the borders – and I love them. The change has been really dramatic, going from an area that included composts heaps, leafmould bays, bonfires, long grass – even pigs and sheep at one stage – to contain large and dramatic borders set beneath mature apple trees, which are, in turn, festooned with rambling roses.
All the other additions, such as the Wildlife and Paradise Gardens, the extra veg plot and our new (for 2021) recycled greenhouse, have been fun and stimulating to make and care for. But not all changes
have been good. Box blight transformed the garden in a disastrous fashion, devastating our box hedges and topiary that were such a feature for the first two decades of the garden’s life. We loved the box balls and losing them was hard, but from this came the development of the Herb Garden. Now, we are in the process of taking up almost all the remaining box hedges – once inconceivable. I used to think that the box hedges were essential for the Grass Borders, yet time has shown this not to be so.
Ever-evolving spirit
I suspect I’ve become more radical and experimental as I’ve got older and, if it were not for the weekly filming at Longmeadow – which rather restricts long-term, messy projects – I would probably make some even bigger changes, such as totally replanting the Jewel and Cottage Gardens. Who knows? It may happen – watch this space!
The truth is that gardens change all the time, whether you like it or not. We either change with them – or get left behind.
Turn the page for more from Monty on what keeps his garden in peak health.