Top 70 Monty Don Quotes

You get older, you slow down. Failure feels like less of a humiliation and more of a balanced return.

For every gardener there is a minimum level of engagement that is needed to sustain and develop the relationship. There is no magic figure to this and it will vary from person to person and season to season, but it is there.

A healthy plant is one that adapts best to the situation in which it finds itself. There is no objective measure of this.

I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn’t make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.

The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.

People are increasingly realising that what they eat is important. You can’t put junk food in your body and be healthy. All sorts of problems can develop, like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, strokes. Gardening not only helps with exercise and mental health, but it can improve diet as well.

Apples hate strong wind and damp, cold soil so try and place them on well-drained, rich soil in a sheltered position.

Organic is loaded with a sense of rightness, with a set of rules. I would much rather someone bought food that was local and sustainable but not organic than bought organic food that had to be shipped across the world.

We don’t value food in Britain, so therefore the cheaper it is the better it is. We all eat far too much, we all pay far too little for our food. We have environmental problems, we have health problems, we have food transport problems.

The Romans brought with them spices such as ginger, pepper and cinnamon, and herbs including borage, chervil, dill, fennel, lovage, sage and thyme, all of which have remained staples of the British kitchen.

Any British household with a scrap of land has always grown herbs for the kitchen. From the superb monastic herb gardens down to the humblest cottage, a supply of fresh herbs would have been considered essential.

I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.

Chickweed is regarded by most gardeners as just that – a weed – but is excellent in sandwiches or salads.

Visiting gardens is bad for you. Not only does it encourage too much eating of cake but sets up all kinds of false notions that are ruinous to your garden back home.

If I’m honest, the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.

Many gardens are hijacked by their plants and end up looking like a room overstuffed with furniture.

In my teens I wanted to be a rock star, I really did. At that time there was nothing I wanted more.

The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.

You can trace the entire history of Britain by looking at gardens.

Ground elder, introduced by the Romans as a vegetable, is difficult to get rid of because it regrows from the smallest trace of root.

I have been growing vegetables since I was a boy. When I was about 17 I was the only one of five children living at home. My parents were ill and I took over the vegetable garden and I have had one ever since.

Tony Blair is a dreadful man; really truly dreadful.

When our jewellery business went into receivership we avoided bankruptcy by selling our houses and possessions.

I had a difficult relationship with my parents, who died young, but they instilled self-discipline and a sense of honour and loyalty and accountability. I’m grateful for that.

I wouldn’t want to be known as Mr Depression, but I found that when I did dip a toe in the water and talk about it, the response from the public was incredible.

Earth heals me better than any medicine.

From the ages of 18 to 50 I ran, rowed and lifted weights at my home gym.

I was a sickly child, and it wasn’t until I was 19 that I realised I was quite a robust, vigorous person. Since then I’ve taken ill health to be an irritating interruption into what is a fairly reliable stream of good health.

My basic philosophy is never do anything with the word ‘celebrity’ attached to it. Without being overly pompous, if you have worked hard to have an audience trust you a bit, why blow it? That is my currency.

My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable – it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.

Modern man has a very abstract idea of what a wood is. I guess that if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what a wood actually was, they would see it as a place where big trees grow.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise.

That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are smallthings but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic.

My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark’s fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.

Bamboos can go from shining health to shabbiness in weeks. The problem is too much wind, too little water and tired compost.

I think that’s my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I’ve read about it, I’ve written about it, I’ve done it all my life but at heart, I’m just a passionate amateur gardener.

As you get older your own problems are not that interesting.

The farm uses up a lot of my creative urges. It’s a sort of rough and ready space, I don’t film there.

The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man.

Trees are complicated, fascinating things, usually older and more beautiful than any of us.

I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man’s-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.

Daffodils, blossom and tulips jostle to the front of the stage in April. I love these early perennials: they may be more modest but they nearly all have that one special quality that a plant needs to transform your affections from admiration to affection – charm.

I love high summer as well, but nothing beats a perfect May morning.

A column is a curiously intimate affair. For a start, you know by default that you will have regular readers, so it gives the writer the privilege of continuing a running conversation with them.

Gardening is seen as a pastime that is almost like belonging to the Church of England – a sign of maturity and wisdom and right thinking.

A weekly column is not always a treat. It can be a tyranny. There are times when I have very little to say. There are times, every year, when I am weighed down with depression. At these times it takes days of slog to force the words on to the page.

The horticultural industry is unimaginative and dominated by vast, supermarket-like outlets. But the small nurseries and growers remain – praise them with your wallets, not your memories.

Coppice management depends upon the chosen tree being cut when the shoots are straight, vigorous and, critically, not shading out new growth.

The British have such an odd relationship with food – and the land. I want the public and the Soil Association to see that growing things in a garden is no different to growing things in a field.

Pulmonarias need splitting every two or three years, as they rapidly develop into a doughnut with an empty centre that quickly gets filled with weeds.

As September rolls into October, I become obsessed with apples. Now obviously this is provoked by the ripening fruit clustering on the trees in our orchard, but it is as though all things pomological ripen in me, too.

I think that most people are aware that it takes so much oil and water to produce what they’re eating. But the problem is inherent within the solution, in so much as you don’t want to tell people what to do.

The truth is that wreaths have never really been part of my creative life. I like them and want them and know how to do them.

We undervalue food in this country, yet Britain has beautiful food and beautiful growing conditions. It is astonishing the range we can grow.

When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.

I like dogs because they are not humans.

I see myself as a writer who happens to garden.

I think that the essence of a Christmas wreath – of all Christmas vegetative decoration – has to be green and, if possible, living. So the basis of a wreath is ideally holly, laurel, ivy, rosemary, larch, fir or whatever is to hand.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise. That is easy to see and evaluate. It inculcates high levels of well-being. That is undeniable and needs little measurement.