Monty Don
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2006
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the gardener and broadcaster, Monty Don. Three years ago Monty Don became the nation's most high-profile gardener when he took over from Alan Titchmarsh as the lead presenter of Gardener's World. Entirely self-taught, he has been gardening since he was a child - but it was not until he was in his late thirties that he found he could make his great passion become his vocation.
His first career ended disastrously; he and his wife Sarah set up a jewellery business together and during the 1980s they prospered; they had shops and offices in Knightsbridge and counted singers and film stars among their clients. But when the slump came they lost everything - the business, their jobs and their home.
Monty suffered years of depression that left him barely able to function. It was by chance that he was offered some stints presenting gardening slots on television. He never looked back - he says there hasn't been a day since when he's not been working and he's become a successful gardening columnist, broadcaster and author.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: A Hard Day's Night by The Beatles Book: Collected Poems of Henry Vaughan Luxury: Hendrickje Bathing by Rembrandt
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My costaway this week is a gardener. He needs soil, he says, like a fix, and certainly it's proved to be his salvation. |
| 0:36.5 | Today he's one of Britain's best known gardening personalities with his own television show, books and |
| 0:41.6 | newspaper articles. The rebellious child of an affluent but frugal |
| 0:45.7 | family, he made his own way to Cambridge where he read English. He eloped with the woman who became |
| 0:50.9 | his wife, went through a business that prospered, then failed, and was |
| 0:54.8 | sinking fast when the offer of gardening work finally arrived. |
| 0:59.1 | Since then, he hasn't looked back. |
| 1:01.0 | The ground, he says, is where I am at home, where I belong, like a sailor |
| 1:06.0 | and the sea. He is Monte Don. It obviously took you a long time to come to that conclusion, |
| 1:11.6 | Monte. Was there a moment? You know, what was the epiphany when you thought, |
| 1:15.6 | ah, the soil is where I belong? There was a particular moment, but it took a while. |
| 1:21.1 | As children, myself and my brothers and sisters were all made to work in the |
| 1:25.9 | garden and you were allocated work and you had to just get on and do it and this was from |
| 1:29.9 | quite a young age and so for many years I regarded it as a chore and I remember there was one day |
| 1:36.0 | and I would have been about 17 because I was still at school and I remember it was early spring April,, March, that sort of time and I was sewing carrots and I knew |
| 1:47.8 | how to do it. I didn't need guidance and I knew what I did. And suddenly the warmth of the |
| 1:52.0 | sun on the soil and my hands on the soil and the seeds |
| 1:56.4 | cut to my hands felt exactly the right thing at the right place. |
| 2:01.5 | And I felt as at home as it's possible to be with anything or anywhere. |
| 2:06.2 | But it's interesting that you didn't spot that therefore that's where you should spend the rest of your life |
... |
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