Gardeners' World's Monty Don reveals heartbreaking reason for 'straight lines' in garden design
by Matt Jackson · DevonLiveMonty Don has revealed the heart-breaking reason his Longmeadow garden has “so many” straight lines.
The Gardeners’ World star’s Herefordshire home is no stranger to fans of the show. But when Monty bought it with wife Sarah in 1991, it looked very different.
On The Travel Diaries podcast, Monty revealed the couple bought the property when it was a “ruin”, having been on the brink of bankruptcy after their costume jewellery business collapsed during the 1987 stock market crash. It led to them “selling everything we own” and living in a single bedroom.
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He said: “We went and lived in a spare bedroom in my parents-in-law's house with all the children. Then my mother died and left me a little bit of money to put down a deposit on this ruined farmhouse.
“We looked at 62 houses and we couldn’t afford anything, so they were all tiny. We thought ‘we have three children, we have dogs’, so we ended up buying this ruin, which is called Longmeadow.”
Monty says Longmeadow’s garden was “just a field” when he bought the property. But Monty says he found “salvation” and “order” .
He continued: “In this crisis of my life, you’d call it a nervous breakdown, but it was a profound depression, the salvation was making a garden, and that’s what Longmeadow was. Someone the other day, not quite recently, said ‘why do you have so many straight lines?’
“And I realised it was me trying to straighten out my life. I was literally on the ground trying to impose order and straightness onto my life.”
Monty says Longmeadow’s impressive two-acre garden contained mostly rough grass, nettles, and brambles when he bought the house, with just a single tree in what is now the Spring Garden. Two years after buying the property, Monty was able to start planting, something he says has “never stopped since”.
Two decades after planting the first bulbs at Longmeadow, Monty took over as the presenter of the popular Gardeners’ World from Alan Titchmarsh. He now regularly films segments of the show from the stunning garden.
He will be once again on screens at 8pm on BBC Two today, where he will be celebrating the beauty of gardening all year round. Meanwhile fellow star Carol Klein will be visiting a garden in Somerset to discover the best shrubs for the colder months.