Monty Don left Gardeners’ World (BBC Two) in trademark style: with understatement. Compare and contrast with Amol Rajan, whose send-off from the Today programme after a mere five years included a montage, a roll call of tributes from colleagues, a speech in which he name-checked his heroes Bertrand Russell and Shane Warne, and a jungle track by General Levy. Don has been with Gardeners’ World for 23 years, but his elegant “final goodbye” lasted no more than a minute.
With Ned, the Golden Retriever, at his feet, Don gave us a potted history of his time on the show. From Berryfields to Longmeadow, with Nigel and Nellie and Patti (RIP all), it was now time to go. He thanked the viewers for “the incredible privilege and pleasure of sharing my garden and my gardening life with you here, as well as working with so many superb people. So thank you. Thank you for coming on that journey with me and good luck with your own gardens in the future. So, for the last time, bye bye”.
He reassured us that he would pop up in the Gardeners’ World winter specials, and be at Chelsea next May, which was a relief, because those words sounded as if he was saying goodbye forever.
I’m not the most regular viewer of Gardeners’ World, because my garden is pitifully small and I’m not green-fingered. But I tuned in for Don’s final episode and took away so many tips, from planting aquilegias in the border now for a display of beautiful blue flowers in the spring, to constructing the “bulb lasagne” which was the first thing Don ever did on television, back in 1989. And a reminder of those autumn jobs, from pruning roses to making leaf mould.
There was a lovely story here too about Janet Willoner, a lady in North Yorkshire who has grown more than 4,000 trees from seed, germinating them in her airing cupboard. No matter that she had no land on which to plant them, she went out and found a local organisation which has nature reserves, and now her rowans, hazels, alders and oaks grow magnificently across the county. “I know that anything I do is a drop in the ocean,” said Janet, “but an ocean is made up of lots of drops.”
Carol Klein drew the short straw this week, conducting an interview with a scientist over Zoom (yawn, can these be banned, please?). Joe Swift visited his friend, the garden designer Ann-Marie Powell, who spoke of finding solace in her garden following the death of her partner. At first she couldn’t bear to step outside, because the memories were too painful. Eventually, she felt that the garden was calling her. Swift beautifully summed up the solace that gardening can bring: “Gardens don’t offer sympathy… but they do give you plenty of reasons to carry on. The watering, the staking, the pots. And sometimes that’s enough.”
Who will replace Don as head gardener? Klein and Swift seem a long way down the list of runners and riders. Frances Tophill and Adam Frost are the favourites. It won’t be someone in the Monty Don mould; the presenter has said that he is probably “the last middle-aged, middle-class white male with a large garden doing Gardeners’ World”. So it’s the end of an era, and goodbye to a class act.
Gardeners’ World is on BBC iPlayer