Monty Don said he is “restraining tears” over the moment each year when the Chelsea Flower Show pulls him away from Longmeadow just as his garden shifts from one season to the next. The 70-year-old said he still feels the loss sharply enough to resent the show, even as he returns to present the event.
Don wrote in Gardeners’ World magazine that he has long understood that “home is the epicentre” of his world, a feeling shaped by being sent to boarding school as a youngster. He said it was then that he felt as though “summer had arrived without me”, and that home was where the seasons “truly existed”.
That idea has played out most clearly at Longmeadow, which he bought in 1991 when it was described as an abandoned field with a single tree. It is now a series of carefully made gardens, built up over decades into the place where he notices change most keenly.
Don said there is often a “watershed moment” in a garden when one season becomes the next with “seemingly no transition”. Gardening, he said, is full of “slow mergings” and things “change constantly”, but at Longmeadow the shift can feel sudden enough to bring him close to tears. “I still have a moment or two like that every year in the garden, although now, 67 years later, I do my best to restrain the tears,” he wrote.
He said one of those moments arrives when he leaves Herefordshire on the Sunday to front the RHS Chelsea Flower Show coverage and comes back a week later to find the garden has “completely rearranged itself”. “Spring has toppled into summer and I was not there to see it,” he said, describing the feeling as a “complicated mess of emotions” that includes a sense of “betrayal” from the garden.
There is a clear tension in that admission. Don said he does not want to miss out on “the greatest garden extravaganza of the year” and is delighted to be part of it, but part of him still resents being taken away at exactly the point when Longmeadow is moving on without him. That conflict sits at the center of the seasonal rhythm he has spent decades trying to capture on screen.
Gardeners’ World was scheduled to return to Two at 8pm on May 15, with Don set to start on summer planters, work on his leeks and make fertiliser. Frances Tophill was due in Berkshire to learn about biodynamic gardening and its benefits, while Adam Frost was to show viewers around his new garden as it begins to take shape. Don presents the Chelsea Flower Show coverage alongside Rachel de Thame, Angellica Bell and Nikki Chapman.
For Don, the story is not just about a TV assignment or a famous flower show. It is about a man who built a garden from nothing, then has to watch it move on without him every spring.
