Monty Don > Quotes

“Modern life is, for most of us, a kind of serfdom to mortgage, job and the constant assault to consume. Although we have more time and money than ever before, most of us have little sense of control over our own lives. It is all connected to the apathy that means fewer and fewer people vote. Politicians don’t listen to us anyway. Big business has all the power; religious extremism all the fear. But in the garden or allotment we are king or queen. It is our piece of outdoors that lays a real stake to the planet.”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“A garden is not a place. It's a journey.”
― Monty Don

“You need to see bare branches to know the full astonishing shock of the new leaves come next April. You need the flat, brown emptiness of the mixed borders to measure their summer fullness.”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“You need nature more than she needs you. It is not an equal relationship. Serve her well and she will look after you. Abuse her and everyone loses.”
― Montagu Don, Down to Earth: Gardening Wisdom

“I have always thought of urban gardens - most gardens - as islands, where we create our own kingdoms, acting out our need for land, nurture and nature. On this weekend all these tiny islands wake again, each one crammed with insects, birdsong (often far better in town than country) and slow-moving people emerging into this gift of extra light.”
― Montagu Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“The point is that this is all gardening. The garden runs through our lives like a river through a field, like air in our lungs. The garden does not end in space any more than it does in time. The flowers grow as much in our minds as in the soil. There are very few nights when I do not lie in the dark, everyone else sleeping inside this creaking, bony house, and go through the garden, seeing it with the clarity of a dreamer, taking it to pieces and putting it together again, mending everything in my head.”
― Montagu Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“Inevitably the real garden with a growing family of children will be untidy, messy even, noisy and often destructive. It drives arch control freaks like myself mad. But I hate it when they are not there.2”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“it goes back to the garden telling a story. You make up bits and play with them to see if they ring true. Sometimes this works out first time and all is well and good, but as often as not you have to fiddle and reshape until it is right.”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“However naturalistic and ‘wild’ it appears, a garden is always an artificial environment made by people for people, so it makes sense to put the considerations of people – rather than plants – first.”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“Failure teaches much more than success.”
― Montagu Don, Down to Earth: Gardening Wisdom

“So how would I do it again if I were to cater for the children in the garden rather than merely tolerate them? I would make places.”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“An immaculate garden is a hostile place to most wildlife. Beautifully weeded borders, with every fallen leaf and twig gathered and disposed of, hedges kept constantly crisp and grass mown to within a fraction of its life may make a certain sort of gardener glow with pride but will provide little comfort for most of our birds, mammals and insects.”
― Monty Don, Down to Earth: Gardening Wisdom

“We all have an idealised picture of the garden that we have carried around in our heads from the moment it became ours and which, I guess, is never the same as the growing reality. Over the years that the garden is coming into being that image carries you forward and inspires you, but when things reach maturity, the cold light of reality can be harsh.”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“[My list] of unwritten books grows longer every year--which may be a blessed relief to the book-buying public but is a source of real dissatisfaction to me.”
― Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“And remember, nobody knows everything. Not even Roy Lancaster.”
― Monty Don

“magpies, jays, sparrowhawks, kestrels, all”
― Monty Don, Nigel: my family and other dogs

“It is snowing. The flakes stream into the torchlight like a crowd flowing across a bridge, each one unknowably different, all exactly the same. But look up and the snow piles out of the dark like a weightless waterfall, tumbling from a black nowhere to your face. Snow at night is like the roof falling in, quietly.”
― Montagu Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden

“a little, would have existed to keep animals”
― Monty Don, Nigel: my family and other dogs