THE BRITISH may be a nation of gardeners but it was not until the lockdowns of the past two years that many of us discovered the simple joy of planting a seed, nurturing it and watching it grow into something beautiful to look at or tasty to eat.
As the main presenter of BBC2’s Gardener’s World, Monty Don had the role of garden therapist-in-chief rather thrust upon him but it also seemed appropriate that someone who has found personal solace in the natural world should communicate that to a troubled populace left fearful and often isolated by the suddenly strange, frightening world they were now living in.
In an interview for the Guardian last year, Monty himself described his role as “the Vera Lynn of Covid”.
“The BBC made a decision to carry on filming Gardeners’ World, and it felt rather like wartime,” he said. “I felt, in a quite old-fashioned way, that I was doing my bit.”
It helped that, since 2011 the show has been broadcast from Monty’s home and gardens at Longmeadow, near Leominster in Herefordshire, but to enable filming of the show to continue with all the stringent social distancing rules in place at the time, the BBC installed five miles of cabling
