The Jewel Garden: A Story of Despair and Redemption

Product Information

It is more than a tale of a garden - wonderful and encouraging as The Jewel Garden is but also a story of a marriage in all its unsanitised honesty. The despair as per the title, refers to the collapse of the business, but also of Monty’s battle with depression. It’s brutally honest; his description of depression is the best I’ve ever read. Their life settles down and together they plan the garden(s) that viewers now see week in, week out. This is a brief précis of what is a marvellous book, that details their trials and successes in life and business, but also really interesting details of their planting, which to me as a gardener are sheer magic. To engage with gardening in the UK today is to engage, unavoidably, with Monty. And when gardening occupies such a sacred spot in the national mindset, the Don supremacy can be contentious. While his predecessors—the pipe-smoking Percy Thrower and the chipper, can-do Alan Titchmarsh—seemed at home in suburbia, Don took Gardeners’ World to his own sprawling, oft-flooded, semi-wild Herefordshire garden, Longmeadow. He’s a lifelong proponent of organic gardening and his dismissal of pesticides, weedkiller and peat is deemed unsupportive and unrealistic by many in the horticultural industry. There are two summer seasons in this garden. The first starts at the end of May and continues to mid July and then there is a noticeable shift as the light changes slightly and the whole garden heats up until September.

He wrote this book with his wife, Sarah, and I must say I enjoyed her contributions as much as I did Monty’s . Here is a good example.

More Things To Do

I blow through French Gardens and then find his series on Italian Gardens. I have now started watching an episode of Gardeners’ World several times a week, while drinking a cup of Earl Grey and ruminating on what I’m learning from Don that can be applied to my own feeble efforts here in the States. Despite his primetime prominence, Don still sees himself primarily as a writer “who happens to have lots of television work.” (And in his younger days, he actually wrote a couple of novels though, in his own words, he soon “destroyed” them because they were “excruciatingly bad.”) He is finishing his next book, about wildlife at Longmeadow, when we speak over the phone, and so I picture him at the desk that he has described in his books, in a converted hop kiln, with the beds of his adored dogs at his feet.

Monty Don is perfectly content whenever he is working in his home garden. It is when he is away from it too long or the winter months make it impossible for him to putter as he likes among the flowers, the vegetables, and the trees that his crippling depression, always lurking like a beast in the shadows, seizes the opportunity to storm the cells deep in the dungeons of his mind and release the creatures of self-doubt, dissatisfaction, recrimination, and lassitude and allow them to run freely through his mind, overturning pots, tearing up rose bushes, and smashing down fences. Sarah pulled on her Wellington’s and strode out the front door. She saw her husband lovingly teaching Adam the ancient art of topiary, a skill that would be vital when he started at Eton next year. And there is no doubting Don’s passion for protecting the land, rooted in having watched a kind of arcadia “literally being ripped up in front of my eyes” in boyhood. “Hedgerows going, wildflowers going, birds disappearing, trees being cut down,” he said. “In today’s climate it is unbelievable what farmers got away with then in the name of greater productivity.” At 18 he “was the youngest by about 40 years” when something stirred him to attend a meeting of the Campaign to Protect Rural England “in somebody’s rectory in Hampshire” and realised he felt an “affinity with what they were talking about. Surely, we should be looking after the natural world and working with it, rather than destroying it in the name of commerce.” I have had issues with " volume " my entire life but never equated it to being connected to my depression... this has been a weight lifted from me.

Summary

This Book, it turns out, chosen for being about Gardening and having the word " Jewel " in the title - not the year to be given jewels that there is no where to wear them to... So a compromise, was a perfect choice! I have been becoming more and more obsessed with my garden over the last 5 years - this year it, quite literally - saved me. It's also a story of the depression that has dogged Monty Don throughout his life, and about which he is pretty open. Naturally this depression found what I hope was its low point during the early years of their new home, when they had practically no money and small children to look after, and the garden at Longmeadow served as a lifeline, a creative outlet, and, eventually, the inspiration for a new career in garden writing and TV presenting. He’s capable of incredible unhappiness at the same time as this large embrace of the world and all its beauties,” said his old university friend Nicolson. “How those two things are related I don’t really know, but it’s very important for who he is, that they co-exist.”