Our temperate climate means we can grow almost anything, but maybe there’s a lesson for us all in the hard choices imposed by the Spanish landscape, says Monty
Last year, in between filming forGardeners’ World, I made four trips to Spain to record a new TV series, and in the seven weeks that I was there, visited 44 gardens. Not exactly the average Spanish holiday trip, but it was much more life enhancing and enriching than any holiday I have had. (I suppose I should qualify that by admitting that my idea of a perfect holiday is an interruption-free week in the garden.)
As I write this I have just returned from a couple of days recording my commentary, which finishes my work on the series. I always enjoy the voice-over sessions because they form an important bit of my contribution to the complex jigsaw of making any programme. It is also the first time that I see the programmes in their finished state. All the weeks of filming and travelling, often out of sequence and in less than perfect conditions, is brilliantly edited and assembled to make something that is greater than the sum of the parts, and gives me a chance to put these gardens into a slightly more objective context.
So, having had a chance to sit back and reflect, what remains most strongly from my year of Spanish gardens? Despite millions of us holidaying there every year, very few British people fully appreciate Spain’s size or dramatic extremes. I travelled over 2,500 miles during the course of the filming and although the roads are good and the high-speed trains excellent, the distances are huge and the landscapes, to British eyes at least, are astonishingly, and often beautifully, empty. I went to Mallorca, right across the south and up to Seville, ranged through the centre of the country from Extremadura in the west, across to Valencia on the eastern coast and from Santiago de Compostela in the north, headed east along the Atlantic coast via Santander and Bilbao, then across the Pyrenees to Barcelona.
It was a lot of travelling but it gave me a rare opportunity to see quite a lot of the country. For all the charm and hospitality of the Spanish people, it is a harsh, fierce and complicated country, and this is the context that gardens have to be made in.
Because most of us only go to the sunny south, we tend to think of it as somewhere that gets extremely hot in summer and is mild in winter. But it is much more varied than that – and usually more extreme. The summer heat is certainly there, but not
