The British may love their gardens, but the Spanish know how to enjoy one, says Monty Don. Step one, stop gardening…
Monty Don’s Spanish Gardens Thursday 8.00pm BBC2
BARCELONA IS FAMOUS for its green spaces, like Antoni Gaudí’s fantastical Parc Güell and the forested terraces of Montjuïc, but not, perhaps, for its adoration of retirement-age British gardeners. Quite a surprise then, for Monty Don to be grabbed in the Ramblas. “That’s the price you pay,” he says, of the moment in Monty Don’s Spanish Gardens when a female florist insists on having her picture taken with him on the Catalan capital’s best-known thoroughfare. “I have the incredible good fortune to travel and see things and learn and then it gets shown on television, so more people are going to know who I am.”
Perhaps, but the woman seemed, to this viewer anyway, to be just the latest of those who’ve fallen for the full Monty package: the greying curls, the knocked-about corduroy trousers and the roguish braces. “It’s a combination of the internet and Netflix,” Don, 68, says of his present fame. “I used to be able to go almost anywhere and be a private citizen. Now, in Tokyo, in Barcelona, in Kansas, somebody knows who you are.” And what do they say? “Most people say, ‘Hey, where’s your dog?’ ” Nell the golden retriever joined Don’s previous hounds digging up the big lawn in the sky last October, but Ned, another retriever, and yorkshire terrier Patti are still here, and the television career thunders on.
That career began in 1989. His jewellery business with wife Sarah Erskine was going bust, and, facing bankruptcy, he began offering gardening tips on This Morning because he needed the £100 appearance fee. Now he has alpha-male status on Gardeners’ World, regular, lavish BBC travelogues – Spanish Gardens follows previous trips to Italy, the Adriatic, the US, Japan, France, and other locations around the world – and Amazon Prime streams his 2014–17 garden makeover show Big Dreams, Small Places. Don squats, braces allowing, at the head of British horticultural television, a dominance acknowledged with an uppermiddle-class diff idence that suggests it’s as much a surprise to him as it is to us.
In his latest journey, Don covers 4,000 Iberian kilometres over three episodes. Starting in Madrid and then Valencia, he sweeps south through Andalusia before traversing the country’s green north and then ducking down into Catalonia. He f inds a Spain full of gardens large and small, some lush, others necessarily water-limited, one or two delightfully strange. They range from baroque masterpieces that have been
