BBC Radio 2’s Jo Whiley visited Monty Don’s famous Longmeadow garden for her podcast and was surprised by its real size compared to how it looks on Gardeners’ World
Over the past six months, Zoe Ball and Jo Whiley’s podcast has enabled the duo – already well-known as BBC Radio hosts – to encounter even more of their idols. A personal standout moment for Jo was getting to meet TV gardening guru Monty Don – though she received quite a shock when she toured his renowned garden at Longmeadow.
The garden, situated at Monty’s residence in Ivington, near Leominster, in Herefordshire, appears vast when featured on Gardeners’ World. Each of its four separate sections – The Cottage Garden, The Jewel Garden, The Paradise Garden and The Vegetable Garden – could easily stand as an independent garden on its own merits.
However, Jo reveals, Longmeadow presents a completely different reality when you’re physically present there.
“I saw Monty’s garden,” she revealed on her Dig It podcast. “I got a personal tour.”
Yet, she noted: “It’s a lot smaller in the flesh than it appears on television, as with all things.”
“It’s beautiful obviously. It’s wild and rugged and beautiful and Monty was a great, great host.”
Longmeadow’s Cottage Garden, Monty explains, dedicated its initial 20 years as a conventional kitchen garden, providing all the fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs for Monty’s family. However, over time, “it has slowly evolved into a traditional, but essentially floral, cottage garden”.
Monty continued: “In summer, it is dominated by over 50 different kinds of old-fashioned shrub roses. In winter the structure is marked out by box hedging and 8 large Irish Yews – that all fitted in the boot of car when we first planted them in 1994.”
Zoe was especially taken aback that Jo had witnessed Monty’s renowned Jewel Garden. According to Monty, it represents “the physical and spiritual centre of the entire garden. Everything revolves around it”.
He reveals that the hues of all the plants have been selected because they possess jewel-like or metallic qualities. The overall impact, Monty remarks, is “just like the 1980’s – brash, extravagant and high maintenance”.
The Paradise Garden represents Monty’s most scholarly approach to garden design, founded on a “Koranic” principle featuring four symmetrical beds positioned around a central water feature that gently bubbles.
Monty clarifies: “The planting is modern and based upon a matrix of the soft grass stipa tenuissima with the tulip acuminata, with its long ottoman-like petals in spring and tulbaghia and verbena bonariensis flowering in summer.
“Roses and Lilies add the essential element of fragrance. What began as an act of homage, almost an academic exercise, has become an important and much loved part of the garden.”
The final garden at Longmeadow is arguably the most functional. Serving the role of Monty’s original Cottage Garden, The Vegetable Garden brims with crops that can be harvested and taken straight to the kitchen.
“The luxury of strolling out into the garden with a basket to ‘market’ it, selecting whatever is most appetising and ready for consumption and then quickly converting these delicious ingredients into a simple meal is one of life’s great pleasures,” Monty says.
Source: Mirror
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