Monty Don Quotes

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Monty Don

Profession : Celebrity

Birth : July 8, 1955

The Romans brought with them spices such as ginger, pepper and cinnamon, and herbs including borage, chervil, dill, fennel, lovage, sage and thyme, all of which have remained staples of the British kitchen.

Monty Don

Chickweed is regarded by most gardeners as just that - a weed - but is excellent in sandwiches or salads.

Monty Don

The divide between a 'wild' plant and what is suitable for the garden is unnatural and meaningless. Gardens begin and end in the mind, and the Western way of thinking is not good at accommodating that.

Monty Don

Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour.

Monty Don

I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man's-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.

Monty Don

For every gardener there is a minimum level of engagement that is needed to sustain and develop the relationship. There is no magic figure to this and it will vary from person to person and season to season, but it is there.

Monty Don

Many gardens are hijacked by their plants and end up looking like a room overstuffed with furniture.

Monty Don

Once you engage with the simple enough business of feeding yourself, of soil and water, weather, season and harvest, it becomes personal. It is about you, your family and friends. Food becomes an aspect of those relationships as well as your intimacy with your plot.

Monty Don

A healthy plant is one that adapts best to the situation in which it finds itself. There is no objective measure of this.

Monty Don

Modern man has a very abstract idea of what a wood is. I guess that if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what a wood actually was, they would see it as a place where big trees grow.

Monty Don

I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.

Monty Don

Coppice management depends upon the chosen tree being cut when the shoots are straight, vigorous and, critically, not shading out new growth.

Monty Don

My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark's fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.

Monty Don

Blackthorn has wicked spikes that are highly brittle and tend to snap off under the skin and then fester horribly. This means that they can only really be part of a hedge that you do not want to get too close to.

Monty Don

I think that the essence of a Christmas wreath - of all Christmas vegetative decoration - has to be green and, if possible, living. So the basis of a wreath is ideally holly, laurel, ivy, rosemary, larch, fir or whatever is to hand.

Monty Don

The truth is that wreaths have never really been part of my creative life. I like them and want them and know how to do them.

Monty Don

You get older, you slow down. Failure feels like less of a humiliation and more of a balanced return.

Monty Don

As September rolls into October, I become obsessed with apples. Now obviously this is provoked by the ripening fruit clustering on the trees in our orchard, but it is as though all things pomological ripen in me, too.

Monty Don