It’s incongruous to sit with Monty Don in a Soho restaurant. His grin demands a backdrop of hedgerow and coppice, not the clogged London streetscape outside Quo Vadis. When we meet for lunch the restaurant is in a late stage of refurbishment so the exterior is temporarily scaffolded and only half the dining room is open. Don seems a bit confined at our corner table, itching for a skyline. He lived in London for nine years from the age of 25, and this was a fairly regular haunt back then in one of its previous incarnations. The arrival of some of chef Jeremy Lee’s signature rustic manchet bread makes him feel more at home; he loosens his shoulders a bit as he breaks into it.
We talk about the only previous time we have sat in a restaurant together, when Don was hired as the gardening correspondent of the Observer magazine, of which I’d just become deputy editor. That was 23 years ago. I remember being struck then, as I am now, by his slightly timeless physical presence in a room of flighty city dwellers; though back then he was new to writing about gardens (the jewellery business he had run with his wife, Sarah, had just gone bankrupt and they had lost everything) as soon as he started to talk about his plans there seemed no doubt he would make it a vocation. His ancestor was the botanist George Don, foreman of the Chelsea Physic Garden and inveterate tropical plant hunter. Monty seemed directly grafted from the same stock.
He recalls that lunch and the job that followed it as something of a before and after for him. “I remember the Observer calling and saying they would like me to do the column,” he says, “and the editor explaining that it wasn’t unfortunately a ‘life-changing’ contract, with a bit of a laugh. I think it was £250 a week. But the fact was that to me at that moment it really was life-changing. We had a young family, we had lost our house and everything. The idea that somebody was saying we are going to give you this cheque every week was like a miracle.”
I guess I still have a sense of the wolf, if not at the door, then at least prowling on the horizon
Don had moved out to a rundown smallholding, Longmeadow in Herefordshire, where he has lived ever since, nurturing and developing the seeds of that writing life, along with the gardens that, after the Observer, became the setting of BBC Gardeners’ World. He has no hankering for city life, never did really. Even as a student at Cambridge he kept chickens. And in London, he says, he spent more time in his patch of garden than anywhere else. “I used to go to the cinema a bit, the occasional meal out. But I don’t crave any of that now. There isn’t really a decent cinema for miles near us anyway.”
As a long-term president of the Soil Association, from which he recently stepped down, he has a clear passion for the kind of seasonal British cooking that Lee has made his name with at Quo Vadis. Don loves good fresh ingredients, but, like Lee, doesn’t fetishise them. He orders his leek, bacon and egg salad, and salt cod and shrimp cakes to follow with the minimum of fuss and eats them and a generous side of parsley potatoes with the relish of a man who knows flavour when he tastes it. A while ago he and Sarah published a farmhouse cookbook and the garden supplies most of what they eat. They cook together as often as they can, though work on his series Big Dream Small Spaces, in which he helps suburban gardeners create their fantasy plots, has seen him on the road a lot of late.
“More than ever I want a few friends and family and quiet and space,” he says. “Sarah is more sociable, but our problems are always about not spending enough time with each other than too much.”
The other ingredient of that life is the occasion for our meeting. Having been pestered to for many years, Don has written a book about his lifelong love affair with his dogs. The book’s star (and the alternative star of Gardeners’ World) is his golden retriever, Nigel. It’s an affectionate and surprisingly affecting story. For a while Don couldn’t work out how to tell it, without it seeming too saccharine. “It clicked when I based it around the garden,” he says. “It became a map, Nigel’s territory, that is where he and I both live.”
The other hurdle was to write it straight without any distancing ironies. “Any kind of blokeiness had to be silenced. You have to put yourself in that frame of mind when you are on your own sitting with a dog by your side with the rain beating on the window.”
For Don the companionship of dogs is of a piece with what he sees as the unique British passion for gardening. It’s a result of a race memory of the brutalities of the industrial revolution, he believes, a psychological need for green thoughts in green shades. “That all happened so fast, 200 years ago, that it is as if we are still coming to terms with it,” he suggests. “What we didn’t lose was the sense of what we lost. Our obsession with gardening is unique. In Italy or even in France, where they didn’t have that revolution until a century later, they don’t see why you would garden yourself when you can afford to pay someone to do it. They regard gardening like we regard plumbing. And the whole British caricature of a grand lady in tweeds with her bottom sticking out of a herbaceous border. It doesn’t exist in those countries.”
Dogs are the other element of that transplanted desire for older rural harmonies. “I like dogs because they are not humans,” he says. “I get very uncomfortable when people start talking about dogs as ‘my boys’. What is wonderful is that this is a wild animal which has chosen to go into partnership with you. It is the only wild animal that really does that.”
Built into that relationship is a sense of dogs tracing the contours of his own life, often in ways that writing the book has revealed to him. “When I recorded the audiobook I realised just how much was involved,” he says. “There are three dogs in the book I’ve had who have died. And I broke down completely reading about one of them and when I turned round the engineer was also sobbing. I thought: ‘Jesus what is going on here?’ We had to stop and have a cup of tea and get a grip…”
In some ways, like the garden, the dogs have been a way of measuring out the years. Don says he’s never forgotten the tougher times and reflexively works very hard to make sure they don’t return. After a minor stroke in 2008 he had to step down from the BBC for nearly a year, and the money immediately dried up. “I had a bit of rainy day money for the first time ever,” he says. “And then it rained and all the money in the bank got spent. I guess I still have a sense of the wolf, if not at the door, then at least prowling on the horizon. Shit does happen.” He can’t imagine packing it in – “why would you not work?” – but he does try to be selective.
He must have been asked to go into the jungle?
“I have – and to dance. All of them,” he says. “My basic philosophy is never do anything with the word ‘celebrity’ attached to it. Without being overly pompous, if you have worked hard to have an audience trust you a bit, why blow it? That is my currency.”
It’s also, you guess, a kind of psychological necessity for him to keep things as “real” as possible. Don has long suffered from bouts of seasonal depression and the rhythm and labour of the garden – and the smallholding he farms with his son in the Black Mountains over the Welsh border – has proved the best antidote. It’s probably telling that a part of him still thinks of himself ruefully as a “failed novelist” (he published a couple of works of fiction in his 20s). But there are compensations. “The farm uses up a lot of my creative urges,” he says. “It’s a sort of rough and ready space, I don’t film there.” He and his son keep 500 breeding ewes and maybe 50 heifers, all organic. “If I’m honest,” he says, “the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.” Holding that very bright thought in mind, he slurps his coffee and heads out into the black and white London afternoon.
Nigel: My Family and Other Dogs is out now (Two Roads, £20). Click here to order a copy from Guardian Bookshop for £16.40
