BBC Gardeners' World's Monty Don reveals heartbreaking reason behind garden design – Express

Monty Don has opened up about the heart-wrenching reason his Longmeadow garden is filled with “so many” straight lines.
The Gardeners’ World star’s Herefordshire home is a familiar sight to viewers of the show, but it was a very different scene when Monty and his wife Sarah purchased it in 1991.
Speaking on The Travel Diaries podcast, Monty shared that they bought the property when it was a “ruin”, after facing bankruptcy when their costume jewellery business collapsed during the 1987 stock market crash. This led to them “selling everything we own” and living in a single bedroom, reports Devon Live.
He said: “We went and lived in a spare bedroom in my parents-in-law’s house with all the children. Then my mother died and left me a little bit of money to put down a deposit on this ruined farmhouse.”
“We looked at 62 houses and we couldn’t afford anything, so they were all tiny. We thought ‘we have three children, we have dogs’, so we ended up buying this ruin, which is called Longmeadow.”
READ MORE: Monty Don fans go wild as he shares career update away from Gardeners’ World According to Monty, Longmeadow’s garden was “just a field” when he bought the property. But for Monty, it became a place of “salvation” and “order”
He added: “In this crisis of my life, you’d call it a nervous breakdown, but it was a profound depression, the salvation was making a garden, and that’s what Longmeadow was.
“Someone the other day, not quite recently, said ‘why do you have so many straight lines?’ and I realised it was me trying to straighten out my life.
“I was literally on the ground trying to impose order and straightness onto my life.”
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Monty Don says you must act ‘immediately’ to prevent more damage to plants [INSIGHT] Monty reveals that when he first acquired his Longmeadow property, the two-acre garden was a far cry from its current glory, overrun with rough grass, nettles, and brambles, and home to just one solitary tree in the area now known as the Spring Garden.
It wasn’t until two years after the purchase that Monty could begin planting, a labour of love he affirms has “never stopped since”.
Two decades on from embedding his inaugural bulbs into Longmeadow soil, Monty stepped into Alan Titchmarsh’s shoes as host of the beloved ‘Gardeners’ World’, regularly inviting viewers to witness the splendour of his garden through the programme.
Tonight at 8pm on BBC Two, Monty will once again grace television screens, this time espousing the perpetual joys of gardening. In tandem, co-presenter Carol Klein will be exploring a Somerset garden, seeking out the finest shrubs to adorn the winter landscape.
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