You’ve got to take your hat off to AA Gill, the Times’ TV critic. Whilst he may have been rather unforgivably panning Monty Don’s Around the World in 80 Gardens, the way he describes Monty is a hoot. It really is such a classic that I have to include it here, where mostly I usually only record my own whimsy… (and I thought I was guilty of purple passages!)
Monty is the reincarnation of Hardy’s Gabriel Oak (if fictional characters can be reincarnated). Whereas Alan Titch-marsh, for all his rambling, is still the evocation of suburban patios, Monty is redolent of a wilder, more ancient throb. He has an ancient boskiness, a Celtic spirit – the green man. He comes from a preindustrial land of peasantry, a place of half-remembered folk song and Catweazle. I’m awestruck by his wild, set-aside, organic beauty, that perfect unkempt meadow of hair, the charmingly lopsided five-bar mouth and all the Bodenish foliage of corduroy and faded cotton, the solid daisy roots and manly man bag. He is retro, eco, postmodern: a difficult look to pull off, but Monty does so with gusto. He is the mulchy, double-dug fantasy of a great many of the female audience, who dream of being espaliered up against a warm garden wall.
Well… he may have a certain point, but what tosh!
But where is Monty? He has disappeared from Gardener’s World and good old Carol Klein is taking about him as though he has passed on to garden nirvana. It’s ‘Monty always intended’ and ‘Monty wanted us to have a go” etc. GW just isn’t the same without him, and its time he got back, wherever he is!
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