November 2024
I am delighted to announce the publication of my latest book Spanish Gardens.
Spanish Gardens is a detailed record of my travels throughout the country as I visited the country as a relative newcomer. The book explores how Spain has evolved from the darker days after the civil war to its successful transition to democracy over fifty years ago, tracing those changes through its gardens - from the more conventional gardens created after the war to the rich and inventive approaches of contemporary designers.
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October 2024
September has been wet and cold at Longmeadow but also extraordinarily busy with filming and writing commitments. Whilst these projects are enjoyable and exciting it has meant, for the first time in nearly 6 years of writing this blog, I have simply not had time to write this month’s entry.
In the mean time I have attached the my job recommendations from last October. These apply to the garden every bit as much in 2024 as they did in 2023.
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September 2024
September bathes the garden in golden light. September sun is often the most benign of the year, the mornings and evenings chilly enough to need a jersey but the days bright and shirt-sleeve warm. Some of this is due to the changing climate but September has always been one of the best months and always with a marked seasonal shift, with a new term, new season, new feel in the air.
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August 2024
We come into August with a generally held belief that - in the UK at least - it has been a 'bad' summer. The weather seems to have been greyer and colder and damper than usual. In fact the evidence is that this is not so. There have been no long spells of hot, dry sunny weather but it has been pretty average.
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July 2024
Last July I set off to the North of Britain to film the first of five programmes for 'Monty Don's UK Gardens’. A year later I have just completed the fifth, filmed in Scotland, and the completed series will be shown on BBC 2 next February. But on that first trip it rained every single day - and sometimes it feels like it has rained every day since then. Certainly this has been the wettest 12 months in my lifetime.
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June 2024
This strange year has - sometimes seemingly against the odds - reached June. Despite the weather this is summer and the garden knows it. The wet weather stretched on into May here, with little sunshine and less heat but the garden has flowered profusely. Whilst it may not have been warm, it has not been especially cold. Lots of rain and mild temperatures make ideal growing conditions for many plants.
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May 2024
April was cold and wet again, the winter’s miserable weather continuing long into Spring. But the floods - at time of writing at least - have at last abated and there is that wonderful sense of the natural world unfurling out into the light.The garden seems not have minded the endless wet and although cold for humans it has in fact been mild with little or no frost so everything is flowering at least 10 days earlier than usual - if not ever.
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April 2024
It is a sobering thought that no one alive has ever experienced a Winter and Spring in the UK as wet as this has been and, as we go into April, there is no sign of the rain stopping. This obviously affects every garden and gardener but, on the up side, it has been mild and everything is growing well.
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March 2024
February in my garden - and most gardens across the UK - was unrelentingly and miserably wet. When it was not actually raining it was muddy, with constant flooding. We were forced to dig up the whole of our Long Walk and lay perforated drainage pipes to try and take away and spread some of the rainwater from our buildings as other parts of the garden were literally saturated and the fresh water had nowhere to go.
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February 2024
There are two kinds of people: those that think of February as the lowest point of the year and those that love it and I am firmly in the latter camp.
February is the month when the garden really starts to come alive and grow even if the weather can be severe and the days are still short. In February something is definitely happening. There is a thrill in the air.
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January 2024
This garden and all who sail in her is floating into 2024 - almost literally. It has barely stopped raining for the past three months and as I write this the fields as far as the eye can see are under water as is sections of the garden .This is rather beautiful in a calm rather surreal way, especially in the brief gaps between downpours when the waters are still and become a vast lake appearing overnight. But mostly all this rain just means mud, slippery paths and the frustration of not being able to get on with much work in the garden without making a terrible mess.
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December 2023
But then Christmas comes and we ransack the garden for greenery, deck the halls, put up a tree, make wreaths and Boxing day feels like a fresh start. In fact I always sow some seeds on Boxing day - onions, chillies, some tomatoes - as much as a symbolic act as serious horticulture.
Midwinter is past. the days are getting longer. Soon there will be snow drops and aconites, crocus and hellebores.
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November 2023
I am writing this on the last day of October and the garden outside is barely autumnal. Most of the leaves are still green and clinging to the trees and hedges and although it has been wet all month, October has been mild.
But experience shows that, even with climate change altering the seasons, there is no room for complacency. The clocks have gone back and winter is coming and preparation for any kind of extreme weather is sound practice.
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October 2023
October this year is entering through the back door. There is barely a hint of autumn other than the shortening days and cooler nights. The garden remains a strange matt green without a hint of the delicacy and fading that usually characterises the end of September.
But the only rule is that there are no rules. The longer I garden the less assumptions I make. And none of this harms the garden in any way.
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September 2023
For us, here on the very west of England, September has traditionally been one of the drier months but also one of the gentlest and most beautiful. This is just as well because August '23 was as cold, wet and grey as July had been. All in all it has been a miserable summer.
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August 2023
Whereas this gardener wore unseasonably heavy clothing and wellingtons in the July mud, the garden loved the rain and tolerated the cold so looks much fresher this August than a year ago. Often August can feel as though summer is growing weary and jaded but not this year. However the one thing that is always constant in the August garden is that the days are growing noticeably shorter and this affects growth, especially of young plants.
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July 2023
Regardless of the weather, July is the summation of summer, the month when the days are still long, the growth as full as it ever might be and none of the slight weariness that can shadow August. It is the month of school holidays, and the garden flows and swells with both floral and edible harvests.
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June 2023
As the clock slips past midnight on May 31st the garden and I have arrived where we most need to be. There is much change and development to come and the beginning of June is a very different place to the dog days of late July and August but nevertheless there sense of arrival at summer is undeniable yet has the freshness and inner glow of spring.
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May 2023
April was cold and wet here at Longmeadow and pretty miserable for gardeners right across the UK. However, the garden seems not have minded too much and it arrives at May luminously green and full of flowers with more appearing every day.
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April 2023
March was blessedly soggy. Not so good for gardeners but after the exceptional dryness of last year, great for gardens. Moisture in the soil now, as plants start to grow in earnest, means that the garden is greening daily and the spring flowers - especially the blossom and bulbs - are quickly following in this green wake.
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