Ah! Monty Don…
There’s the lanky frame, the floppy linen shirts, the straw hats. The long and slightly melancholy face, which is transfigured at times with a gentle toothy smile and unforced enthusiasm when he loves something. There’s an often bewildered politeness when he doesn’t. His cultivated (joke!) English voice is gentle and not too poncy as he talks us through the gardens of the world. Then there’s Longmeadow, his gorgeous garden in Hereford, and the long marriage to his lovely Sarah, and the beautiful dogs…
I bagged The Road to Le Thonolet at the Library book sale. No coloured pictures, just a few grainy black-and-whites in a little paperback. A garden journey, yes, which was wonderful. Grand chateau gardens and even grander palace gardens; artists’ gardens; potagers and monastery vegetable gardens; a cubist garden, a vertical garden, lush gardens and dry ones. Perhaps the most illuminating thing about the book is his explanation of the difference between the French and English approaches. First, there is in France an ‘inherent and learnt respect for, and adherence to, prescribed form… The essentials of rhythm, balance, geometric symmetry and harmony are still seen as the starting points for any garden design and not just because they make for beautiful gardens but also because they are in harmony with the essential ingredients of an ordered, harmonious culture and society.’ And second, the French love of intellectual concepts.
I learned a lot, but perhaps what I enjoyed even more was the personal aspect of this book, the memoir within a garden tour. It was good to get to know the very young Monty, let loose in France, living on the cheap, walking and hitching, looking, learning and experiencing. There’s a drift of images and memories, often little inconsequential things that have remained in his mind – like a perfect omelette, a swim in an icy pool ‘whose black depths suddenly seemed fathomless, the thigh-burning steepness of a walk, a bottle of Orangina (would that be Fanta?) after he slid down a snowy mountainside, the taste of mineral water from a hillside spring. He writes:
There is an innocence in this, a sense of a pure past that is now unreclaimable and I suspect, increasingly hunts you down with the ache of loss as the years pass…
