The garden was a drug and I was hooked. I needed money to finance the habit. I began to understand completely why debtors resort to uncharacteristic, extreme crimes… Every penny spent was more than we could afford, and the knowledge and pressure of this was a constant, grinding burden.
In dire need of solace, I turned to ABC iview for Monty Don. I can’t be the only woman – or man for that matter – with a major crush on Monty. Rhineland Gardens and British Gardens were just the ticket but I should have known that reading The Prickotty Bush was not going to be the soothing experience I was hoping for. It is Monty Don’s first published book, out of print and hard to get hold of – but I did, at stupid expense, from a second-hand dealer in the UK. Worth it? Yes, and no – it is a beautifully written story of gardens and madness, and so makes uncomfortable reading.
It’s hard to imagine Monty Don as anything other than the amiable lanky fellow in loose blue linen shirts guiding viewers around beautiful gardens, but in the late 1980’s, he and his wife Sarah had a business making high-fashion costume jewellery for the international market. They also had young children and a strong desire for country life as a counterbalance to their high-stress London life. Gardening was already a passion with him, and he’d done a few gardening programmes for TV, but this was before he became famous as a writer and presenter. After looking for a couple of years, they found The Hanburies in rural Herefordshire and Monty set about transforming the overgrown, neglected garden into into something wonderful. With insights from Monty and Sarah Don’s The Jewel Garden, I knew that the garden at The Hanburies nearly broke them both.
Oh the Prickotty Bush, the Prickotty Bush,
Will I never be free of the Prickotty Bush?
With the jewellery business failing, their London house on the market but not selling, a mortgage and a bridging loan to service, after a year or so the Dons sank into deep financial trouble. But Monty remained obsessed with making the garden of his dreams at The Hanburies. He thought of little else. He wrote and planned and drew up planting schemes, and worked in the garden – digging, weeding, clearing, planting – to the point of exhaustion and often into the night. There was massive earth moving work to re-shape the layout. Trees were relocated; walls and terraces built; enormous numbers of plants bought; tradespeople, labourers and machinery were hired. Everything cost more, in time and money, than he’d planned. And he and Sarah were constantly physically overstretched, with small children who hardly slept and Sarah herself unwell. When the financial crunch came, they had to sell The Hanburies.
As Sarah writes in The Jewel Garden,
When it came down to it, Montagu was a loony and I was ill all the time. How did we ever believe we could save the situation?
I suppose the lowest point for me was when I was hidden away on my sickbed while potential buyers traipsed around the house. I found it astonishing that Montagu never mentioned my bedridden weeks in The Prickotty Bush. I can only assume that he was so obsessed with making the garden that I was, during that time, peripheral.
Despite everything, Montagu had the garden and a book. I am sad that I have so little to show for that time. At least the children were happy and healthy.
Much of the book is beautiful to read. Planning and making a garden is such a creative act, full of hope and belief in the future. And as I know from his later books, Monty is has a gift for what you might call ‘nature writing’. Like this:
…A yellow moon hitched its skirts over the wood and there was the faintest streak of light over the western horizon.
Silence. The noise suddenly swung down the hill again, an excited squabbling yittering. I could just make out the undergrowth moving through the gleaming trunks of the birches. It was fox cubs, tumbling and fighting through the docks, foxgloves and elder.
As I went indoors, I could hear them again, playing their last midsummer games before adulthood.
The greenhouse is overflowing with plants and pots and seed-trays, all growing, growing.