Monty Don tells how Longmeadow’s various areas evolved 

The way that I have designed my garden is, as a friend of mine only half-jokingly described it, ‘like a series of allotments’. 

It means there are a number of different areas, all quite separate and usually hidden from the rest. I make no apologies for this and enjoy the surprises and sense of enclosure that it brings.

Inevitably this means that different sections of the garden have their own character. 

We also try to treat each separate area as though it were the only garden that we had. This means that each section has to stand up to the strictest scrutiny and aesthetic standards.  

Having said this, one of the reasons for having many different compartments to a garden is that whilst it is very hard, if not impossible, to make an entire garden look wonderful year round, it is much more achievable to have at least one section looking good at any given time.

By the same token, some of the different ‘rooms’ can rest for part of the year or even shut down for a while. 

This gives the opportunity to indulge in favourites that might have a short flowering season or a group of plants that share the same conditions but which are at odds with much of the rest of the garden.

1. THE SPRING GARDEN

This garden has changed very little since it was made nearly 30 years ago. It is where I go and dip my toe as we emerge from winter. 

It is where the first flowers peek through frost, snow and flood – snowdrops, aconites, hellebores – and where, as the days roll thrillingly into spring, the daffodils, fritillaries and tulips, Solomon’s seal, forget-me-nots, tiarella, brunnera, euphorbia, first species roses and cow parsley all expand out into weeks of heady glory before subsiding into summer dormancy.

The Spring Garden is still the first part of the garden to flood in winter, and in late 2019 and early 2020 more than half of it was under water for weeks on end, but nothing seemed to suffer. 

However, time has crept up on it and change has manifested itself as growth. The trees I planted as slips that I could hold in one hand in the spring of 1993 are now 15m tall so a couple of years ago we radically pruned them back.

The other great change was a result of starting to film Gardeners’ World here in 2011. 

In 1995 we planted a hornbeam hedge beneath the pleached limes of the Lime Walk and by 2002, when the last edition of this book was photographed, it had formed a green wall bounding the west side of the Spring Garden. 

But it made access for the camera difficult, so in 2013 I removed it. It added much more light and a whole new view of the garden. It is like taking the side off a building. The entire Spring Garden is now revealed in one cast of the eye.

2. THE JEWEL GARDEN 

This remains the heart of our entire garden, the physical and conceptual hub around which all other parts revolve. 

In many ways it has not changed much at all in the last 20 years, as the basic concept is still to use jewel colours throughout the seasons, in as rich and opulent a display as possible.

It is a big, difficult space to keep looking good, so we have invested an awful lot of thought, time and effort into it. 

Whereas there are times when most of the other sections of the garden seem to be like an engine that just needs a bit of maintenance here and the odd part replaced or repaired there, the Jewel Garden is very high-maintenance and demanding. Not so much a well-oiled machine as a distinctly temperamental thoroughbred.

The first phase of the Jewel Garden lasted for about eight years. It took a lot of work to maintain, with hundreds of annuals grown and added each season. 

But no border stays the same from year to year, let alone decade to decade. To keep things as they are, you have to change all the time. 

By 2010, some of the beds had become infested with bindweed and so we took out every single plant, washed the roots clean of the spaghetti-like bindweed roots and removed every last scrap of bindweed we could find. It was boring and took ages but was worth it.

I added to the structure with shrubs such as Buddleja ‘Black Night’ and B. globosa, and with the elders that do so well for us, such as the golden Sambucus racemosa ‘Plumosa Aurea’ and the almost black S. nigra f. porphyrophylla ‘Guincho Purple’. 

I have also added quite a few roses such as ‘William Shakespeare’ and ‘Falstaff’. The Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ is a glorious thug whose bulbs we dig up and remove by the barrowload every year.

We now have many more dahlias and cannas in our late summer display and still grow hundreds of zinnias, tithonias, sunflowers, antirrhinums, cosmos and other annuals. 

The trick is to have a foundation of large groups of perennials and then to allow yourself room and the mindset to play, adding in annuals and individual purchases or gifts where they seem to suit. The Jewel Garden should always be a dance, not a static tableau, however glorious.

3. THE DAMP GARDEN 

When the first edition of this book went to the printers in 2002, the Damp Garden was just taking shape. Along with the Spring Garden it’s in the first area to flood and is often under water when everything else is dry, but I resisted making a pond here because when we came to Longmeadow we had small children. 

Friends of my parents had a two-year-old daughter who drowned in their small garden pond, so it was drummed into me from an early age that small children and ponds did not mix. 

No pond, I decided, until the youngest can swim unaided. Time went by, the garden became more established, the youngest learned to swim like a fish, but water still did not officially feature in any way in the garden. 

When the first series of Gardeners’ World to be shot in this garden was coming to a close in October 2011, the producer said I ought to have a pond. 

It was made in the winter of 2012 and within a few months it looked as though it had always been there, with hostas, ligularias, rodgersias, ferns, primulas and water lilies. 

From the outset I decided this was to be a natural-looking wildlife pond rather than a formal expanse of water illuminated with a few choice plants. Frogs, newts, water beetles and other aquatic insects quickly became established.

One of the wonders of making any kind of pond is seeing how quickly the range of wildlife expands and makes its home there – as well as the bird and bat population benefitting hugely because ponds also attract lots of insects. 

One aspect of having a pond I had completely underrated was the quality of light that water brings into play. 

At different times of day, the light reflects in different ways on the water as it is thrown back up to the surrounding trees. And when the setting sun falls exactly through a gap in the Long Walk’s hornbeam hedge, it creates a shining line of light on the surface of the water. 

We paved the area between the hedge and water and I often sit there. Here I am hidden from the rest of the garden, drinking deep of the peace and sense of harmony with the natural world that a pond, surrounded by plants that are all at home either in or at the water’s edge, seems to impart more than any other area of a garden.

4. THE WILDLIFE GARDEN 

If you want to share your garden with fascinating creatures, then start by not using pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. Stop killing wildlife in the name of neatness or a very selective version of ‘health’. Chemicals are not selective.

Although there are occasions when munching caterpillars might be classed as ‘the enemy’, in almost all circumstances they are part of a much bigger, much richer picture. Live and let live.

I deliberately allow the Wildlife Garden to become as ‘wild’ as it can be without losing what I consider to be its horticultural charm. 

It was made in 2015, primarily to show that you don’t need a big area to attract a wide range of wildlife, and also to demonstrate that a wildlife garden can be good for your fellow creatures as well as being beautiful. 

When the first edition of this book was published, this area contained a greenhouse, our soft fruit and two asparagus beds. We moved all that and planted hazels, an oak tree and a field maple, all behind a high hawthorn hedge.

Having done this we left them to do their thing. As such, it truly was good for wildlife – but not very attractive in any conventional horticultural sense. 

So I set about seeing to what extent I could combine horticulture with a wildlife preserve. The first thing I did was make a pond.

Any pond is good for attracting insects, birds and bats to your garden as well as amphibians and reptiles. 

However, unlike with the pond in the Damp Garden, I added a shallow beach made up of small stones so birds and mammals could walk in and out of the water, plus a log floating on the surface that is ideal for beetles, basking birds and frogs, and plants such as the native flag, Iris pseudacorus. 

But in 2020 I decided this pond was too small and in the wrong place, so I carefully rehomed all visible life and made a bigger and more central pond. 

Next to it I planted a border filled with plants to attract bees and a range of other insects and pollinators. Although it looks natural, the Wildlife Garden is as carefully ‘gardened’ as any other part of Longmeadow. 

5. THE WRITING GARDEN 

The shed at the end of the Writing Garden was built by my son when he was 12. It is set in a small self-contained area created by hawthorn hedges. 

This area had five apple trees and a mown path curving gently through long grass to the door of the shed. 

Every May this grass was overtaken by cow parsley and, combined with the blossom of the apple trees, it was as good as anything that my own horticultural efforts could conjure. 

I put a table and chair in the shed and began to use it to write in – hence its name ‘The Writing Shed’. However, once the cow parsley and apple blossom was finished, it became a hedged-in little corner of scruffy orchard. The magic was lost. 

So in the winter of 2012-13 we lifted the turf and started planting to try to sustain that May-time magic. In effect, the garden is now one big border with a brick path through it following the line of the grass path. 

All the plants in it are white. White gardens have been popular and occasionally highly fashionable for the last 70 years. But they are not easy to get right, because white is one of the more difficult colours to use in a border. 

Too much white and it becomes blank, too little and it ceases to be white. I started with snowdrops, then the lovely white daffodil ‘Thalia’, followed by Ammi majus, which exactly hits the cow parsley-tone I want. 

There are foxgloves, sweet peas, alliums, lupins, buddleia, philadelphus, hydrangeas and roses. I found I was using the Writing Shed less and less so now, from September to June, it contains tray upon tray of picked apples that I collect almost daily to take back to the house. 

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The new edition of The Complete Gardener by Monty Don is published on 4 March by DK, £27. © Monty Don 2003, 2009, 2021. Pre-order a copy for £13.50 at whsmith.co.uk by entering code DMMONTY at checkout. Book number: 9780241424308. Offer valid until 15 March 2021. T&Cs apply: www.whsmith.co.uk/terms