Is your plot a thriller? As the Daily Mail launches its annual search for Britain's most gorgeous garden, Monty Don urges you to consider sharing your pride and joy with us
- Monty Don urges you to enter Daily Mail's annual National Garden Competition
- British gardening expert says every single shape of garden is a potential winner
- He shares his tips for entering the competition including a list of 'do's and don'ts'
We’re all desperate for our lives to return to something approaching normality, and for me that will mean filming Gardeners’ World each week from my garden with a real live crew in attendance, working in a physical team that I can interact with. It’ll be quite a change.
Since lockdown began in March 2020, I have worked alone, speaking to robot cameras connected by over five miles of cabling hidden around the garden.
A brilliant production team controls this from four containers that were craned into our driveway (leaving just enough room to park one car and open the doors on one side), communicating with me by walkie-talkie. It is a strange business but it seems to have worked.
Monty Don (pictured) has encouraged readers to enter The Daily Mail's annual National Garden Competition, now in its 26th year – and you could win £2,000 in cash
Although this has meant I have been able to share my garden with millions of people each week, I desperately miss the real, live human contact of showing people round and I realise that the crew (cameramen, director, producers, sound recordists, runners, researchers) played an important part in admiring or commiserating on the state of the garden on their weekly, two-day visits.
The point is that however much satisfaction you get from your garden, however focused you are on the process, you need outside recognition to realise fully the pleasure that you get. To put it another way: a pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled.
So now that we have come round to the Daily Mail’s annual National Garden Competition, I urge any of you that have spent time, skill, hard work and love on your gardens over the past extraordinary year to enter and share it with us.
Because that is the essence of this competition. Yes there is a judging process and yes there will be a winner declared, but entering your garden is above all an act of sharing. You are opening the doors and if you win – every single garden of any shape, size or kind is a potential winner – then everybody shares that communal celebration.
The British gardening expert says every single garden of any shape, size or kind is a potential winner. Pictured: The garden of a 2015 finalist
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He also shared his tips for entering the competition including a list of 'do's and don'ts'. Pictured: One of the four finalists from the 2017 competition
The beauty of this competition is that it is genuinely open to all. It really does not matter if you garden a balcony filled with plants, a small dark back yard that you have made a ferny jungle, a garden by the sea that’s open to the elements, or rolling acres that consumes all your time. It is open to everyone, everywhere.
The only proviso is that you should have created and maintained the garden yourself with no more than one part-time helper.
I have spent a good slice of the past 15 years travelling the world and visiting gardens of every kind in every culture, climate and continent, from hundreds of miles inside the Arctic Circle to deserts in Australia, America and Africa, half way up the Amazon and on rooftops in the world’s busiest cities.
Yet I have never come across a national culture of gardening to match that of the British. It is in our bones, in our DNA. If we think of ourselves as ‘amateurs’ in a disparaging way then we completely misunderstand what is happening.
We garden in the same way that the French eat or nomadic people move across vast spaces. It is how we understand and interpret the world. So hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps millions – have an extraordinary level of horticultural knowledge and skill, and use it to make beautiful gardens.
Yet they are doing so as a hobby, almost always simply for the pleasure that it gives. No other nation, to my knowledge, comes anywhere near this.
This means that we tend to assume as ‘normal’ a level of horticultural expertise that is actually exceptional. It means that your gardens (and perhaps those of your neighbours) are very good indeed – even though you may take that excellence for granted.
The National Garden Competition is a very good way of celebrating these skills. Every year we get a wide range of gardens entering the competition and it is important to stress that every single one is judged on its own merits rather than in contrast or relation to any others. It is not a race but a selection.
You may reasonably ask how it is possible to find one winner given the huge diversity of gardens. How do you compare a jewel box of a garden in London with a garden by the sea in Northumberland? How can anyone decide that a roof garden grown entirely in containers is ‘better’ than a boggy garden based around a pond?
But the judges, headed by garden designer Tim Sharples, are looking primarily for how the garden is used and created in relation to its own particular site and the circumstances of the gardener.
They will be looking for imagination and the best use of the available space. They will consider anything from a collection of containers on a flat roof to wildflower meadows.
They’ll be as impressed with collections of rare or ‘difficult’ plants as a garden made up entirely of topiary – if both share the same passion, skill and wit.
It certainly does not matter if you have never shown your garden before or if it has been open to the public for years – everyone gets treated the same.
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