Readers Bid Farewell to Monty Don After Final Gardeners' World

Monty Don presented his final episode of Gardeners' World on 6 November, and readers writing to the Guardian have answered with three letters that map exactly what his tenure meant: a career, a weekly therapy hour, and a grandmother's wildflower meadow.

Saul Abbott, a garden designer based in Essex, puts a precise date on the influence. He started his professional gardening career in 2004 — one year after Don began presenting the programme. "To say this great man taught me much of what I have learned since is a gross understatement," Abbott writes. The lessons went beyond horticultural technique, he says, extending to "the understanding in a greater sense of what a garden is, what it gives to us both in bounty, tangibly, and nourishment of something far greater, internally."

How did a gardening programme train a professional?

Abbott describes a discipline that his friends found baffling. As a novice, he sat down every Friday night with a pencil and a pad, noting every plant shown and every method demonstrated, so he could apply the knowledge at work the following week. His friends, he writes, "couldn't believe that I was giving up Friday nights out for a gardening programme." His verdict: "Honestly, I wouldn't change that for all the Camellia sinensis in China." He calls Don "the greatest presenter of a TV show in a generation" and admits to a tear at the end of the final episode. The takeaway, in Abbott's plain words: Don was the best teacher imaginable.

What did the programme offer beyond plants?

Jane Bates, writing from Macclesfield in Cheshire, focuses on mental health. Don's own struggle with depression, she notes, was always part of his presenting, even though the programme never made mental health its explicit subject. Instead, it consistently foregrounded the benefits that gardening, fresh air and plants bring to anyone experiencing "the ups and downs of living."

Bates quantifies the gift in weekly terms: an hour every Friday to look at "what is real and relevant to my own internal life and enjoyment." Her conclusion is short and unambiguous. "My life is decidedly the better for it," she writes. She values the programme immeasurably and looks forward to its continuation in a new form for years to come.

When did the programme reach an unlikely audience?

Joe Mackenzie of Lewisham, London, offers the most personal letter. He was not an avid viewer; he discovered the show only during Covid, while quarantined with his grandmother, who watched it religiously. She was a keen gardener herself, regularly entered her village flower competitions, and in the summer of 2020 spent more time outside than in. Television held little interest for her, but she never missed Gardeners' World — and Mackenzie is sure she had a huge crush on its presenter.

Don's influence showed in her soil. Mackenzie credits him with inspiring her to let part of her garden grow into a wildflower meadow to attract bees and insects, a tangible change in a single plot driven by a single broadcaster.

The story closes with a wedding and a hospital. The week of Mackenzie's marriage, his grandmother was admitted to hospital; the night before the ceremony, anxious about her and the day ahead, he switched on the television in his hotel room and found Gardeners' World. She died a week later. She saw the flowers from the wedding, Mackenzie writes, but not Don's final episode.

Three letters, three measures: a career launched in 2004, an hour a week of steadiness, a meadow planted in 2020. The programme continues without its presenter, and Bates speaks for at least part of the audience in expecting it to run on for years.