Tonight Monty Don Plants Bulbs at Longmeadow for a Spring the Cameras Won’t See
The BBC's contract kept Longmeadow camera-ready for 15 years. With the cameras gone, the garden has to pay its own way — and Don says it can't, yet.
At nine o’clock tonight, Monty Don will be on BBC Two in his own garden, putting spring-flowering bulbs into the soil at Longmeadow and clearing the greenhouse for winter storage. There is nothing unusual about any of it, which is the point. This is an ordinary October edition of Gardeners’ World — one of the last, and already in the can. Don wrapped the final filming visit to Longmeadow earlier this month, posting a photograph of the camera crew packing away their equipment. What viewers watch tonight is the farewell playing out on television after the set has already closed.
Speaking at the RHS Malvern Autumn Show last month, in remarks reported by The Guardian, Don said the BBC’s contract had required him to employ two full-time gardeners from the day the show moved to his own garden in 2011. “If I’m off filming in the Rhine or India or somewhere like that, somebody has got to be getting it ready,” he told the audience. The BBC paid a contribution toward their wages — “not enough, but they do pay something, which is great,” he said. That money stops when he does.
“Obviously, that contribution is going to go,” he said at Malvern. He does not see how the garden covers two salaries on its own: “I can’t afford it unless we earn money from it.” He wants to find ways of earning something from Longmeadow, but nothing can happen before the middle of 2027 at the earliest. He has ruled out the obvious one — the two-acre garden stays private, with no opening to the public. The team caught in the gap — two gardeners, a propagation expert and a landscaper — has worked with him for about ten years.
Don’s own explanation for leaving, written in Gardeners’ World magazine, was that the short commute had a catch. “The commute is delightfully short, but when I go home I take the job with me seven days a week, 24 hours a day.” One morning this summer he woke up and knew it was time to stop. “They say of sportspeople wondering when to retire, ‘You just know.’ Well, I just knew.” The magazine column never said how the garden pays its own way afterward. That part came out at Malvern.
Frances Tophill, long tipped as Don’s successor, told the Sunday Times that “broadcasting is not my day job, my day job is being a gardener.” The BBC has named no successor. The people closest to the job are not volunteering for it. Adam Frost, on BBC Morning Live last month, said Don would be “sorely, sorely missed” — and back in 2025 he gave the Sunday Times his own guess for the future: “I’m comfortable being the supply teacher. Besides, my gut says that when his lordship hangs up his trowel, it won’t be any one person. There will be a small group of co-presenters.” A HortWeek poll of readers last month put the same instinct at 26 percent for a rolling multi-presenter format. The BBC’s chief content officer, Kate Phillips, has only said she looks forward to working with Don on “future BBC projects.”
Gardeners’ World has been on air since 1968. Don joined it in 2003.
