Gardeners’ World episode 1 2011: Gardeners’ World returns with Monty Don back at the helm, but this time in the garden at his own Herefordshire home – a place that he has lovingly nurtured for the last 20 years. With winter receding, Monty, Carol Klein, Joe Swift and Rachel de Thame are preparing for spring.
As well as showing us round his garden, Monty lifts and divides snowdrops. He also gets his vegetable garden started by sowing beetroot and planting onions. It is also the perfect time, before the burst of spring growth, to prune his apple trees and give his shrub roses a much needed trim.
Carol Klein visits one of Britain’s most inspirational winter gardens, Anglesey Abbey, and discovers that even in the darkest winter months gardens can still delight the senses with colour, fragrance and architectural beauty. From gorgeous willows and cornus to Tibetan cherry trees, Carol revels in the beautiful, vibrant and imaginative planting.
Joe Swift and Rachel de Thame are in Dorset offering advice and a helping hand to a plucky gardener who, although it is officially still winter, is about to open her garden to the public under the National Gardens Scheme.
Gardeners’ World episode 1 2011
Gardeners’ World is a long-running BBC Television programme about gardening, first broadcast on 5 January 1968 and still running as of 2019. Its first episode was presented by Ken Burras and came from Oxford Botanical Gardens. The magazine BBC Gardeners’ World is a tie-in to the programme. Most of its episodes have been 30 minutes in length, although there are many specials that last longer. The 2008 and 2009 series used a 60-minute format as did the 2016 series from episode 23, for eight episodes in total.
Monty Don
Monty Don was born in West Berlin to British parents Denis Thomas Keiller Don, a career soldier posted in Germany, and Janet Montagu (née Wyatt). Both of his paternal grandparents were Scottish, through whom he is descended from botanist George Don and the Keiller family of Dundee, inventors of a brand of marmalade in 1797. On his maternal side, he is descended from the Wyatts, who were a prominent dynasty of architects. Both parents died in the 1980s. Don has a twin sister, an elder brother David, and two other siblings. His twin suffered a broken neck and blindness after a car crash, at the age of 19. Don describes his parents as being “very strict”.
Don was educated at three independent schools: Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, Hampshire, Bigshotte School in Wokingham, Berkshire, and at Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, a college he hated. He then attended a state comprehensive school, the Vyne School, in Hampshire. He failed his A levels and while studying for re-takes at night school, worked on a building site and a pig farm by day. During his childhood he had become an avid gardener and farmer. He was determined to go to Cambridge out of “sheer bloody-mindedness”, attending Magdalene College, where he read English and met his future wife Sarah. He was a Cambridge Half Blue for boxing.
