The Full Monty

After visiting gardens of all shapes and sizes around the world, Monty finds that plants don't always play a starring role in inspiring spiritual reflection

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During the filming of Monty Don's British Gardens, across the 62 we visited, a certain type stood out. These were gardens that were essentially the stage or gallery for either artwork or elaborate ideas. Off the top of my head I would include Little Sparta, Crawick Multiverse and Plaz Metaxu as very obvious examples, with Chatsworth, Houghton Hall and Rousham including art as an essential element of the gardens and grounds. This tells us a lot about us British, and how we use and think about gardens. By far the dominant feature for the vast majority of gardeners are plants. I suspect for many gardeners this is an absurdly obvious tautology. Gardens, they say, are plants, and how you choose and use them defines the kind of garden and, indeed, gardening itself. Well, up to a point.

Historically, our deep love of garden plants is relatively new. The gardens at Stowe, which have embedded in them a strong political message, Rousham with its statues and temples, and many of the landscapes of Capability Brown, were creating, often on a vast scale, an Arcadian ideal that did not involve any particular interest in the specific plants used. Plants were the medium, but never the message.