The nation’s favourite gardener on his bond with the subject of his current book – his pet dogs – and why he won’t be appearing on TV shows with ‘celebrity’ in the titleIt’s incongruous to sit with Monty Don in a Soho restaurant. His grin demands a backdrop of hedgerow and coppice, not the clogged London streetscape outside Quo Vadis. When we meet for lunch the restaurant is in a late stage of refurbishment so the exterior is temporarily scaffolded and only half the dining room is open. Don seems a bit confined at our corner table, itching for a skyline. He lived in London for nine years from the age of 25, and this was a fairly regular haunt back then in one of its previous incarnations. The arrival of some of chef Jeremy Lee’s signature rustic manchet bread makes him feel more at home; he loosens his shoulders a bit as he breaks into it.We talk about the only previous time we have sat in a restaurant together, when Don was hired as the gardening correspondent of the Observer magazine, of which I’d just become deputy editor. That was 23 years ago. I remember being struck then, as I am now, by his slightly timeless physical presence in a room of flighty city dwellers; though back then he was new to writing about gardens (the jewellery business he had run with his wife, Sarah, had just gone bankrupt and they had lost everything) as soon as he started to talk about his plans there seemed no doubt he would make it a vocation. His ancestor was the botanist George Don, foreman of the Chelsea Physic Garden and inveterate tropical plant hunter. Monty seemed directly grafted from the same stock. Continue reading…
Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Monty Don: ‘I like dogs because they are not humans’
