Monty Don

"From a small boy I had wanted only to be a and to work on the land. A hurdle-maker's life seemed to me to be ideal, your materials with hand tools in the woods and then making hurdles with hypnotic skill. As a student I had seriously considered becoming a thatcher. In an ideal world I would farm as well, but I had worked on farms and seen that only those with money had any chance of owning their own land and for me, possession was a large part of the draw. The only writing that I considered was fiction. It never crossed my mind to write about gardening, even though by then I had written — and destroyed — a couple of excruciatingly bad novels, and was facing the sneaking suspicion that I might not be any good at it."

"For the Japanese especially, gardens are an essential part of their cultural identity and their history can be measured out in them. In a land of earthquakes and s, gardens are often more durable — and more easily repaired — than buildings. That is not to say that they are easy for the Western visitor to understand or appreciate. Of all the countries I have visited, Japan remains the most enigmatic, drawing you just so close but no further. The cultural divide in the garden — as in almost all other walks of life — remain huge."

"One of the things that has always moved me, and this has often been said by people who are grieving, is that the rhythm of the seasons is a huge comforter. In the bleakest , you trust that spring will come, that the blossom will appear."

"... Two years ago, I was filming in Madrid for my BBC series on Spanish gardens and was struck by the dogs garden] at , designed by Álvaro Sampedro. Dogs had been very much a part of that design. I thought it was fun and nicely done and, when I got home to Longmeadow, my garden in , it made me think about the ways my dogs use the garden and how they react to it."