Gardeners' World presenter Monty Don has been a fixture on the BBC show for decades, but his path to fame began with a photoshoot. The 70-year-old gardening expert recently opened up about his early career, revealing that his first taste of the spotlight came from an unexpected source.
From Topless Photo to Gardening Icon
Monty Don, who has graced Gardeners' World for several decades, recalled that when he first gained widespread recognition, a man in his twenties with a passion for gardening was regarded as a rather peculiar pursuit. Yet it wasn't his horticultural talents that first brought him to public attention, but rather the home he shared with his wife Sarah, to whom he has been happily married for over 40 years.
Speaking on the 'Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?' podcast, he said: "A magazine called Elle, which was really big in the eighties, a sort of lifestyle/fashion thing, came and did an article about our home. Sarah and Monty Don's lovely home, you know, that type of thing."
"They looked out the window and said, 'Wow! Look at your garden, who did you get to do that?'. I thought, that's fighting talk. I said, 'we did it, it's our garden, planted every single thing, of course we did'."
Upon spotting the garden, the Elle team asked Monty whether they could photograph him amongst the greenery, to which he duly agreed — though what followed was, by his own admission, a little unexpected. He added: "So they said, 'Well, can we photograph it?', which they did. And I'm ashamed to say, in it, I'm topless. I genuinely can't imagine why."
"It's out there folks, you can find it. And then a newspaper picked it up and thing was, in the 80s, if you were a gardener in your twenties, it was like being in the British ice hockey team or you found out that a premier league footballer was mad about crocheting. Something like that, it was really very unusual, and they wrote about the garden."
From Magazine Feature to Columnist
Following that Elle magazine feature, other more mainstream outlets, including several newspapers, took notice of Monty and his gardening prowess, ultimately leading to one publication inviting him to write about the subject. Monty continued: "Then the Mail On Sunday asked if I would like to write about gardens for them and I did and then they gave me a column and then one thing led to another and I got a book off the back of that column."
Life Beyond Gardening
In recent times, speculation has grown about what the future might hold for Monty should he choose to hang up his trowel, yet he remains as active as ever. Speaking to Saga magazine last year, he remarked: "I genuinely don't know what retirement would look like. I don't play golf or tennis, and I can't see myself doing the crossword all day. Whenever I say to Sarah, 'Well, thank God, I have no addictions,' she rolls her eyes and says, 'You are completely addicted to work!' But there comes a point in life when saying no is the least interesting option. And in reality, I like work."
