Gardeners' World presenter Monty Don has opened up about the beginning of his career, revealing how a visit from a magazine to his home with wife Sarah changed everything. The 70-year-old BBC legend said his rise to fame began after appearing in Elle Magazine in the 1980s.
An Unlikely Start
Monty explained that when he first became widely known, a man in his twenties being a gardener was considered very odd. However, it wasn't gardening that first got him noticed, but rather the home he shared with Sarah, his wife of 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."
He continued: "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'."
The Topless Photo
In response to seeing the garden, the Elle staff asked Monty if they could photograph him in the garden. He agreed, but ended up doing something slightly strange. 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."
He noted: "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 to Mainstream
From that Elle article, other mainstream publications, including newspapers, picked up on Monty and his gardening magic. This eventually led to one paper asking him to write about gardening. Monty added: "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."
Thoughts on Retirement
In recent years, conversations have started about what life could look like for Monty if he were to retire, but he remains as busy as ever. Commenting to Saga last year, he said: "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."
