Quotes from Monty Don

Visiting gardens is bad for you. Not only does it encourage too much eating of cake but sets up all kinds of false notions that are ruinous to your garden back home.

I love high summer as well, but nothing beats a perfect May morning.

The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.

There is a British assumption that you mustn't speak evil of anyone's garden because it is rude - it is like criticising their home, their children or their pets.

Any British household with a scrap of land has always grown herbs for the kitchen. From the superb monastic herb gardens down to the humblest cottage, a supply of fresh herbs would have been considered essential.

I think that most people are aware that it takes so much oil and water to produce what they're eating. But the problem is inherent within the solution, in so much as you don't want to tell people what to do.

Plant breeding has been going on for millennia and it's a gradual process.

Many gardens are hijacked by their plants and end up looking like a room overstuffed with furniture.

I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn't make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.

Organic is loaded with a sense of rightness, with a set of rules. I would much rather someone bought food that was local and sustainable but not organic than bought organic food that had to be shipped across the world.

My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable - it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.

Once you engage with the simple enough business of feeding yourself, of soil and water, weather, season and harvest, it becomes personal. It is about you, your family and friends. Food becomes an aspect of those relationships as well as your intimacy with your plot.

Chickweed is regarded by most gardeners as just that - a weed - but is excellent in sandwiches or salads.

Pulmonarias need splitting every two or three years, as they rapidly develop into a doughnut with an empty centre that quickly gets filled with weeds.

Some plants become weeds simply by virtue of their success rather than any other factor. You merely want less of them.

My basic philosophy is never do anything with the word 'celebrity' attached to it. Without being overly pompous, if you have worked hard to have an audience trust you a bit, why blow it? That is my currency.

When our jewellery business went into receivership we avoided bankruptcy by selling our houses and possessions.

I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man's-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.

The truth is that wreaths have never really been part of my creative life. I like them and want them and know how to do them.

A weekly column is not always a treat. It can be a tyranny. There are times when I have very little to say. There are times, every year, when I am weighed down with depression. At these times it takes days of slog to force the words on to the page.

From the ages of 18 to 50 I ran, rowed and lifted weights at my home gym.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise. That is easy to see and evaluate. It inculcates high levels of well-being. That is undeniable and needs little measurement.

A column is a curiously intimate affair. For a start, you know by default that you will have regular readers, so it gives the writer the privilege of continuing a running conversation with them.

Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.