Quotes from Monty Don

I love filming. I love the teamwork. It's a tight-knit group spending months on the road together. All the experience is shared.

In my teens I wanted to be a rock star, I really did. At that time there was nothing I wanted more.

It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.

Blackthorn has wicked spikes that are highly brittle and tend to snap off under the skin and then fester horribly. This means that they can only really be part of a hedge that you do not want to get too close to.

If I'm honest, the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.

By having a direct stake and involvement with the process of plants growing, of having your hands in the soil and tending it carefully and with love, your world and everyone's else's world too, becomes a better place.

I have learnt that gardens are like happiness: you cannot pursue them as an absolute thing or moment.

Bamboos can go from shining health to shabbiness in weeks. The problem is too much wind, too little water and tired compost.

Apples hate strong wind and damp, cold soil so try and place them on well-drained, rich soil in a sheltered position.

What I love about French gardens is the combination of formal elegance and intellectual questioning.

The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.

I see myself as a writer who happens to garden.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise.

I think we put far too much interest in trying to get ten to 20 year olds interested in gardening. I think you should do everything you can to try and get them interested up to the age of 10.

Happiness is a by-product rather than an end in itself. It pops into your life unbidden, and then tends to pop out again. I'm on record as being depressive. It is related to winter.

My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark's fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.

Intellectually the French are wonderfully open, in a way the British just don't begin to be. You can question ideas in France, endlessly. In Britain, two things happen when you do that. Either you're branded an intellectual, which is fundamentally mistrusted, or you're branded a phony and pretentious, which people despise.

Modern man has a very abstract idea of what a wood is. I guess that if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what a wood actually was, they would see it as a place where big trees grow.

The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man.

The more people share woodland, absorb it and regard it as part of their personal heritage and culture, the richer our society will be. The more people can work in woods and use them practically rather than go through the motions as a kind of ersatz exercise, the more they will care for the places themselves rather than the political idea of them.

Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves.

I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.

Earth heals me better than any medicine.

When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.