Quotes from Monty Don

I always see gardening as escape, as peace really. If you are angry or troubled, nothing provides the same solace as nurturing the soil.

I often eat cakes while my fingers are caked in soil.

The British have such an odd relationship with food - and the land. I want the public and the Soil Association to see that growing things in a garden is no different to growing things in a field.

A garden is not a place. It's a journey.

You need to see bare branches to know the full astonishing shock of the new leaves come next April. You need the flat, brown emptiness of the mixed borders to measure their summer fullness.

Inevitably the real garden with a growing family of children will be untidy, messy even, noisy and often destructive. It drives arch control freaks like myself mad. But I hate it when they are not there.2

it goes back to the garden telling a story. You make up bits and play with them to see if they ring true. Sometimes this works out first time and all is well and good, but as often as not you have to fiddle and reshape until it is right.

However naturalistic and 'wild' it appears, a garden is always an artificial environment made by people for people, so it makes sense to put the considerations of people – rather than plants – first.

So how would I do it again if I were to cater for the children in the garden rather than merely tolerate them? I would make places.

My list] of unwritten books grows longer every year--which may be a blessed relief to the book-buying public but is a source of real dissatisfaction to me.

An immaculate garden is a hostile place to most wildlife. Beautifully weeded borders, with every fallen leaf and twig gathered and disposed of, hedges kept constantly crisp and grass mown to within a fraction of its life may make a certain sort of gardener glow with pride but will provide little comfort for most of our birds, mammals and insects.

magpies, jays, sparrowhawks, kestrels, all

a little, would have existed to keep animals

We all have an idealised picture of the garden that we have carried around in our heads from the moment it became ours and which, I guess, is never the same as the growing reality. Over the years that the garden is coming into being that image carries you forward and inspires you, but when things reach maturity, the cold light of reality can be harsh.

Daffodils, blossom and tulips jostle to the front of the stage in April. I love these early perennials: they may be more modest but they nearly all have that one special quality that a plant needs to transform your affections from admiration to affection - charm.

The Romans brought with them spices such as ginger, pepper and cinnamon, and herbs including borage, chervil, dill, fennel, lovage, sage and thyme, all of which have remained staples of the British kitchen.

I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.

We are extremely uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of gardening, and yet most people feel it in some form or other, even if it's a sense of connection to the greater world on a beautiful day.

I do wear gloves for things that sting a lot or prick a lot. But I just like to feel with my hands. I find gloves cumbersome and uncomfortable and I've got tough old hands so the old cut doesn't matter.

We undervalue food in this country, yet Britain has beautiful food and beautiful growing conditions. It is astonishing the range we can grow.

The divide between a 'wild' plant and what is suitable for the garden is unnatural and meaningless. Gardens begin and end in the mind, and the Western way of thinking is not good at accommodating that.

I loathe nowheres - airports and bland hotels. I would rather be in an unpleasant, uncomfortable place rather than one just adrift, floating around.

I feel ashamed if my hands are too clean and untouched. It's a measure of how much time I've spent travelling and poncing around.

Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.