Inside Monty Don’s Herefordshire garden

Monty Don’s Herefordshire garden, Longmeadow, is well known to garden enthusiasts around the UK as the setting of BBC’s Gardener’s World, and its yearly cycles are well documented on the broadcaster’s social media feeds. He and his wife, Sarah, have been working on the garden for more than thirty years, having bought the house in 1991 when there was little in the garden but rubble. It has been home to the couple, their three children, and their dogs (including the much-beloved and now deceased Nigel), ever since. The two-acre space is divided into several different areas, including the Cottage Garden, the riot of colour that is the Jewel Garden, the Islamic-inspired Paradise Garden, and the Vegetable Garden.

The author and presenter also has a writing hut at Longmeadow, a pond, greenhouses, an orchard and a space called The Mound, once a “glorified rubbish dump” for the garden but now home to a paved seating area surrounded by flowers. Take a look at some of Monty Don’s best pictures and videos of his garden below.

The Long Walk (below) is lined with box cones and usually provides a great morning view from the window of the house.

The Jewel Garden, which is full of tulips in the spring, and later in the summer is home to other colourful, intense flowers – dahlias, zinnias and sunflowers, among others – was planted to commemorate the couple’s jewellery business, which folded at the end of the 1980s after several years of success with customers including Diana, Princess of Wales, Boy George and Michael Jackson.

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It’s a very peaceful and wild garden, which is what attracts so much local wildlife.

The Mound has become a peaceful place to sit, which Monty has planted with a calming lemon and cornflower blue colour scheme.

At one end of the garden, a path curves round to the writing hut where the author can work on his books. He has written a number of books about his gardens and gardens around the world, and also one about his Golden Retriever Nigel, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 11.

Part of Monty Don’s garden is dedicated to wildlife, and this pond is intended as a habitat for insects, frogs and birds. A pond with plenty of plants around it helps to encourage a thriving ecosystem in the garden.

The gentle planting in the cottage garden, which contains flowers, fruit trees, herbs and shrubs, and will soon be blooming with summer roses.

The Vegetable Garden, below, features neat raised beds, espaliered fruit trees, and a pleasingly ramshackle shed with corrugated metal walls.

Don grows a variety of vegetables in his Vegetable Garden, including chard. His Yorkshire terrier, Patti, sometimes gives him a hand.

The wooden greenhouse is the perfect place to store less hardy plants over winter.

The Paradise Garden is based on ideas of Islamic gardens, and came about after Don made a TV series and a book about the gardens of the Islamic world in 2017. Arranged in a square pattern with a fountain in the middle, the garden features a shady pavilion, lemon and orange trees and fragrant roses and lilies.

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