How to Cultivate an Obsession

Reviewing Montague Don’s THE PRICKOTTY BUSH

In my daydreams, I’m living on a large plot of land, ten acres at least. I devote about one or two hours a day to writing, while the rest goes to walking the land, my dogs unleashed beside me as I care for the plants. I cultivate an enormous kitchen garden and an equally large cut flower farm. There’s an orchard, with rare fruit varieties and native food trees. I maintain a coppice forest and a native fir wood. Carefully-shaped topiary art sits next to wild meadow. The garden is equal parts practical functionality and extravagant indulgence.

My dream has a guide, a patron saint: a seventy-year-old British man named Monty Don. As the host of Gardener’s World, a long-running BBC program, Monty regularly beams into my television and guides me through the daily rhythms of large-scale gardening. The show is not highly produced. Most of its runtime consists of a camera pointed at Monty as he walks around his garden at Longmeadow, followed by one or more dogs, talking through what he is doing that day and why and giving you, the viewer, jobs for the weekend. He demonstrates the proper way to prune or propagate different plants and when to sow various seeds, but there’s rarely a timelapse or any other stylized editing; it’s just Monty, talking about plants. He’s got a smile on his face, and he looks sharp in his rugged blue work jacket.

Monty speaks about the garden with a natural and easy poetry. He talks about the lightness of the flower petals and the softness of the light peeking through the trees. He talks of periods of depression, from which he was pulled out by the plants themselves, but he never lingers or goes into great detail. This simplicity is the charm, the delight, of Gardener’s World. It feels like you’re hanging out with a master gardener as he shares his wisdom. Monty makes gardening look like the best way you could possibly spend your time, which of course, it is.¹

Like myself, Monty harbors a deep love for the garden. He is also, it turns out, an incredibly talented writer.

There’s no guarantee this charm, this easy mixture of wisdom and practicality and simplicity, would transfer from screen to page. Plenty of people have charisma on camera, or the ability to speak extemporaneously, without any real knack for the written word, and most of the books published under Monty’s name lean only into the practicality. They’re gardening how-tos and coffee table books on Japanese Gardens and Paradise Gardens and more. All great products, but not literature.

I was recently excited to discover The Prickotty Bush (1990), Monty’s mostly-forgotten first book. It’s a memoir, written more than a decade before he became the host of Gardener’s World, and published under the name “Montague Don.” It details a darker time in his life, when gardening was less a salve and more an obsession – and one which threatened to derail his life. It is also a great work of literature and demonstrates the literary talent of Monty – excuse me, Montague – Don.

It’s 1988. Monty and his wife Sarah live in London and operate a moderately-successful jewelry company. They have two young children, and everything is mostly going fine. Monty has even built a small, but nice, garden at their London townhouse. They could remain in this place indefinitely and build a very nice, very successful, life.

Yet, Monty has other ideas. He doesn’t want to settle for “nice,” he wants extravagant. He can’t imagine a life constrained to offices and conference calls, he wants the open air and the flowers and the meadows. So, in his early thirties and with two very young children, Monty and Sarah purchase the Hanburies, an estate in the Herefordshire countryside. He has a dream, a vision, of restoring and rejuvenating a massive garden on the land, which once thrived but had been degraded, having been used for the previous fifteen years primarily as horse pasture. The new Hanburies garden would be elegant and provide food and flowers. It would be his lifetime achievement.

The Prickotty Bush tells the story of this failed project. As the narrative stretches on, it becomes clear that Monty is pursuing a course of madness. They do not have the money – either in savings or income – to support his vision. Their house in London sits on the market, the bridge loan they took out to purchase the Hanburies starts collecting interest, and their jewelry business (their one profitable venture) begins to struggle as Monty devotes more and more of his time to the land. What little money they do have is spent on the garden – purchasing mature trees and hedges, hiring contractors and renting heavy machinery to move the earth – and occasionally on necessary repairs to the house.

What’s more, it becomes clear that Monty understands this; he is never so deluded to think this will work out, but he is just deluded enough to let it consume his life anyways. Every time a friend comes to visit, he sticks a shovel in their hands. When he twists his ankle, he is upset that it is only a sprain, because a broken bone would give him a cast that he could walk and work on, while a sprain requires rest for two days. Sarah, who for so long had supported him, tells Monty that he is “an obsessive . . . simply using this garden as an outlet for another obsession and that she hated it with all her heart.” He ignores her, spending more and more time in the garden, until finally the bank comes collecting.

A sense of melancholy pervades the book. Monty’s story is a sad one, and it feels right at home in Herefordshire. In one early anecdote, a new neighbor drops in on his way to the pub. He is “jovial and nosey,” and he complains that he hurt his leg trying to help a man who died in a car crash going down a nearby hill. He tells Monty that the Hanburies used to be a “proper gentleman’s residence . . . there were walks and borders – all looked after.” The house, too, “had been a wonderful building, complete with all its Victorian interior and fittings.” Without proper maintenance, the garden and the house both fell into ruin.

Eventually, Monty meets Mr and Mrs Jones, the gardener and housekeeper who looked after the property during its proper gentleman days. They hadn’t been back in nearly fifteen years, but in their day it wasn’t just the garden that was alive; they had a good relationship with the owners, a brother and sister, and the iron furnace always gave a comfortable warmth. But their employers grew old, and the sister “began to behave erratically.” She was over one-hundred years old and, after trying to climb out the window, was admitted to the hospital. The Joneses never saw her again, and soon the sister’s niece terminated their employment.

Monty goes with the nosey neighbor to a nearby farm sale. The farmer had recently died (so many deaths in this rural community) and his son had no interest in carrying on the family business, so they had cattle to sell. One by one, the herd goes for bargain prices. The auctioneer starts with what he thinks the cattle is worth, then works his way down, settling on prices at around 60% of the starting ask. This herd, we learn, was meant for breeding. It was the Hereford cattle, a prized line, which was now being beat in the market by the Charolias, and Monty begins to feel he’s at a funeral. He writes:

To see this distillation of the Hereford breed going for a song here in the heart of Hereforedshire signalled the end of something. Of what? Dreams perhaps.

Beautiful things cannot sustain themselves. Without external inputs, inertia runs out and entropy takes over. This is especially true in the garden; the moment human efforts end, nature takes over. Weeds and invasives grow, shrubs become unruly, and in short time you have an overgrown forest. But the garden is just one example of the principle at stake everywhere. We sweep the floors of our houses to prevent pests that would chew through electric wires and place precious works of fine art behind glass and out of the direct sunlight that would dim their colors. We coddle beautiful things, because they cannot last on their own.

We often make the mistake of thinking literature is exempt from this truth, that “manuscripts don’t burn,” as Mikhail Bulgakov so memorably put it in The Master and Margarita. This is false; the library of Alexandria burned just fine. Novels, history, knowledge – all of these are lost all of the time. During the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, conquistadors burned full libraries. These were not hieroglyphs or proto-writings, but books, texts written on paper derived from plants and bound between leather pages, and they are all gone, forever. Today, paper degrades and falls to shreds, even when lined with microplastics. Digital file types become obsolete, and data centers fail without enormous energy to consume.

The Prickotty Bush, itself, is mostly lost. The book didn’t sell well, and two years after its release, the publisher pulped the remaining copies. It was never reprinted. There is no ebook, no audiobook, and (as far as I can tell) no clandestine PDF scan floating around the internet. Used copies run at least one hundred dollars online, sometimes more, a cost which I cannot justify on a single book. I borrowed a copy through my library’s interlibrary loan program. There were only twenty-one copies across all participating libraries, worldwide. I was sad to send it back.

It is an extraordinary book, a work of art. While Monty Don puts out expertly-produced coffee table books and gardening guides, Montague Don shows real literary talent. The Prickotty Bush takes place over the course of two years, with small chapters focused either on discrete events, garden tasks, and thematic ideas. About three-quarters of the way through the book, in a chapter titled “Death,” Monty writes about a day working on the garden, and seeing a sparrowhawk flying high above. He’s reminded of a friend he once knew named Marshall, who taught him the difference between a sparrowhawk and a kestrel. There’s a whole paragraph, long and detailed, focused entirely on Marshall’s advice and how it certainly must be a sparrowhawk above him, not a kestrel. This is what’s occupying Monty’s mind. Then, in one brief sentence, the paragraph takes a sharp turn and an abrupt ending: “Marshall was dead now, burnt to death in his drunken sleep by his pipe setting the bed-clothes ablaze.”

Death intrudes. It’s always there, especially in the garden with its ever-present cycles of seed to life to death. You don’t look at it head on, but it finds ways to take root and sprout up again, like a noxious weed. The book’s structure – about 70% gardening instruction with bits of observation coming in unexpectedly – effectively recreates Monty’s interior experience. He keeps working, focusing his attention on the plants, while the horrors of life keep worming their way to his mind. After observing the sparrowhawk, he works in the garden while listening to the radio. A hundred people died in a riot that broke out after a soccer game.

The chill of disaster swept across England, reaching my garden, swallowing up my garden. I went on feeding the plants carefully, scattering ground bones to satisfy the great hunger, paying great attention to the minute, counting the bodies, aware of the way that the afternoon had become radiant, aware of my children, of the rich green smell of new-mown grass in my clothes, of the hundred empty families, of madness and the importance the absolute need of firming the roots in properly.

The following Monday I was reading the paper, full of pictures of the dead dying and the accounts of their agonies when the telephone rang with a message to say that my mother had collapsed and died ten minutes earlier.

What can you do? Monty works, until his body is tired and he no longer finds joy in the garden. The chapter concludes:

My mother never visited the house, never saw the garden. She was to have come in May, when the weather was warmer. I don’t suppose it would have meant much. Even to death we burden our parents with our expectations and petty triumphs. What did it mean any more? For a while, for a surprisingly long while, very little indeed.

Any gardener is familiar with life and death. In the city, we become cut off from these natural cycles, but in the garden they cannot be ignored. This isn’t a novel idea, but it is a true one, and thoughtfully told by Monty. Importantly, it’s honest; a lot of bad nature writing is too precious, too romantic about the beauty of nature. The truth is that nature can be cruel. It gives life and it takes away. In this chapter – and so many more – Monty presents the fullness of what the garden means, and he tells it straight.

Eventually, the bank reclaims the Hanburies and sends a realtor out to assess its value. The man looks around the property, observing the dozens of half-finished garden projects: great holes in the earth, uprooted trees, piles of scraps. The vision, the future glory of the garden, exists only in Monty’s mind. The realtor informs him that, unfortunately, the Hanburies is now worth less than he paid for it. “Pity about the state of the garden,” the realtor says, in the book’s crushing final line.

There’s a strange clarity that comes from his writing in the near aftermath of these events. In the book’s conclusion, the Hanburies have not yet been sold. Monty and his family haven’t been kicked out, but they soon will. There’s no sense that this will all work out for the better, that Monty will have learned important lessons that improve his character or prepare him for his eventual role as host of Gardener’s World. Had the book been written later, it might have ended this way; time and age have a way of shaping our live events into unnaturally straight lines, like neat yew hedges. But The Prickotty Bush was written fresh, and there was no redemptive end to the story, and yet, to the last page, Monty never regrets his work.

Perhaps this is what obsession is: to work through failure without despair or regret. Monty had a vision of cultivating and sustaining something beautiful. He believed the work worthwhile, even if no one else did, even as it nearly ruined him. This is the meaning of the book’s title, drawn from an old English folk tune about a man who cannot claim a pot of gold because he’s stuck in a thorny bush – there may be such a great reward for Monty if he would just set himself free, but he never will. And why should he? The gardener is exactly where he wants to be.

What’s most shocking about this (other than how much I identify with it) is how similar this central character is to the jovial old man on my television. I’m not sure there’s any real difference between the Montague of The Prickotty Bush and the Monty of Gardener’s World. Did he learn anything from this disaster? One can hope that seventy-year-old Monty is wiser and better about not letting his obsessions take over his life, but I’m not so sure. I’ve never seen anyone smile so much as Monty, climbing into an apple tree with a pruning knife in hand, or wading into a pond, or crafting a topiary statue of his golden retriever, Nigel. “Mucking about,” he calls it.

The only real difference is that, today, the BBC funds Monty’s obsession, whereas thirty years ago he vainly tried to fund it himself, through a job he constantly neglected. Perhaps that’s what any obsessive really needs: a benefactor.

Monty is a talented writer, but of course I’m an easy audience – I share his obsessions. Though my own Hanburies (or Longmeadow) is many years away, and will perhaps never happen at all, I do what I can in the city. In my modest Portland garden, I spend whatever leisure time I have planting hedges and propagating roses and sowing tomatoes. I dig deep holes and move heavy shrubs. I do it gladly. It’s all a mess, a work in progress, but in my mind I can see the future, what it will look like when the trees are mature and the hedges tall and the pond has been dug and filled and the scrap piles disposed. This is what I work for.

If I ever strike it rich, through whatever luck or fortune, you’ll know where to find me: somewhere out in the rural Pacific Northwest, managing ten or more acres of woods and garden, with a large farmhouse and a dog at my side, and a copy of The Prickotty Bush in my study.

1. The best way to watch Gardener’s World is through Tubi, which has a channel called “Gardening with Monty Don.” It’s just a 24/7 stream of Monty’s gardening programs, probably about 80% of which is Gardener’s World. No need to fuss about which season or episode you’re watching, it’s all equally good. Turn on the channel and watch whatever Monty has for you.