Family background

Both his paternal grandmother and grandfather were Scottish and he is descended from the Keiller family of Dundee who were the inventors of chip marmalade in 1797. Keiller’s became the biggest confectioners in Britain, overtaking other family-run giants like Cadbury and Rowntree and by 1877 were worth £203,000 the equivalent of £13 million.

Monty Don was born in Berlin, son to a career soldier posted in Germany. Don has a twin sister and three other siblings. His twin later suffered a broken neck and blindness in a car crash when she was 19.

Education

Don was educated at three independent schools: at Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, Hampshire, Bigshotte School in Wokingham, Berkshire, and at Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, a college he hated. He then attended a state comprehensive school, The Vyne School, in Hampshire. He failed his A levels and while studying for re-takes at night school, worked on a building site and a pig farm by day. During his childhood he had become an avid gardener and farmer. He determined to go to Cambridge out of “sheer bloody-mindedness”, attending Magdalene College, where he read English and met his wife Sarah. They married in 1983, and have three children, Adam, Freya and Tom. The couple lived in Islington, north London while Don pursued postgraduate study at the London School of Economics, worked as waiter at Joe Allen restaurant in Covent Garden and later as a dustman, completing two unpublished novels. Sarah trained as a jeweller.

Career

In the 1980s, Don and his wife formed a successful company that made and sold costume jewellery under the name Monty Don Jewellery. The collapse of the company in the early 1990s, prompted him to embark on a career in writing and broadcasting. He has written about the rise and collapse of their business in The Jewel Garden, an autobiographical book written with his wife. “We were lambs to the slaughter and we lost everything, [...] we lost our house, our business. We sold every stick of furniture we had at Leominster market,” he wrote. He was unemployed from 1991 to 1993.

Don's first TV work came as the presenter of a gardening segment on breakfast show This Morning. He featured as a guest presenter for the BBC's Holiday programme. He went on to present several Channel 4 land and gardening series: Don Roaming, Fork to Fork, Real Gardens and Lost Gardens, and wrote a regular weekly gardening column for The Observer between February 1994 and May 2006. Don had never received formal training as a gardener. He commented, "I was — am — an amateur gardener and a professional writer. My only authority came from a lifetime of gardening and a passion amounting to an obsession for my own garden."He is a keen proponent of organic gardening and the practice of organic techniques, to some extent, features in all of his published work. The organic approach is most prominent in his 2003 book The Complete Gardener. Don was the main presenter on BBC Two's Gardeners' World from 2003, succeeding Alan Titchmarsh. He was the first self-taught horticulturist presenter in the show's 36-year history, stepping down only after suffering a minor stroke in 2008. He featured in the BBC programme and book, Growing out of Trouble, in which several heroin addicts manage a Herefordshire smallholding in an attempt at rehabilitation. He also presented Around the World in 80 Gardens (BBC Two 27 January - 30 March 2008) and in December 2008, narrated a programme about the cork oak forests of Portugal, for the BBC's natural history series Natural World. He presented My Dream Farm, a series which helped people learn to become successful smallholders (Channel 4, January 2010)and Mastercrafts, a six-part series for BBC Two, which celebrated six traditional British crafts. He has twice been a panelist on the BBC's Question Time (February 2009 and March 2010) and his family history was the subject of the fourth programme in the seventh series of the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? (August 2010).

In late 2008 Monty became President of the Soil Association.

Personal life

Don has written of his struggle with depression since the age of 25and Seasonal Affective Disorder. He describes in his memoir, "great spans of muddy time" in which there is nothing but depression. He noted "'Earth heals me better than any medicine". He has had Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and formerly took Prozac before favouring a lightbox, now a recognised aid for SAD sufferers. He suffered from peritonitis in 2007 and a minor stroke in 2008, following which he announced his retirement from BBC's Gardener's World, his rôle being taken over by Toby Buckland.

He currently lives in Ivington, Herefordshire, England, and has lived in Herefordshire for the past twenty years.