Monty Don

“I don't think about being the Colin Firth of the gardening world. I live a very insular world based around my family and my home, and to them I'm not the Colin Firth of anything.”

“The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.”

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

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

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

“The truth is that wreaths have never really been part of my creative life. I like them and want them and know how to do them.”

“The thing I like to stress about TV is that it's a team exercise. You really can't have too much of an ego.”

“The farm uses up a lot of my creative urges. It's a sort of rough and ready space, I don't film there.”

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

“Coppice management depends upon the chosen tree being cut when the shoots are straight, vigorous and, critically, not shading out new growth.”

“My father was an army officer who left the forces when I was six and never really fitted back into civilian life. My mother had five children and a mother with Alzheimer's, who lived with us, so I imagined that she had a lot to do.”

“A healthy plant is one that adapts best to the situation in which it finds itself. There is no objective measure of this.”

“Visiting gardens is bad for you. Not only does it encourage too much eating of cake but sets up all kinds of false notions that are ruinous to your garden back home.”

“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.”

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

“I think that's my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I've read about it, I've written about it, I've done it all my life but at heart, I'm just a passionate amateur gardener.”

“I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man's-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.”

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

“Many gardens are hijacked by their plants and end up looking like a room overstuffed with furniture.”

“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.”