While my midlife friends have started habits from meditation to magnesium dosing to help them find sleep in their perimenopausal years, I have opted for a slightly different solution. For years now, I've set up an iPad (with an anti-blue light setting, of course) and dozed off to an episode of Gardeners’ World, accompanied by the soft, reassuringly steady voice of Monty Don. An episode can last me most of the week, so quickly do I usually drop off. I simply pick up where I can last remember watching the next evening. I highly recommend it.
For many midlife women Monty’s Gardeners’ World has become a gateway drug into a calming and restorative new hobby that (studies say) could also help us live longer, more agile lives. You’ll regularly see those memes that state “You’re in your 40s, choose your obsession”. And for those of us who’ve found gardening to enter our lives like a post-40s rite of passage, the Don of the good life has helped ease us into growing our passion and our gardens, becoming a mainstay of our weekends.
I’m not alone then, in being strangely and parasocially devastated at the news that Monty is stepping down from presenting Gardeners' World at the end of this series after hosting for more than 20 years. And I know that it’s news that is particularly hitting women of my age, because I saw them all commenting and expressing their woe on Don’s Instagram post yesterday in which he made the announcement alongside his dog, Ned.
It’ll be no surprise that the nation (and particularly women “of a certain age”) were so upset, if you’ve ever seen Monty try to walk around Chelsea Flower Show. Even after I’d spent decades interviewing A list celebrities and attending awards ceremonies, it was sight to behold, watching him try to move just metres and becoming mobbed by fans looking for selfies.
“I have had the privilege of sharing my own abiding passion for gardens and gardening with an equally passionate, and often equally knowledgeable, audience,” he said in a statement. And he did manage to engender a feeling in new midlife gardeners like us that with patience and practice you too could prosper in the garden. Perhaps that’s because he was the first Gardeners’ World host to be self-taught. Something that makes gardening so appealing later in life is that you really can learn new things daily and the enthusiasm with which he clearly still let Longmeadow teach him new tricks, experimented with different growing methods and adapted to the challenges of our changing climate was catching.
That’s not to say, of course, that you didn’t recognise that he is incredibly experienced or that you could never in any way really emulate his work. But I felt like I always appreciated the patience with which he - year after year - still calmly talked you through planting spring bulbs, or sewing seeds or creating a sweet pea structure. As we're increasingly left to AI overviews and social media to give us guidance, it was incredibly reassuring to learn from someone who said, “I’ve done this many times before, here’s what I’ve learnt, and here’s what you should do too.” And didn’t mind telling you it all again next year.
A moment of calm
At a time in life that’s incredibly squeezed from all sides, I find gardening to be a moment’s pause and respite. And Don’s presenting style from his home seemed to be the personification of that calm. The show often opened just to the sounds of the garden before his polite and softly spoken “Hello”. His scripts were punctuated by silence and there was no rush to get to the end of a sentence. His shows exuded the patience that your garden also forces you to learn.
Perhaps that’s because Don himself has spoken repeatedly about how gardening was a saviour for him. He’s been open about how he struggles with depression and particularly the role gardening had in rebuilding his life after the family’s jewellery company went bankrupt in 1987. Speaking about the years after that time, he’s said of moving to their Herefordshire home: “While the year-long repairwork to the house went on, I cleared it, wove a fence round the outside, designed the layout and started digging. Earth mended the hurt.”
Midlife comes with more stresses and wounds that need healing than most of us have experienced previously - and for some of us, like him, earth helps mend those hurts. And it’s always helpful if you can see people have trodden that same path. As Kate Phillips, the BBC’s chief content officer said yesterday: “I would like to thank Monty personally for his honesty and kindness, which has seen him open up about his own personal struggles and the power of the natural world to improve mental health.” I’m sure many of us would too. In fact, many did so yesterday directly on his Instagram video.
© Dave Benett/Getty Images for BooEven before the avalanche of thank yous he received, Monty was aware that his message of gardening as holistic life improvement is part of his legacy. He said of his departure: “That connection with millions, not just in Britain but across the world, who share a love of gardens, plants and the natural world is something I have always treasured and which I increasingly believe to be at the heart of a life well lived.”
As well as teaching patience in a world designed to destroy it, there are so many things about a garden in midlife that are reassuring - the plants that return time and again, the beauty that comes just from dirt, the way effort is rewarded, and sometimes, for no reason, isn’t. It’s a salve to so much you now have to face and a lesson that in younger life you might not have been willing to heed. Monty’s Gardeners’ World was filled with tidbits about how his garden enriched his life that always made you think about your own.
Colour and life
In recent years, as friends have suffered bereavements and hard times, I’ve found myself buying them bulbs as a gift - they’re the ultimate signifier that colour and life can come again after the bleakest times. Don himself touched on this in a Radio 4 interview when he said: “One of the things that has always moved me, and this has often been said by people who are grieving, is that the rhythm of the seasons is a huge comforter. In the bleakest midwinter, you trust that spring will come, that the blossoms will appear. You sow a seed and you trust that it will flower. Now, sometimes it doesn’t. I mean everything is complicated and nothing is linear like that. But underneath it all, there is that rhythm of nature.”
For more than 20 years, many of us will have found ourselves reassured by the rhythm of Gardeners’ World returning after winter, Monty appearing on our screens again as the tulips push the earth and dark days away. Next spring will feel unsettlingly different.
