Top monty Quotes Collection

Discover a curated collection of monty quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.

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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.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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I love high summer as well, but nothing beats a perfect May morning.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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When you're 15 whatever your parents tell you you should do, you're not going to do it.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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I do wear gloves for things that sting a lot or prick a lot. But I just like to feel with my hands. I find gloves cumbersome and uncomfortable and I've got tough old hands so the old cut doesn't matter.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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A column is a curiously intimate affair. For a start, you know by default that you will have regular readers, so it gives the writer the privilege of continuing a running conversation with them.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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You would be surprised at how many letters I get criticising me for straying outside the strict limitations of horticulture or even for expressing what is clearly an opinion.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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A weekly column is not always a treat. It can be a tyranny. There are times when I have very little to say. There are times, every year, when I am weighed down with depression. At these times it takes days of slog to force the words on to the page.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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I myself did not officially become organic until 1997, although I was always hopeless at using chemicals.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Trees are complicated, fascinating things, usually older and more beautiful than any of us.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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The more people share woodland, absorb it and regard it as part of their personal heritage and culture, the richer our society will be. The more people can work in woods and use them practically rather than go through the motions as a kind of ersatz exercise, the more they will care for the places themselves rather than the political idea of them.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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I have been growing vegetables since I was a boy. When I was about 17 I was the only one of five children living at home. My parents were ill and I took over the vegetable garden and I have had one ever since.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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We undervalue food in this country, yet Britain has beautiful food and beautiful growing conditions. It is astonishing the range we can grow.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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The horticultural industry is unimaginative and dominated by vast, supermarket-like outlets. But the small nurseries and growers remain - praise them with your wallets, not your memories.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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I have learnt that gardens are like happiness: you cannot pursue them as an absolute thing or moment.
- Monty Don
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Ground elder, introduced by the Romans as a vegetable, is difficult to get rid of because it regrows from the smallest trace of root.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Bamboos can go from shining health to shabbiness in weeks. The problem is too much wind, too little water and tired compost.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Pulmonarias need splitting every two or three years, as they rapidly develop into a doughnut with an empty centre that quickly gets filled with weeds.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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A plant I have grown for years without really taking much notice of is epimedium. You know how it is: someone gives you a plant, you stick it in the ground and somehow it never presses the trigger. There is no intimacy.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Any British household with a scrap of land has always grown herbs for the kitchen. From the superb monastic herb gardens down to the humblest cottage, a supply of fresh herbs would have been considered essential.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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The divide between a 'wild' plant and what is suitable for the garden is unnatural and meaningless. Gardens begin and end in the mind, and the Western way of thinking is not good at accommodating that.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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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.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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For every gardener there is a minimum level of engagement that is needed to sustain and develop the relationship. There is no magic figure to this and it will vary from person to person and season to season, but it is there.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Many gardens are hijacked by their plants and end up looking like a room overstuffed with furniture.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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A healthy plant is one that adapts best to the situation in which it finds itself. There is no objective measure of this.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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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.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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I have always felt that the best gardens aspired to coppice and that the best woods have all the elements of the very best gardens.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Coppice management depends upon the chosen tree being cut when the shoots are straight, vigorous and, critically, not shading out new growth.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark's fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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I think that the essence of a Christmas wreath - of all Christmas vegetative decoration - has to be green and, if possible, living. So the basis of a wreath is ideally holly, laurel, ivy, rosemary, larch, fir or whatever is to hand.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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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.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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You get older, you slow down. Failure feels like less of a humiliation and more of a balanced return.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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As September rolls into October, I become obsessed with apples. Now obviously this is provoked by the ripening fruit clustering on the trees in our orchard, but it is as though all things pomological ripen in me, too.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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No apple is reliably self-fertile, so each tree needs a pollinator. A neighbour may well have an apple that will do that for you, but it is better to always plant at least two trees to be certain of pollination.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty
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Apples hate strong wind and damp, cold soil so try and place them on well-drained, rich soil in a sheltered position.
- Monty Don
Collection: Monty