hen he’s not busy with that project, he will be changing the way he cultivates the garden at Ivington in Herefordshire. He was greatly inspired by the garden at Brenthurst, Johannesburg, in South Africa, which was created by the Oppenheimer family in the 1920s.
Its 45-acres feature fabulously smooth lawns and crisp hedges tended by an army of 45 gardeners, who share a tai chi session every morning. But what impressed him most was the way in which Strilli, the member of the family currently overseeing operations, has let the borders run semi-wild.
“I like her idea of doing as little as you can to maintain your garden. It’s not that you aren’t manipulating nature - the hedges are clipped, the lawns are mowed - but the borders aren’t mulched and staked or weeded out, so they are constantly changing and self-selecting, and they don’t prune dead branches. It’s the antithesis of the formulaic way in which the British are taught to garden; I find it incredibly interesting and very beautiful.”
Following her example, at home this year he will break from the routine that he has established in order to get the best out of the two-acres that he and his wife, Sarah, have ambitiously divided into 15 or 16 different areas.
“We have a system of doing certain things at certain points through the year; I’m starting to challenge that. What if I don’t mulch? What if I let more seedlings grow? You have to let go enough to see what happens.”
But letting go does not come naturally to 52-year-old Don, for whom gardening has been the antidote to depression. Getting out there and making things look as wonderful as possible - and in the process earning a good living as a broadcaster after his jewellery business went under - has helped his struggle against black moods.
It also goes against his intensely held views on gardening: “It’s about controlling nature - by man, for man,” he says.
His travels, though, have given him new ideas on how this can be done. The plan was never to go on a horticultural “greatest hits” tour of the world.
“Our brief was to get under the skin of cultures through their gardens,” he says.
Some he had always wanted to see - such as the great Zen gardens of Japan and the Renaissance masterpieces of the Villa D’Este and Villa Lante in Italy. But others - such as the market gardens crouching under the tower blocks of Havana, Cuba, or the verandas that fringe the Klongs (canals) of Thailand’s capital city Bangkok, were chosen because they belong to a particular time and place.
Although he saw most of them at their worst - if he wasn’t contending with bitter cold and “zillions” of tourists in China, he was battling through downpours in South Africa, or sweating his way around drought-stricken Australia and California - he found something to admire in all of them, even Giverny, which he found has become a “Monet theme park” - lacking the obsessive attention to colour and light that had so inspired its creator.
In the Far East it was the spirituality of gardening that struck him, the way everything, whether the viewer’s position or the angle of a bough, was carefully stage-managed to evoke the desired response. In Latin America it was the vitality and imagination that made the biggest impression.
The Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India and the Casa Barragan in Mexico City made him question whether gardens even needed plants at all. “In Chandigarh it’s about making things from debris; in Casa Barragan it’s about the fall of light,” he says.
But the gardens he responded to most strongly were those created by great garden designers for themselves. He was delighted to find that Juan Grimm’s seaside house in Chile had been painted to match the lichen on the rocks and that all the steps were hidden to help it blend into the landscape.
The “billowingly beautiful” cloud-clipped box hedges and straight lines of flowers in Jacques Wirtz’s garden in Antwerp made him revise his views on borders. He revelled in Fernando Caruncho’s Madrid garden designed, following his study of the Greeks, to be a magical place where the gods might be present.
“Most of my favourites are modern, break the mould and are strongly architectural. I found myself, not bored, but less inspired by plantsmen’s gardens,” says Don.
With that in mind he can now set to work on his own. After almost two years break, he can’t wait.
Around the World in 80 Gardens by Monty Don (Weidenfeld%26amp;Nicolson) is available for %26pound;18, plus %26pound;1.25 p%26amp;p, from Telegraph Books (0870 428 4112; books.telegraph.co.uk).The television series of the same name is on Sundays at 9pm on BBC2.
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