Monty Don

Montagu Denis Wyatt Don (born George Montagu Don; 8 July 1955) is a British horticulturist, broadcaster, and writer who is best known as the lead presenter of the BBC gardening television series Gardeners' World.

Born in Germany and raised in England, Don studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he met his future wife.

George Montagu Don Was born on 8 July 1955 in Iserlohn, West Germany.

He is the youngest of five children to British parents Denis Thomas Keiller Don, a career soldier stationed in Germany at the time of his birth, and Janet Montagu (née Wyatt).

Soon after Don's birth, his parents changed the name on his birth certificate to Montagu Denis Don because of a family spat over the name.

When Don Was 10, he added his mother's maiden name, becoming Montagu Denis Wyatt Don.

Don is a descendant of botanist George Don and the Keiller family, best known as the inventors of Keiller's marmalade.

On his maternal side, he is descended from the Wyatt family of architects.

Don has a twin sister, Alison, who at the age of 19 was nearly killed in a car accident, suffering a broken neck and blindness.

When Don Was one, the family moved to Hampshire, England.

He described his parents as "very strict".

He attended three independent schools: Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, followed by Bigshotte School in Wokingham, where at seven, he was asked to leave school for being too boisterous.

He then attended Malvern College in Malvern, which he hated, followed by a state comprehensive school, the Vyne School, and a state sixth form college, Queen Mary's College, Basingstoke.

He failed his A-levels and while studying for retakes 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.

In his late teens, Don spent several months in Aix-en-Provence, France where he worked as a gardener and played rugby in local teams.

He returned to England, determined to attend Cambridge University out of "sheer bloody-mindedness", and passed the entrance exams.

He studied English at Magdalene College, during which time he met his future wife Sarah Erskine, a trained jeweller and architect.

Don took up boxing to impress his father, a former heavyweight boxing champion in the army, becoming a Cambridge Half Blue for boxing.

He gave up after getting knocked out and suffering concussion.

They ran a successful costume jewellery business through the 1980s until the stock market crash of 1987 resulted in almost complete bankruptcy.

In 1981, Don and Erskine started Monty Don Jewellery, a London-based business that designed, made, and sold costume jewellery.

The company became a success and in five years, operated from a shop on Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge with hundreds of outworkers and had secured as many as 60 outlets across the UK, including Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Liberty.

Among their customers were Boy George, Michael Jackson, and Princess Diana.

However, the 1987 stock market crash caused an almost complete bankruptcy as it cut off American sales, their biggest market.

The situation prompted Don to embark on a career in writing and broadcasting.

Reflecting on the experience, he wrote: "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".

In 1989, Don made his television debut as a regular on This Morning with a gardening segment, which led to further television work across the decade including his own shows for BBC Television and Channel 4.

By mid-1989, Don had written several gardening articles and his home garden was featured in various publications.

The increased exposure opened doors: soon Don Was writing a gardening column for the Mail on Sunday, had a book deal, and an invitation to screen test for a proposed weekly live gardening segment on the ITV television breakfast show This Morning.

Don landed the spot and his first segment aired in October 1989, receiving £100 a show.

After 26 spots on This Morning, Don landed additional television work as presenter on the BBC Television shows Holiday and Tomorrow's World.

Though he had some doubts about being a presenter, he took the jobs as he felt desperate for work.

Don began his writing career at this time and published his first of over 25 books, in 1990.

He was unemployed from 1991 to 1993, and spent all of 1992 on the dole.

Some of their jewellery is kept at the V&A Museum.

Between 1994 and 2006, Don wrote a weekly gardening column in The Observer.

In November 1999, Channel 4 started to air the gardening series Fork to Fork, in which Don and his wife presented segments on growing and cooking organic vegetables.

In 2003, Don replaced Alan Titchmarsh as the lead presenter of Gardeners' World, only leaving the show between 2008 and 2011 owing to illness.

Since then he has written and produced several garden series of his own, the most recent being Monty Don's Spanish Gardens which aired in 2024.