My Garden Worldby Monty Don is a celebration of every living creature that we all share. This year has given us the enforced opportunity to learn more about the fascinating natural world around us. Whether you live in the countryside or the town, Monty’s observations and insights are relevant to each and every one of us. My Garden Worldis Monty Don’s personal journey through the natural year, month by month, season by season, observed from the immediate world around him. If you are new to gardening, it can seem daunting - with Latin names, various soil types and seasonal requirements, it feels like a lot to learn. But with Monty Don's new book as a guide you will discover just how joyful and rewarding gardening can be. From a very early age I loved the countryside as much as any garden and was fascinated by the life that I saw all around me from trees, wildflowers, birds, insects and mammals. In a sense this book has been over sixty years in gestation. I have kept notebooks and journals ever since I could write and I have drawn upon these as well as the events of the past year.'

My only criticism would be the careless editing that left uncorrected his error about the Mabinogion. It wasn’t an early work in English, as claimed in the book. It is an early work in Welsh. From a very early age I loved the countryside as much as any garden and was fascinated by the life that I saw all around me from trees, wildflowers, birds, insects and mammals. In a sense this book has been over sixty years in gestation. I have kept notebooks and journals ever since I could write and I have drawn upon these as well as the events of the past year.’I also found his way of talking about hunting/killing a bit brutal, but then he is a farmer - and living in Devon, I know that death is a part of farming and most farmers talk about it as they would any other part of life.

This book is an amazing naturalists account of all the many birds, plants, and mammals that are to be found at different times of the year and in all the many places, in and around farms, gardens, woodlands and environments both familiar, and unfamiliar. It is amazing because it is a personal account of wildlife that is recalled from first-hand observation and experience in great detail, to the extent that it was like discovering all these species for the first time with a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation. There is a wealth of knowledge contained in this book with facts that I had either forgotten or was unaware of, such as the reasons for the decline in some birds, for example, - Swifts- I’ve never read a book by Monty Don, but I do so love his gentle manner on television, and that coupled with my love of gardening for nature drew me to this book. Another landmark of the style was H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald (2014), which is now followed by Vesper Flights, translating place into prose on an emotional journey - TH White's The Goshawk for the anxious generation. The book is a Season by Season, month by month journal of sorts, cataloguing the observations of plant and animal life as they emerge and appear over the course of a year. Along with his home and garden in Long Meadow, there is a farm in Wales which provide endless opportunities to observe the comings and goings of plants and wildlife as the seasons change.Don is keen to be the countryman, and he has lived for 25 years at Longmeadow in Herefordshire, where he presents Gardeners' World from. He likes the uncommon hedeghogs and kingfishers but doesn't like pesky moles or foxes much. He understands the cruelty of nature. What strikes me about Don is he is often posing - he seems to be trying to say the right thing, and ends up sounding, shall we say, Richard Madeley-like. His unintended transparency is quite endearing.

Spend a year with Monty Don. My Garden World is a celebration of every living creature and the natural world that we all share. Recent times have given us the enforced opportunity to learn more about the fascinating natural world around us. Whether you live in the countryside or the town, Monty's observations and insights are relevant to each and every one of us. My Garden World is Monty Don's personal journey through the natural year, month by month, season by season, observed from the immediate world around him.Think of your garden like a meal. When you select a recipe, you're choosing it based on inclination, experience and circumstance. Making a garden, big or small, uses exactly the same process.' Swifts do not live here any more. They pay cursory visits but do not belong to these skies. Yet no other creature owns the sky more than the swift and they used to grace us with their supersonic, sleek version of the still ubiquitous swallows and martins. But over the past 20 years, their appearances have become increasingly infrequent, increasingly brief..." and there follows the explanation as to why this has happened. Having only started watching Gardener's World in the last year or so, and succumbing to the calm, soothing tone of Monty Don's voice and demeanour at a time when the world seems even more chaotic than normal, I had to see if it translated to the written word. It does.