BBC presenter Monty Don usually maps out episodes of Gardeners’ World with painstaking detail, coordinating with his production team to make sure every filming session goes according to plan. However, one recent mishap brought things to a halt, when all of the flowers from a beautiful bed of dahlias mysteriously disappeared.
Taking up the story on the show’s podcast, Monty cringed: “We had a bed of superb dahlias in a cut flower bed, and we were going to do it before lunch, but the director said, ‘Let’s break for lunch.’ I always go indoors and have leftovers in the kitchen. Sarah wasn’t around but I assumed she was, had my cold rice or whatever it was, went out…” Then Monty dropped the bombshell: “They went back to where the cut flowers were, all gone, and there was Sarah holding a big bunch of flowers!”
It hasn’t always been wife Sarah derailing filming, as Monty recalled another embarrassing moment when the team were caught in a downpour and the camera got so wet that it needed to be dried off with a hairdryer.
They’d stopped abruptly, meaning that they hadn’t finished filming the scene – and by the time they were ready to resume, the climate had completely changed to bright sunshine and a blue sky.
Not wanting to disrupt the “continuity”, the director insisted Monty needed to be hosed down so that he’d be dripping wet just as he had been when they started.
“Someone stood off camera and hosed me down while I had to do the shot,” he exclaimed.
Meanwhile, despite wife Sarah contributing to his recent filming struggles, the pair remain as happily married as they were when they first tied the knot back in 1983.
After meeting her at Cambridge University where both were studying, Monty recalled that he felt “intense attraction at first sight”.
They had three children together over the years – two boys and a girl – and have weathered the storm despite events including a failed jewellery business which had once seen them sell to celebrity clients like Michael Jackson, and Monty’s mental health battles.
In one poignant post to celebrate the pair’s 39th wedding anniversary, he touchingly wrote: “The love is as evergreen and strong now as it was all those years ago.”
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