Plunged into a deep depression after the failure of his jewellery business, Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Done told how his love of roses ‘lightened his deep darkness’
10:48, 02 Jun 2025Updated 13:19, 02 Jun 2025
Monty Don with his wife Sarah (Image: Corbis via Getty Images)
Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don has opened up about a crippling depression that blighted his 20s – and revealed the one flower that helped him out of those “dark days.”
Speaking to the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, he explained how he had developed a passion for roses despite not really caring for them at first. Monty said he’d “always admired the flowers in the kind of knee-jerk way that most of us love sunsets or the song of a blackbird.”
But after a while, Monty developed a deeper love for roses, poring over catalogues full of names that “ran off his tongue like a floral charm.”
Monty planted out a Rose de Rescht(Image: undefined via Getty Images)
At the time, Monty was running a successful jewellery business, but the 1980s financial crisis left him in dire straits, and the impact on Monty’s mental health was profound. Monty’s wife Sarah was gravely concerned about him, and their children started asking: “Why is daddy always crying?”
Monty told how he did “very little” for almost a year: “They were dark days,” he recalled. “But my wife would pick small bunches of roses from the pots I’d not yet planted out and place them in vases before me.”
He listed some of the most memorable flowers, including: “Tuscany Superb, Charles de Mills, Alba Semiplena, Celestial, Chapeau de Napoleon, and Rose de Rescht.
“Those exquisite flowers lightened my deep darkness,” Monty recalled.
Monty went through some tough times(Image: undefined via Getty Images)
Monty planted many of those blooms in his garden at Longmeadow, and some of them, remain over quarter of a century later: “Since then, I’ve acquired perhaps a couple of hundred different roses – I’ve never counted – and I love them all,” he says.
Monty says he loves the “simplicity and purity” of roses, and credits them helping lift him out of depression. \
Monty, 69, says that he has always suffered with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and copes by seeking warmer climates during the winter months for some essential “winter sun.”
In a candid conversation on The Love of Gardens podcast with Kirsty Wark, Monty spoke about managing his mental health and described the therapeutic nature of his work.
Monty realised how roses had helped lift him out of his depression(Image: undefined via Getty Images)
He explained: “I’m well documented of having struggled with depression all my life and I found that being outside, working particularly with the soil, rather than any particular plant group, for me works incredibly well at helping deal with that.”
He added that gardening can be a great antidote for mental health problems, saying: “It’s the healing process, I don’t say it’s a passive for anybody, you found out what works for you, it may well be in conjunction with medication.”
Monty has shared his thoughts on the “two sides” of mental health and how gardening can be a beneficial activity for anyone looking to improve their wellbeing. He said: “That’s a side of mental health and, again, there are two sides of mental health.
“There’s mental illness that could be made maybe better through gardening, and there’s mental wellbeing which everybody can feel and it recharges those batteries.”
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