Monty Don Audiobooks

There is a particular register to Monty Don’s voice that anyone who has watched Gardeners’ World will recognise: unhurried, faintly wry, entirely without the hard sell. Born in 1955 and raised in Hampshire, he has fronted the programme since 2003 and has written a long-running newspaper column and more than twenty-five books alongside it.

The path there was not a straight one. He and his wife Sarah built a costume jewellery business in the 1980s that supplied Harrods and Harvey Nichols, and lost almost all of it in the crash of 1987. Gardening, at Longmeadow in Herefordshire, was what he returned to, and he has been notably open about how much it has helped him live with long-running depression.

He gardens organically, served as president of the Soil Association, and takes a broader view than most television gardeners: less about show borders, more about weather, wildlife, soil and the discipline of noticing what is happening outside the window.

My Garden World is his most ambitious book in audio, a month-by-month record of the natural year at Longmeadow that pays as much attention to badgers, swifts and lichen as to the borders. It runs to nearly fourteen and a half hours and is best taken in seasonal chunks rather than at a single run.

Down to Earth is the practical counterweight, shorter and more instructive, distilling what he has learnt about soil, pruning, planting and patience across a long working life.

Don narrates his own work, which is the whole point of listening to him. Having that voice in your ear while you are actually out among the beds is not a bad way to spend an afternoon, and his audiobooks are gathered below.