People are increasingly realising that what they eat is important. You can’t put junk food in your body and be healthy. All sorts of problems can develop, like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, strokes. Gardening not only helps with exercise and mental health, but it can improve diet as well. Monty Don Read Quote
Any British household with a scrap of land has always grown herbs for the kitchen. From the superb monastic herb gardens down to the humblest cottage, a supply of fresh herbs would have been considered essential. Monty Don Read Quote
Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves. Monty Don Read Quote
Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour. Monty Don Read Quote
The more people share woodland, absorb it and regard it as part of their personal heritage and culture, the richer our society will be. The more people can work in woods and use them practically rather than go through the motions as a kind of ersatz exercise, the more they will care for the places themselves rather than the political idea of them. Monty Don Read Quote
I loathe nowheres – airports and bland hotels. I would rather be in an unpleasant, uncomfortable place rather than one just adrift, floating around. Monty Don Read Quote
I have been growing vegetables since I was a boy. When I was about 17 I was the only one of five children living at home. My parents were ill and I took over the vegetable garden and I have had one ever since. Monty Don Read Quote
That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are smallthings but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic. Monty Don Read Quote
