W hen I look back over the

past year, the lens is

clouded by Covid-19,
which has obviously dominated all else.
But if there had been no pandemic, this
would still have been a remarkable and
unusual year. It began here at Longmeadow,
as the old year ended, with floods. These
lasted till the beginning of March and were
bigger and more sustained than anything
in living memory and clearly one of the
manifestations of climate change.
For all the horrors and crises of Covid-19
and political upheaval around the world,
climate change remains a bigger story than
everything else put together. It has oft been
said, but is worth endlessly repeating, that
gardeners are right at the cutting edge of
climate change. All you need is a windowbox
or a scrap of garden to notice the effects on
weather, wildlife and the timing of plants,
as well as the associated effects on fungi,
insects, birds and a hundred other clues and
signs apparent every day in every garden.

Filming in lockdown
But then came the virus. We filmed the first
programme of Gardeners’ World here at Off to a soggy start
Longmeadow on 10 March with jokey and In most winters, areas of
nervous waves, rather than the handshakes Longmeadow flood, but in
and hugs the team normally greet each other early 2020 the water was
with after the winter lay-off, and wondered more widespread and longer
how this was going to affect our filming lasting than ever before
procedure. As it turned out, that was the last
day a film crew visited the garden and within
two weeks the country was in lockdown. For the first time in years, I had day after day in my
For the next month we cobbled the
programme together, with my wife Sarah
garden – it was the loveliest spring I can remember
and I filming and talking to directors on our
phones. That is how the Chelsea programmes
were made too, with the addition of a
second phone linked to Joe, filming in
his garden with his wife Kath.
Then the cabling was installed – miles
of it was laid all around the garden at
Longmeadow and Portakabins were set
up in our driveway. For the rest of the year,
all filming was done via fixed cameras
controlled from these huts. I had a walkie-
talkie linked to the director, who was in one
hut, and he or she had radio communication
with the cameraman and sound recordist,
who were socially distanced in another. They
could see me on their screens, but I never
saw them and was never in the garden at the
same time they were. It was a strange and
rather limiting experience – I increasingly
PHOTOS: MARSHA ARNOLD; JASON INGRAM

missed the companionship and creative Remote working

energy of working with a real live crew –
but it did mean that the programmes got
made when most other scheduled filming
across every genre was closed down.
However, life – outrageous as it might be
to say – consists of more than Gardeners’
World. Lockdown meant that I could not
begin the series on European gardens that
Socially distant filming enabled
Gardeners’ World to stay on air,
with director Kathryn Williams
running the show from a cabin.
RIGHT Monty filming at the RHS
Chelsea Flower Show in 2019. This
year he filmed segments for the
virtual show from his own garden.

28 gardenersworld.com December 2020