Visiting gardens is bad for you. Not only does it encourage too much eating of cake but sets up all kinds of false notions that are ruinous to your garden back home.
— Monty Don
Absorbing a healthy amount of dirt builds your immune system.
I often eat cakes while my fingers are caked in soil.
As you get older your own problems are not that interesting.
I feel ashamed if my hands are too clean and untouched. It's a measure of how much time I've spent travelling and poncing around.
Happiness is a by-product rather than an end in itself. It pops into your life unbidden, and then tends to pop out again. I'm on record as being depressive. It is related to winter.
I was a sickly child, and it wasn't until I was 19 that I realised I was quite a robust, vigorous person. Since then I've taken ill health to be an irritating interruption into what is a fairly reliable stream of good health.
I loathe nowheres - airports and bland hotels. I would rather be in an unpleasant, uncomfortable place rather than one just adrift, floating around.
Organic is loaded with a sense of rightness, with a set of rules. I would much rather someone bought food that was local and sustainable but not organic than bought organic food that had to be shipped across the world.
By having a direct stake and involvement with the process of plants growing, of having your hands in the soil and tending it carefully and with love, your world and everyone's else's world too, becomes a better place.
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.
What I love about French gardens is the combination of formal elegance and intellectual questioning.
I always see gardening as escape, as peace really. If you are angry or troubled, nothing provides the same solace as nurturing the soil.
Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.
If I'm honest, the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.
Tony Blair is a dreadful man; really truly dreadful.
My father was an army officer who left the forces when I was six and never really fitted back into civilian life. My mother had five children and a mother with Alzheimer's, who lived with us, so I imagined that she had a lot to do.
I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn't make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.
When our jewellery business went into receivership we avoided bankruptcy by selling our houses and possessions.
The thing I like to stress about TV is that it's a team exercise. You really can't have too much of an ego.
I wouldn't want to be known as Mr Depression, but I found that when I did dip a toe in the water and talk about it, the response from the public was incredible.
We are extremely uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of gardening, and yet most people feel it in some form or other, even if it's a sense of connection to the greater world on a beautiful day.
I'm bad at sleeping. I get somewhere between three and six hours a night.
I don't think about being the Colin Firth of the gardening world. I live a very insular world based around my family and my home, and to them I'm not the Colin Firth of anything.
My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable - it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.
I think that most people are aware that it takes so much oil and water to produce what they're eating. But the problem is inherent within the solution, in so much as you don't want to tell people what to do.
When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.
Intellectually the French are wonderfully open, in a way the British just don't begin to be. You can question ideas in France, endlessly. In Britain, two things happen when you do that. Either you're branded an intellectual, which is fundamentally mistrusted, or you're branded a phony and pretentious, which people despise.
Gardening is seen as a pastime that is almost like belonging to the Church of England - a sign of maturity and wisdom and right thinking.
I see myself as a writer who happens to garden.
I had a difficult relationship with my parents, who died young, but they instilled self-discipline and a sense of honour and loyalty and accountability. I'm grateful for that.
My basic philosophy is never do anything with the word 'celebrity' attached to it. Without being overly pompous, if you have worked hard to have an audience trust you a bit, why blow it? That is my currency.
I live in the middle of country so I walk a lot.
I love filming. I love the teamwork. It's a tight-knit group spending months on the road together. All the experience is shared.
I'm a great believer in trying things, so I've eaten witchetty grubs, a mountain frog, ostrich and alligator. I like tongue, I like brains and tripe.
You can trace the entire history of Britain by looking at gardens.
The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.
It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.
From the ages of 18 to 50 I ran, rowed and lifted weights at my home gym.
There is a British assumption that you mustn't speak evil of anyone's garden because it is rude - it is like criticising their home, their children or their pets.
Plant breeding has been going on for millennia and it's a gradual process.
We don't value food in Britain, so therefore the cheaper it is the better it is. We all eat far too much, we all pay far too little for our food. We have environmental problems, we have health problems, we have food transport problems.
We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise. That is easy to see and evaluate. It inculcates high levels of well-being. That is undeniable and needs little measurement.
The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.
I was brought up a strict Christian. My father was a lay preacher, my mother a church warden. The rhythm and ritual of the Anglican Church was part of our lives.
The British have such an odd relationship with food - and the land. I want the public and the Soil Association to see that growing things in a garden is no different to growing things in a field.
The farm uses up a lot of my creative urges. It's a sort of rough and ready space, I don't film there.
I like dogs because they are not humans.
In my teens I wanted to be a rock star, I really did. At that time there was nothing I wanted more.
