Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don has been a firm favourite on our TV screens for decades, but his rise to fame began with a surprising topless shoot for Elle Magazine in the 1980s
Gardeners’ World icon Monty Don has opened up about his unlikely route to stardom, revealing it was a feature in Elle Magazine during the 1980s that first thrust him into the spotlight.
The 70-year-old gardening guru, who has graced our screens on Gardeners’ World for several decades, recalled how being a young man with a passion for gardening was considered quite unusual at the time.
Yet it wasn’t his green fingers that initially caught people’s attention, but rather the home he shared with his wife Sarah, his partner of more than 40 years.
Talking on the ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?’ podcast, he revealed: “A magazine called Elle, which was really big in the eighties, a sort of lifestyle/fashion thing, came and did an article about our home. Sarah and Monty Don’s lovely home, you know, that type of thing.”
He continued: “They looked out the window and said, ‘Wow! Look at your garden, who did you get to do that?’. I thought, that’s fighting talk. I said, ‘we did it, it’s our garden, planted every single thing, of course we did’.”
Impressed by what they saw, the Elle team asked if they could snap some pictures of Monty in the garden.
He confessed: “So they said, ‘Well, can we photograph it?’, which they did. And I’m ashamed to say, in it, I’m topless. I genuinely can’t imagine why.
“It’s out there folks, you can find it. And then a newspaper picked it up and thing was, in the 80s, if you were a gardener in your twenties, it was like being in the British ice hockey team or you found out that a premier league footballer was mad about crocheting. Something like that, it was really very unusual, and they wrote about the garden.”
Yet following that Elle magazine feature, other mainstream outlets, including national newspapers, became intrigued by Monty and his horticultural talents, with one publication eventually approaching him to contribute gardening content.
Monty explained: “Then the Mail On Sunday asked if I would like to write about gardens for them and I did and then they gave me a column and then one thing led to another and I got a book off the back of that column.”
In more recent times, discussions have emerged around what Monty’s future might hold should he choose to step back from work, though he remains incredibly active.
Speaking to Saga last year on the subject, he revealed: “I genuinely don’t know what retirement would look like.
“I don’t play golf or tennis, and I can’t see myself doing the crossword all day.
“Whenever I say to Sarah, ‘Well, thank God, I have no addictions,’ she rolls her eyes and says, ‘You are completely addicted to work!’ But there comes a point in life when saying no is the least interesting option. And in reality, I like work.”
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