The Easter Sunday Ishmael: 20/04/2025

It's Spring! It's Easter! And Monty Don is being more than usually aggravating.

In this weekend's edition of Gardener's World, the 69 year old presenter had a nice sit-down on his mound, and confided in the viewers that he was very happy with the yellow at this time of year. He added that he liked "to have the yellow wash over him".

Unlike Alex Van Duyn, of Portland, Oregon, who made a heartfelt plea on KKTV(Colorado) last month. He said that his recycling bin had not been collected one day in September, and, on opening it, he found it contained, in addition to his own recycling, six gallon-sized bottles of urine - the recycler had refused to take the piss, it being a bio-hazard. The anonymous urine donor continued to drop off bottles of piss in his bin each week, until the enraged Mr. Van Duyn gave up on recycling, after which the pisser transferred to his neighbour's bin. But Mr Van Duyn has installed surveillance cameras and is hoping to get identifiable evidence of who the pisser is. He ended the TV interview with the plea: "please stop. Please, just don't do it anymore. It's really pissing me off."

I had a little think about why the pisser is doing this. Apparently he drives up in his car, jumps out and puts the bottles into the bin. If its six bottles each time, then it is likely to be a week's worth. It is not a personal grudge against Mr. Van Duyn, as he's transferred his deposits to the neighbour. The only explanation I came up with - apart from the pisser being quite mad - is that he is living in his car and pissing in bottles. If that is the case, what is he doing with his shit? Maybe he's got a steaming compost heap somewhere. Which brings me neatly back to Monty Don.

Don's latest wheeze is that he is entering a garden in the Chelsea Flower Show next month. It's a special garden, which he has co-designed with his dog, Ned.

Ned's paws not being adapted to holding a pencil, Monty Don watched him running about and captured his routes to transform into paths, which he drew out so that the chap who is actually building the garden, Jamie Butterworth, could incorporate the runs between the trees which he has grown and bagged ready for transfer to Chelsea. This most recent blatant appeal to maintain his special place in the hearts of his adoring legion of middle-aged British women in sensible shoes follows his other initiatives: the carefully curated gardening clothes, his unfortunate, but well-publicised, episodes of depression, appointing Alys of the floaty transparent frocks as his "head gardener" to appeal to the occasional gentleman viewer, a whole series devoted to introducing unemployable young drug offenders to the healing benefits of gardening, endless series - Monty Don's Italian Gardens, Monty Don's French Gardens, Monty Don's Paradise Gardens (for Islamic gardeners), Monty Don's Japanese Gardens, Monty Don's American Gardens, Monty Don's Adriatic Gardens, Monty Don's Spanish Gardens, Monty Don's British Gardens, and a whole slew of books with lots of pictures of Monty posing prettily. Not a bad career for an untrained gardener and former jewellery maker. Anyway, as Monty said about his Chelsea Flower Show Garden: "the British like gardens and they like dogs". What's not to like?
This is, I think, a good opportunity to revisit -

The Collected Monty Don thoughts of mr ishmael. 

"If you're like me, the sort of person who combines farming and helping people and modestly curing drug addicts with saving the planet and somehow managing to do it all on TeeVee or in lavish, glossy books with sometimes literally thousands of pictures of myself, showing me in my carefully battered, old, woollen and corduroy clothes, caring about what I do, then like me, you, too, will have a staff of gardeners, provided by the BBC, who devise all the plans, do all the work, make sure all the crops are perfect, leaving me to do the really important, caring pieces to camera. It is a great life, being winsome, environmentally responsible and standing in the flower beds surrounded by lights, cameramen and sound recordists and producers and script and make-up people.

Suddenly, everyone is doing it, hedges, planting them, growing them, trimming them, grubbing them, as we say, up. And when I say everybody I really do mean everybody, the nice people at the Guardian and the BBC all have their gardeners working flat-out and do you know they find it really therapeutic, watching their staff work so hard because it's really on behalf of you, the license payer, who, let's face it, at the end of the day, pays for it all, and you can't get much better than that."

Monty Don's bland erasure of any other labourers in his vineyard, as though it is he and he alone who so perfectly plans and manages, weeds, digs and mulches his vast garden, as though his really is a horticultural labour of love and not a teevee show with limitless funds, with scores, if not hundreds of production assistants doing the work, off-camera, shredding license-payers' fifty-pound notes into compost. Consumerism's deceitful oddjob man, is Monty.

Posing, of course I'm not posing, I'm being earnest.

There was even some snooty old trollop at the Chelsea Flower Show, angling for business, hungry for recognition, enunciating to Mad Monty Don all the ways in which her Chelsea Garden, her tarted-up bits of grass and flowers movingly evoked the spirit of her great, great something or other who fell at the Somme; you'd think she spent her every weekend volunteering to maintain the Commonwealth war cemeteries of the Western Front.

If I'd been there I'da run a hedge-trimmer down her face. I don't know, maybe - probably - I have some distant connection to a white stone cross atop a bag of bones in Flanders but even if I don't, we have mrs ishmael's grandfather's death medal hanging behind glass in the hall with later medals awarded to her father, for hosing-down and mucking-out Auschwitz. Most people are connected, quietly, one way or another to Slaughter, although few are lavishly paid for rehearsing their own distant genealogy, building a memorial garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, make you puke, really, the New Britons. Anything for a few quid, sell anything, steal anything; Larceny in Virtue's clothes; Thatcher's legacy. And Blair's. And Brown's. And that other prick. The bloke in the underpants.

With Monty, though, he's pure, unadulterated showbusiness; be it gardens about poverty, disability, heroin addiction or, as now, the annihilation of a generation, Monty has an earnest horticultural aperçu with which to lighten our collective, human load: "At the end of the day, viewers, for me, it's what gardening's all about and what better way to commemorate all those dead blokes than for you all to buy my books and watch my shows, whether you're a pacifist - as I obviously am, look, I even have a dog - or whether you're another sort of person - and that really is a matter of personal choice- gardening, through feast or famine, high or low, war and peace, is what it's really all about. Everyman, down his garden with his dog, a camera crew, a producer, a scriptwriter, a make-up girl, a director and a team of sturdy workers to do the actual digging, y'know, the gardening part, rather than, though I say it myself, doing the most important part, the presenting; well, what could be more diligent and painstaking and honest and virtuous and quintessentially British than that?"

Join me next time on Gardeners World for some more well-rehearsed, spontaneous, specious and insincere homilies and you, too, could live a life like Monty - humble, sincere, worthy, essentially carbon-neutral, compostable and completely cuntish.

Viewers grow addicted to the stupidest, most vapid, contrived, worthless and narcissistic filth, to people, for instance, like Monty Don, the Guardian readers' Face of Gardening, year after year peddling his simpering but actually quite shrewdly-reasoned sincerity, his earnest environmental realism, challenging but do-able and his all-round, well-balanced, impeccable but harmonious worthiness, as though he was God's Own Ethical Gardener and not an every-word-scripted, cosmetically enhanced, costumed, floodlit and soundtracked, neurotic, fucked-up, typical telly personality who couldn't, unassisted, find the hole in his own arse. He presents, Monty, as though he has kept, for centuries, Botany's ancient secret, has taken holy horticultural orders, is in some shrubby, composty Noble and Chivalrous Order of the Knights Gardener. He belongs in a loony bin, picking the weeds out from between the slabs, with a blunt knife, so he doesn't harm himself; yet we are taught to worship him, Monty, the luckiest costume jeweller in history.

I'm not Earnest and Worthy Monty Don but we do grow herbs and eat loads of them; this is as we have done for decades, just without the flesh on the plate and when the cows stick their heads over the wall or I meet the sheep in the lane I can pat their heads without guilt.  The Gospel of Monty Don, which saith, never ye an opportunity miss to stress thine own virtuous, ethical and most earnest worthiness, to the planet and its teeming programme schedulers. Yes, more of a ministry's how I see my tenure at Gardeners World, 'sall about responsibility, caring, very deeply I might say, for the garden that is our planet, wearing carefully selected pre-worn clothes and talking like a cunt. 

I don't do clothes in any fashion sense. I hate the fashion industry as much as the arms or the halal meat trades. I used to do clothes, in my twenties, suits and cufflinks, ties'n'hankies, but that's long ago and far away and I don't do them anymore. But I don't not do clothes in a Monty Don way.

Maybe the BBC pays production assistants to locate for him battered old linen shirts, Fred Dibnah jackets, frayed braces, old cardies and worn cord trousers, so's he can continue his poseur's existence, worthy and sincere,

ethically photogenic, green and right-fucking-on, committed to leaving a light carbon footprint.  Wryly, chiding her about GardeningPorn, I bought mrs ishmael one of Monty's huge, millstone doorstop books, must have been six-hundred pages and there were pictures of him on every page, bending, stretching, leaning, more bending, must be over a thousand of them, in the one book, all of them in what we country house owners call shabby-chic, except that you know Monty's get-ups will have been checked and co-ordinated by lighting cameramen, directors, fruit and vegetable stylists, continuity personnel, his publishers, BBC producers and people from the Radio Times.

Adamant agronomy porn-toy

That's not not doing clothes, that's doing clothes Bigtime, image creation and consumer manipulation - Monty's just like you, really, gets his old clothes on and pops down the garden, doing some organic stuff, for the planet and for the children, just forget the squadrons of writers who script his every word, his every conscientious, planet-friendly aside; forget the storyboarders who choreograph his every lithe step, his every wheelbarrow pushed between two epic trees or hedges or sculptural garden features, knocked-up for Oh, just a few pounds, really, and some stuff you can easily get down the local garden centre.

He's an ordinary guy, Monty, just like us, in his shabby old linen. Clothes maketh the man.

There is a pretence that some presenter or other has some specialist knowledge, that Monty Don does do his own garden, for instance; never runs out of compost, although, one man toiling away there in his cardy, he uses tons of it, tons. I make compost in my walled acre and I can never make enough of it, never; have to buy as much from Lidl as I make, at least as much, and I don't have to make teevee shows and write books and columns and save heroin addicts from destruction, like Earnest Monty does. No, it's bollocks, of course; Monty has a team of gardeners doing the work, he's a presenter, leans on his shovel and sighs worthily about how good life can be, if only we do like him, magic gardening with invisible labourers, scriptwriters, producers and the best horticulturalists that your licence fee can buy.

 Let me entertain you.

Mrs Elisabeth Primrose-Banks, new boss of the Royal Horticultural Society,  said the BBC's flagship gardening programme, Gardeners' World, was shite, pure and simple. She probably didn't say:  "Fuckwits, 'swhat they are, that fucking barrowboy, the bald git, Joe Wotsit, and that wheezing old baggage, Carol Klein, they're good for fuck all, wouldn't let them trim my privet, let alone prune my bush or put a seep hose under my Rhododendrons. And now the poor mad bastard's rampaging all around Broadcasting House with ideas for programmes about helping heroin addicts and lunatics who wanna be fucking craftsmen, even though they're not and nor is he, fucking treatment's what he needs, not playing at being a tellyshrink, sanity through digging with Monty, never heard such fucking rubbish. I mean, I love Cruelty TeeVee as much as the next lesbian but Monty fucking Don, telling suburbanite shitbrains that, No, they're not actually cut out to be master stonemasons or Llama farmers so they can just fuck off back to working in Lidl, well, that's too much, even for me."

The convention of these programmes is that by the time the programme is over the punter has a new, sparkling glass home standing with integrity in the landscape, a blend of Rococo and Art Deco and a hint of Swedish minimalism all topped-off with solar panels. 

Or was that a different show? 

How can you tell?

............................................................................

What, mrs ishmael, has all this to do with Easter? The celebration of the most significant event, the founding event, in the Christian religion? Bigger than Christmas? You know how it goes:

"He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and buried. He descended into hell and on the third day he rose again from the dead...."

Well, apart from just annoying the living daylights out of me, and mr ishmael, as is apparent from the Collected Thoughts, above, I began musing on why I'm drawn back to Gardener's World and to its High Priest, Monty Fucking Don. He is avuncular, he is kindly, but firm, signing off each episode with his "jobs for the weekend". He is very English, in an Archetypal way, and his programme, his since 2003, when he ousted Alan Titmarsh -

A Darkie? In the bushes?
I daresay you're right, your worship, I'll fetch your twelve-bore.

yes, him - is very beautiful and educational. How to adore the compost, grow things to eat and flowers to beautify and bushes to hide in. If Monty - or George, his given first name, is a high priest of anything, it is not of Christ, but of of Ēostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess mentioned by Bede in his 8th century work The Reckoning of Time. He wrote that pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in her honour during the month named after her: Ēosturmōnaþ (April), and that this became the English name for Easter.

You'll recall the quotation famously attributed to G.K. Chesterton (although the Chesterton Society can't actually find it in the Collected Works):

When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything.

Well, it seems that Monty has now stepped up into the vacant god-shaped hole in our hearts. His signing-off words in the Easter edition of Gardener's World were:

"Take time to relish the Blossom. And to get stuck into the garden".

Back to mr ishmael for some Easter thoughts from long ago. Well, not that long ago - and the politicians mentioned, while not in office, mostly, are still breathing God's good air and enjoying their money.

THE ART OF EASTER

It is the end of Holy Week, the fantastical Resurrection remembered, by Blair and Bush and Brown and Obama as they go about their works of Devilment, pious and punitive and profiteering. He is the abomination of our times, Blair. And Imelda, let us not forget Satan's very own working mother, cajoling the MPs' wives to vote for Inferno in Baghdad, the horrible poxed-up crone. Funny how the viler people are the graver, the more public is their piety. And it is darkly meet, fitting that at the height of their crimes, the Blairs joined Pope Nazi Benedict in his monstrous, bloody, infant-buggering hypocrisy. A religion made for these two, full of theatre and threat, superficially benevolent; heaving, beneath, with menace. Il Papa, the Nonce Protector General, is now, in Holy Week, baring his diseased fangs, snarling at his critics, the horrible old bastard. And Blair, too, is demonstrating his vacuity, his hammy worthlessness, with his gobby, meaningless tosh from behind a wall of expensive security, preposterously in his old constituency, surely the stupidest Britons outside Hartlepool, as he half-heartedly extols the Godly to Vote for Snot.(Gordon Brown, famously caught on camera picking his nose and eating it in the House of Commons - ed.) 

There is early Christian art, in the Middle East and Africa, or so it is claimed by the telly scholars as they jet around the world being scholarly and there are the cathedrals, many commenced a thousand years ago but there's nothing which impinges hugely on our pop-art consciousness much before the Renaissance. Most would recognise Dali's Christ of Saint John of The Cross or this fragment of Bach's St Matthew's Passion - O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden - if only from Paul Simon's reworking of it as his whining, white man's blues, American Tune. There are scraps of doleful, pre-harmony music and bits of bloody paintings but the popular Christian art, the everyday imagery, sound and sculpture was largely made a millenium and a half or more AD and made in the service of the State. 

Happy Easter, Ishmaelites, and take time to relish the Blossom.