In review: British Gardens

Monty Don’s British Gardens (2026) is both a love letter to the nation’s gardened landscape and a quietly probing meditation on British identity. Drawing on a lifetime of travel and observation, Monty Don turns his attention homeward, journeying from the north of Scotland to the Cornish coast in search of what gardens reveal about Britain and its garden loving people.

The book moves fluidly between grand historic estates, modest urban plots, rewilded spaces and carefully tended borders, each treated as a chapter in a wider cultural story. Monty Don’s central question - what do our gardens say about us? - is answered through his own warm yet canny opinion and through richly observed encounters.

Beautifully illustrated with photography by Derry Moore, the book balances visual splendour with Don’s characteristically reflective prose. He resists easy nostalgia, instead presenting British gardening as an evolving dialogue between people and place - part invention, part inheritance.

At its best, British Gardens is expansive yet intimate, offering both a survey of the nation’s landscapes and a personal philosophy of gardening. It will appeal as much to the armchair traveller as to the practical gardener, leaving the reader with a renewed sense that gardens are not merely cultivated spaces, but expressions of who we are.