Monty Don’s French Gardens

Series one, episode one
Squint hard enough during this first of three episodes exploring the historic gardens of France you can just about see a beret on Monty Don’s head. He might be synonymous with gardening in Britain, but Don is that rarest of Englishmen – a Francophile. It’s tempting, then, to approach ‘French Gardens’ as a kind of horticultural travelogue, and Don painstakingly digs up the historic and cultural context of each garden. But ultimately, this is pure garden porn, almost incidentally filmed in France.

Of course, that’s not such a bad thing. The French ruling class, it won’t surprise you to learn, possessed a certain je ne sais quoi when it came to grand, green gestures, whether in Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte or elsewhere. Don visits the lot with characteristic breathlessness – or is it arousal? Next up, ‘The Gourmet Garden’.