However, the 1987 stock market crash caused an almost complete bankruptcy as it cut off American sales, their biggest market. Among their customers were Boy George, Michael Jackson, and Princess Diana. The company became a success and in five years, operated from a shop on Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge with hundreds of outworkers and had secured as many as 60 outlets across the UK, including Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Liberty.
In 1981, Don and Erskine started Monty Don Jewellery, a London-based business that designed, made, and sold costume jewellery. He gave up after getting knocked out and suffering concussion. Don took up boxing to impress his father, a former heavyweight boxing champion in the army, becoming a Cambridge Half Blue for boxing. He studied English at Magdalene College, during which time he met his future wife Sarah Erskine, a trained jeweller and architect. He returned to England, determined to attend Cambridge University out of "sheer bloody-mindedness", and passed the entrance exams. In his late teens, Don spent several months in Aix-en-Provence, France where he worked as a gardener and played rugby in local teams. During his childhood he had become an avid gardener and farmer. He failed his A-levels and while studying for retakes at night school, worked on a building site and a pig farm by day. He then attended Malvern College in Malvern, which he hated, followed by a state comprehensive school, the Vyne School, also in Basingstoke.
He attended three independent schools: Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, followed by Bigshotte School in Wokingham, where at seven, he was asked to leave school for being too boisterous. He described his parents as "very strict". When Don was one, the family moved to Hampshire, England. Don has a twin sister, Alison, who at the age of 19 was nearly killed in a car accident, suffering a broken neck and blindness. On his maternal side, he is descended from the Wyatt family of architects. Don is a descendant of botanist George Don and the Keiller family, best known as the inventors of Keiller's marmalade. When Don was 10, he added his mother's maiden name to it, becoming Montagu Denis Wyatt Don. Soon after Don's birth, his parents changed the name on his birth certificate to Montagu Denis Don due to a family spat over the name. He is the youngest of five children to British parents Denis Thomas Keiller Don, a career soldier stationed in Germany at the time of his birth, and Janet Montagu ( née Wyatt). George Montagu Don was born on 8 July 1955 in Iserlohn, West Germany.
Since then he has written and produced several garden series of his own the most recent was Monty Don's Adriatic Gardens which aired in 2022. In 2003, Don replaced Alan Titchmarsh as the lead presenter of Gardeners' World, only leaving the show between 20 due to illness.
Between 19, Don wrote a weekly gardening column in The Observer. Don began his writing career at this time and published his first of over 25 books, in 1990. In 1989, Don made his television debut as a regular on This Morning with a gardening segment, which led to further television work across the decade including his own shows for BBC Television and Channel 4. They ran a successful costume jewellery business through the 1980s until the stock market crash of 1987 resulted in almost complete bankruptcy. Montagu Denis Wyatt Don OBE VMH (born George Montagu Don 8 July 1955) is a British horticulturist, broadcaster, and writer who is best known as the lead presenter of the BBC gardening television series Gardeners' World.īorn in Germany and raised in England, Don studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he met his future wife.