Monty Don's Spanish Gardens

Episode 1

Central Spain

59 mins

Monty begins his tour of the gardens of Spain in the central region of the country in and around the capital of Madrid, making a clockwise tour around it eventually ending in the historic town of Toledo before heading to the Mediterranean coast, specifically Valencia. With much of this central region being semi-arid, the larger, more formal historic gardens are a mixture of the the monastic tradition (the cultural side) with the Arabic (the climatic side). With Madrid being a modern city, many of its gardens are more contemporary and experimental in nature, including a vertical garden between two office buildings, one designed by and for dogs, and one on an inhospitable site that was planted with thousands of plants but that is meant to self seed so that the site itself dictates what its eventual design will be. In Valencia, he focuses on a site that became a dry river bed, that the public administrators were going to turn into a highway, but that public outcry instead led to it being turned into a several kilometers long public green space.