SPRING is one of Monty Don’s favourite times of the year – when primroses, daffodils, fritillaries and tulips emerge in his beautiful garden at Longmeadow.

It’s a sight he won’t enjoy alone, as two million viewers who tune into Gardeners’ World every week will be invited to share the many glories of his two-acre garden, which is divided into 19 different sections and last year became the new base of the hit gardening programme.

For nine months of the year, from February to November, TV crews film in his garden in the Herefordshire Marches, eight miles from the Welsh border.

The nurtured space will be revealed in the new series of Gardeners’ World, which begins tonight on BBC Two, and is accompanied by a tie-in book, Gardening At Longmeadow.

Don, the programme’s main presenter, admits that opening up his own two-acre private garden to the cameras hasn’t come without its drawbacks, but the pros far outweigh the cons.

“The good thing is I have no journey, the downside is that I live above the shop. I never turn off from it.”

The film crew aren’t allowed in the house and the TV equipment is stored in an outhouse when not in use. Don may have allowed the cameras in, but he’s in charge of the garden. For the last five years, he and his wife Sarah have had no help at all, until the BBC insisted on it. Don now has two full-time gardeners to assist.

“The slight downside of that means I do less gardening because there’s less to do. It’s a bit like having a chef in the kitchen asking if I’d like a poached egg, when I could poach one myself.”

But he remains the master of his own domain. “Nobody tells me what to do in my own garden.

People are genuinely helping me rather than doing it themselves and then telling me about it.”

Filming takes place one or two days in the week, depending on what’s happening in the garden.

And Don has had to compromise in some measure as to how he wants his garden to be for the sake of the programme.

It’s a complicated, large, full garden – no big lawns, no empty spaces and even the orchard has 39 apple trees. At any one time, 90 per cent of the garden needs to look good, which can be difficult to achieve, he reflects.

“Inevitably, all of the garden has to look good all the time, whereas in a private garden, if you hadn’t weeded that bed, you do it when you can. Or if you got terribly behind with your veg, you’d think, ‘Ok, I won’t grow any peas this year’.

“A TV programme doesn’t allow for that, but I do try to show the camera where things go wrong and show the human side of it, rather than making it a show garden, because it’s not a show garden.”

He stresses that the BBC has been very good about not trying to lose the personal element.

“Obviously you lose your privacy to a degree. On one hand you want more people to see it, on the other you only want to have invited people. But there are certain boundaries which are not crossed.”

Å Gardening At Longmeadow by Monty Don is published by BBC Books on Thursday, March 15, priced £25. The new series of Gardeners’ World starts tonight on BBC Two.