Earlscliffe on Television & in the Press
Television brought Earlscliffe to a far wider audience than books ever could. Cameras arrived looking for spectacle, atmosphere, and explanation, and in doing so helped fix particular ways of seeing the garden and its creator.
Some programmes were straightforward celebrations. Others became something more complex. A visit intended to illustrate one gardening philosophy later gave rise to a sharply worded newspaper article, an unpublished reply, years of retelling, and eventually an unexpected exchange that reframed the whole episode.
This page traces that story. It begins with the early broadcasts that introduced Earlscliffe to viewers at home, follows the best-known controversy in full, and then steps back to look at what changed, what endured, and what television ultimately reveals about authority, taste, and perspective.
Early Television Appearances
From the outset, television interest in Earlscliffe fell into two distinct patterns. In some programmes, the garden itself was the subject, visited as an example of an unusual and highly individual approach to plants and place. In others, the garden served a different purpose, acting as a working backdrop where techniques, ideas, and principles of gardening could be demonstrated in practice.
Both approaches brought cameras to Earlscliffe for different reasons, and each shaped how viewers came to understand the garden and the person behind it.
The Garden as the Subject
Some programmes came to Earlscliffe because of the garden itself. Its exposed coastal position, unusual plant range, and favourable microclimate made it a compelling example of what could be achieved outside conventional expectations.
A good example is the RTÉ television series A Growing Obsession, presented by Dr Charles Nelson of the National Botanic Gardens. The series focused on people who cultivated unusual or exotic plants, visiting gardens where personal passion and experimentation played a central role. Earlscliffe featured in this context as a garden worth visiting in its own right, with David Robinson and his methods placed firmly at the centre of the story.
The programme was broadcast 7th February 1989 and the footage includes overhead shots of the garden and its features, taken from a helicopter. This was, no doubt, the most expensive part of the shoot. No cheap drones in those days!
Another example is the 1995 filming of Earlscliffe as part of Don Burke's Australian documentary programme "Burke's Backyard Overseas". Following the filming, Don Burke published an item on Earlscliffe (without prior permission) in his book ‘Burke’s Backyard Overseas – Travels with Don Burke’ published by CTC Productions 1997 1. In this book he lists "David Robinson’s garden" as one of eight places of interest to visit in Ireland.
The Garden as a Working Backdrop
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Other programmes used Earlscliffe less as a destination and more as a practical setting. In these cases, the garden provided a real, functioning environment in which techniques could be demonstrated and discussed.
The gardening series Greenfingers, produced in the 1990s for RTÉ and BBC Northern Ireland, is a clear example. Presented by a group of gardeners, horticulturalists, and designers including Gerry Daly, David Robinson, and others, the programme visited gardens across the island of Ireland.
When filmed at Earlscliffe, the focus was not primarily on the garden itself, but on illustrating specific techniques, such as the cultivation and training of fruit trees, with Earlscliffe providing a working, lived-in backdrop.
As an example, as part of one programme, David used a south-facing wall in the Earlscliffe garden to demonstrate practical growing techniques, showing how fruit trees could be trained and managed in a restricted space. Using the wall as both shelter and support, he explained and demonstrated the process of espaliering, illustrating how careful training could improve growth, structure, and fruiting even in challenging conditions.
Filming “The Sensuous Garden”
In 1997, Montagu (Monty) Don, the lead presenter of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World, came to Earlscliffe to film material to accompany his forthcoming book The Sensuous Garden. In it, Monty set out a vision of gardening rooted in the senses and the seasons, shaped as much by feeling and intuition as by plant lists or formal design.
At Earlscliffe, the garden became a working stage for those ideas. Among the plants and paths, David Robinson spoke to camera about texture, growth, and plant behaviour, breaking down scientific ideas such as photosynthesis into clear, easily grasped explanations.
At the time, nothing about the visit seemed unusual. David assumed it was simply one of many garden visits Monty was making as he prepared to launch the book, and once the cameras left, life at Earlscliffe returned to normal.
What David did not know was that the footage would take on a life of its own. Edited into short one- and two-minute segments, often consisting of close-up shots of David speaking to camera, the material was repeatedly reused on Granada’s This Morning programme over the next five years. No royalties were sought or paid. David accepted it as part of how some people chose to do business and thought little more of it.
But before any of that became apparent, and not long after the book appeared in 1998, David was made aware of something that changed his perception of the situation.
“Strangely Barren and Repugnant”
A year after the television cameras had left Earlscliffe, a short and unexpected article by Monty Don appeared in The Observer Life magazine 2. In it, he described a visit to a garden “just outside Dublin” that had been awarded two stars in the Good Gardens Guide. The garden was not named, but there was little doubt which one he meant.
Monty began by questioning the judgement of the Guide itself. Two-star gardens, he explained, were meant to be significant, yet the garden he had visited, while it “had its moments”, left him wondering whether the assessors had been “dishing out stars like a schoolteacher on a Friday afternoon”.
He then turned his attention to the garden’s management. He described a meticulously weed-free zone, maintained by what he referred to as an “elderly man” – a description that sat awkwardly with the fact that David Robinson was only in his late sixties at the time. Monty touched briefly on David’s weed-control regime before delivering his most striking judgement.
He wrote that he had “never visited a garden that felt so sterile”. The plants, he said, appeared to grow from “an untilled, curiously indeterminate surface that looked more like concrete than soil”. A garden entirely without weeds, he concluded, was “strangely barren and repugnant”.
David Robinson's Reaction to the Article
By this point, David Robinson had been a journalist for fifteen years and held a deep respect for the work and opinions of other journalists. At the same time, anyone familiar with the gardens at Earlscliffe also knew the remarkable beauty and breadth of the subtropical plants, from climatic zone 9, that flourished there. When the article appeared, the garden was open to the public and formed part of David’s livelihood. He was soon contacted by colleagues and associates who had read the piece and had immediately recognised Earlscliffe as the garden being described. Concerned that the article would damage public perception and reduce visitor numbers, David regarded its tone as derogatory and felt compelled to respond.
David Robinson’s response
David wrote to the Editor of The Observer Life magazine and the following is the text of the letter he sent:
September 3 1998
To The Editor
Observer Life
I was intrigued to read Montagu Don’s description of my garden as repugnant (Life 16 August). Admittedly he saw little of it, as the sole purpose of his visit was to use my garden as a backdrop for his TV programme ‘The Sensuous Garden’.
His article illustrates the importance of perception in gardening. He describes my soil as ‘untilled – looking more like concrete’, but I see it as the perfect medium for my plants. As the soil is untilled, their valuable surface roots are never damaged by hoeing. Surface layers are extraordinarily important to plants as they are the richest in oxygen and nutrients. This, along with a favourable microclimate, allows an amazing range of subtropical plants to flourish here.
As a young researcher in the 1950s working on soil conditions and plant growth, I soon realised that, although to the untrained eye, an untilled soil looks compacted, this is usually confined to a thin layer at the surface. Below the surface, soil structure improves as the tunnels made by soil fauna are not destroyed. Because we see through different eyes, and I imagine Monty sees as an artist and not as a plantsman, I don’t mind him describing my garden as repugnant. I take exception, however, to him calling it barren. From my ‘concrete’ seedbed, thousands of self-sown seedlings spring up each year, including Lomatia, Cordyline, Eucalyptus, and many other tender plants. Part of his TV programme on texture was shot in my naturalised Betula/Echium pininana woodland where hundreds of these plants, from the tundra and subtropics, have self seeded and have created probably the only naturalised woodland of this kind in the world.
He describes the appearance of my soil as sinister. Without comment, he walked by many unusual plants, such as Schefflera, Araucaria bidwillii, Agave, Aloe, Furcraea and others that he would never have seen before at this latitude. I wonder was it the strange plants that upset him?David Robinson, Co. Dublin
David's letter was never published, or even acknowledged by the Observer.
To hell with the begrudgers!
Although the article clearly dismayed him, David Robinson chose not to bristle or retreat. Instead, he regularly folded it into his story and made it his own.
For years afterwards, whenever he was invited to speak about the gardens at Earlscliffe, he would project slide after slide of rare and exotic plants flourishing outdoors in what many considered an improbably northern climate. At just the right moment, he would pause and quote Monty Don’s verdict that the garden was “strangely barren and repugnant”.
The contrast never failed. The line would land, the audience would laugh, and David would move on, having neatly turned criticism into context and scepticism into proof.
In 2003, shortly before he was taken ill, David Robinson wrote the following for a lecture he was asked to give in England:
I have great admiration for Monty Don. And I can understand to some extent why women viewers fall in love with him so readily. And there is a moral in this little saga about Monty’s attitude towards my garden. Monty and I can look at the same picture but we see different scenes. I am looking at the picture through the eyes of a plantsman and I see a profusion of plant growth. Monty is looking at the scene through the eyes of an artist, who likes freshly tilled soil – he sees the capped moss covered soil and doesn’t relate this to the prolific growth of plants.
And the moral is – your garden is one of the last places on earth where you can be yourself, where you can do your own thing. Elsewhere in the world we have got to conform. We can’t drive too fast, we are restricted in the type of house we can erect – but in our gardens we can do as we please. If you like purple asters and orange marigolds together in your garden – go for it, that is your prerogative. Don’t let anybody tell you that the colours clash. If Monty wants to damage his cultivated plants by uncontrolled growth or by vigorous hoeing of the surface roots that is his privilege and he is perfectly entitled to do so. But he should not call my garden barren just because I control weeds.
And so gardening has never been easier. Garden centres are full of good plants; and chemical aids including weed killers have never been safer. So your garden as part of your home is your castle. Do your own thing in it and to hell with the begrudgers.
Sadly, David died in early 2004. Shortly after this, in Jun 2004, by sheer coincidence Monty wrote an article for the Observer magazine titled "Sand and deliver" where he discusses plants that survive well at the seaside. In it he described the wonders of the Echium and this time mentioned Earlscliffe by name. 3
E pininana has the more familiar great flowering spire that can reach 3m tall. It is a biennial and will need to be frost-free, or have some protection for the foliage to survive winter, so that the flowers can follow in summer. But I have seen it grow almost like a weed at Earlscliffe, on the Howth peninsula, just outside Dublin, so it is viable in protected places in these islands. They also grow E wildpretii at Earlscliffe, which has shorter spikes, about 1.5m tall, with a dense column of flowers that are often described as red but seem to be more pink to me. Call them pinky red. It, too, is a biennial or very short-lived perennial, which will seed itself.
After this article was written, an email was sent by David Robinson's son-in-law, David Foley, to Monty Don at The Observer to inform him of David's death.
As with the letters that David Robinson had previously sent to The Observer, no reply or acknowledgement was received.
The above discussion on the article, and David Robinson's responses were then published on the Earlscliffe website.
Monty Responds
In April 2008, almost 10 years after the original article, Monty Don discovered the Earlscliffe website by accident and, after reading the above story, he felt compelled to write to us.
His note explained that he had never received any of the emails that David Robinson or David Foley had sent him and he was sad to hear of David Robinson's death. He wrote:
I am very sorry to hear that David Robinson has died.
Despite not seeing eye to eye on his use of chemical weedkillers I spent a very happy and fascinating visit to Earlscliffe just over 10 years ago and David Robinson was a charming and fascinating host. As to communication sent to The Observer - I assure you that none of this ever reached me at home. The generosity of spirit and tone of slight bafflement rather than perhaps justifiable anger that David shows in response to my comments are a tribute to his generosity and stature. I salute his memory and trust that Earlscliffe will long remain a tribute to him.
Monty Don
We wrote back to Monty:
Thank you so much for your email.
In many respects, it was a great pity that the emails from David Robinson never reached you as he would have enjoyed communicating and debating with you on various subjects.
However, he dined out on his unanswered communications.
He was often asked to give talks or lectures on various aspects of horticulture (including his own garden) and would show slides of some of the wonderful tender plants he could grow, and then talk with great amusement about how you described his garden as ‘sterile’.
Having said that, he was an avid fan of your programmes and would watch and video them every week, devouring the knowledge he could gain from them. You gave him great enjoyment in many ways.
David Foley
Postscript - and post Simazine!
By David Foley
Although it took many years to get a resolution to this discussion, I believe that the correspondence received from Monty Don showed a generosity of spirit and a genuine effort to understand my late father-in-law, David Robinson’s position on weed control, particularly his use of Simazine, while still holding a different view. It offered perspective rather than resolution. I thank Monty for that.
Looking back from a post-Simazine world, it is hard not to wonder how David Robinson would have responded to these changed times. He lived through many shifts in horticultural thinking over his lifetime and would likely have engaged vigorously with this one too. What follows is not a scientific assessment (as I am not a scientist), but a personal reflection on his approach and on how life at Earlscliffe has evolved since.
The need for food after World War II
David Robinson trained as a horticulturist in 1949, at a moment when post-war Europe faced an urgent need to increase food production. Weed control was seen as central to that effort, and the decades that followed saw intense research into chemical solutions. Products such as Simazine, developed in the 1940s and 1950s, allowed weeds to be selectively suppressed and were widely regarded as a breakthrough, contributing to improved yields and agricultural stability.
David immersed himself in this global research and became an acknowledged expert in the field. When he moved to Earlscliffe in the late 1960s, he applied that knowledge to a very different challenge: pushing the boundaries of what could be grown outdoors in Ireland. By suppressing weed competition, he created conditions in which tender subtropical plants could survive and thrive, even through winter, without protection.
Earlscliffe’s favourable microclimate on the Howth peninsula undoubtedly helped, but David believed that reducing competition from weeds was just as critical. Chemical weed control made it possible for him to manage a seven-acre garden almost entirely on his own. Aside from his wife Muriel, who continued cutting the lawns until she reached eighty, David worked largely unaided. The result was extraordinary: over more than three decades, Earlscliffe became internationally known for its collection of climatically hardy plants from five continents, drawing visitors from across the horticultural world, from curious amateurs to leading professionals and broadcasters.
A Silver bullet?
Yet this approach was never universally accepted. From the 1960s onwards, books such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson challenged the optimism surrounding chemical solutions, and environmental concerns increasingly shaped public opinion. Closer to home, David’s daughter Karen, a landscape architect, shared many of the reservations later voiced by Monty Don and urged her father to temper his views when speaking publicly.
David listened, but he remained convinced that chemical weed control was only dangerous when misused. With nearly sixty years of experience, he believed he understood both its risks and its benefits, and he pointed to the results at Earlscliffe as evidence.
David Robinson died in March 2004. One month later, Simazine was banned in Europe. The timing struck many as poignant, and it inevitably raised questions about how his great horticultural experiment would have fared without the tool he regarded as central to its success.
The Brave New World at Earlscliffe
After David’s death, responsibility for the garden passed to his daughter Karen. She not only carried that legacy forward, but extended it in her own way, adopting an approach shaped by contemporary environmental thinking and by the practical realities of modern life. Unlike her father, who had both the expertise and the time to manage every aspect of the garden himself, Karen has had to balance its needs alongside a demanding career. In doing so, she has been open to outside expertise and has embraced labour-intensive but effective alternatives to chemical weed control, including the use of bark and wood-chip mulches.
The garden has adapted well. Weed control now requires more sustained attention, but Earlscliffe continues to thrive and evolve. Some plants have benefited from the absence of Simazine, while others that flourished under David’s regime are harder to replace, particularly given his exceptional knowledge and access to rare plant sources.
Any comparison between then and now is necessarily complex. The garden today is not better or worse, but different. Climate change has introduced challenges David never faced, with harsher winters and record-breaking summers bringing losses unknown in earlier decades. Yet in places the garden is arguably stronger than ever, shaped by new priorities, constraints, and understandings.
Perhaps one day Monty Don might revisit Earlscliffe and see how it has evolved in a post-Simazine world. It is tempting to think he would be pleasantly surprised.
And it is equally tempting to think that David Robinson would be too.
References & Further Reading
- See Burke's Backyard Overseas, Don Burke, 1997, Crows Nest, N.S.W. Titles Distributed by Gary Allen Pty Ltd, ISBN: 0646339796 ↩
- Fertility Symbols, Montagu Don, Observer Life Magazine, 16 August 1998 ↩
- See Sand and deliver, Monty Don, Observer Life Magazine, 27 June 2004 ↩
Page last updated: 18 Jul 2026