Who Should Replace Monty Don on Gardeners' World? The Runners and Riders, Ranked

After 23 years, 700-odd episodes and one very famous dog, Britain's most soothing broadcaster is hanging up his TV secateurs. The BBC now faces its trickiest succession since Doctor Who regenerated - pick badly, and a national comfort blanket unravels.

There's a very particular kind of grief reserved for the departure of a person you have never met but have nonetheless let into your home, at 8pm, every Friday, for over two decades. That's the mood among Britain's gardeners this month, after Monty Don announced - via an Instagram reel featuring his dog Ned, because of course it did - that he is stepping down from Gardeners' World.

"It's been fantastic," Don said, with the understatement of a man who has just informed the nation he's leaving. "I've loved every minute and I've worked with amazing people and it's been a joy to share my gardening life, and my dogs, with you. But it's time for a change." He called it, a little theatrically but not inaccurately, "the end of a chapter." In a follow-up statement he was more direct still: "I have decided that the current series of Gardener's World is to be my last." He'll see out the current run before leaving at the end of 2026, promising "more books to write, more programmes to make," and - in the sentence that will bring a tear to even the flintiest allotment-holder's eye - that he'll "still be gardening, dog by side, here at Longmeadow."

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The BBC's response had the careful warmth of an organisation that knows exactly what it is losing. Kate Phillips, the corporation's chief content officer, called Don "utterly unique, a wonderfully engaging broadcaster with a soothing, calm presence who has inspired so many," adding that the BBC would "miss him on the show hugely." She isn't wrong. Since taking over in 2003 - his second stint, having first presented the show in the 1990s - Don didn't just host Gardeners' World, he redefined what it was for: less a magazine show about hanging baskets, more a slow, meditative hour about mortality, seasons and the quiet dignity of a well-turned compost heap. Losing him is less like losing a presenter and more like losing weather.

So who inherits Longmeadow - or wherever the show goes next, since Don's own garden may well go with him?

The favourite

Bookmakers have Adam Frost as the clear front-runner, at around 2/1, and it isn't hard to see why. Frost has quietly co-presented the show for a decade, bringing a warmer, more everyman energy than Don's country-squire cool, and he has already stepped up to fill the silence: asked about Don's departure, he said Monty "is going to be sorely, sorely missed" - the kind of double-sorry that tells you exactly how rattled the sofa has been at Gardeners' World HQ. Frost is safe, popular and unthreatening to the show's format. He is also, frankly, the establishment pick, and the BBC has a well-documented weakness for establishment picks. My worry isn't whether Frost can do the job - he plainly can - it's whether promoting the safest man in the greenhouse is the right call for a show that badly needs a jolt of new energy, not more of the same, gentler shade of beige cardigan.

The insurgent

Frances Tophill sits close behind at around 3/1, and on merit she probably ought to be favourite. She's sharp, unpretentious, genuinely knowledgeable about growing food rather than merely admiring herbaceous borders, and she speaks to an audience - renters, first-time growers, people with a windowsill rather than a walled garden - that Gardeners' World has historically been polite about but not actually for. The catch, according to reporting around the announcement, is that she may simply not want the job; friends have suggested she's wary of becoming the full-time face of a 45-minute weekly institution when she has her own projects on the go. If that's true, it would be a real shame, because Tophill is exactly the kind of presenter who could drag the show's audience twenty years younger without losing the twenty years it already has.

The wildcards worth taking seriously

Arit Anderson (7/1) has spent the last few years quietly becoming the most important voice on the programme, turning "sustainable gardening" from a niche segment into the show's actual moral centre - drought-proofing, rewilding, gardening for a hotter Britain. Given that climate anxiety is now one of the biggest reasons younger people say they've taken up gardening at all, promoting Anderson wouldn't be a diversity box-tick; it would be the single most editorially coherent choice on this list. Advolly Richmond, appointed OBE in this year's New Year Honours for services to horticulture, brings something no other candidate does: proper scholarship, a garden historian's eye, and a willingness to talk openly about an industry that has not always been welcoming to people who look like her. She'd change the show's register more than any other name here - arguably too much for a single presenting chair, but a Gardeners' World that used her more, not less, would be a better one.

Then there's Jamie Butterworth - 26 years old, one of the country's youngest commercial nursery owners, and, by his own account, someone who started gardening at nine years old because he was watching Monty Don. He worked alongside Don on the Dog Garden at Chelsea, has been dubbed (not unfairly) "the Jamie Oliver of gardening" for his book's mission to demystify growing the way Oliver demystified cooking, and has just started filming for the show itself, calling it "a dream come true." He's a long shot on the betting markets, and probably too green - sorry - for the top job outright. But as Don's actual protégé, handing him a proper platform alongside a more experienced co-host would be the closest thing to a passing of the torch the show could stage.

Further down the list sit the nostalgia picks: Joe Swift (10/1), Carol Klein (12/1, and much-loved, though she is 80 and has been open about a cancer diagnosis last year, which makes a full-time return unlikely), even Alan Titchmarsh (20/1) - the show's presenter before Don, and 77 now, which tells you everything about how desperate some fans are to simply rewind the clock rather than face the future.

My verdict

If I were the BBC, I wouldn't replace Monty Don with one Monty Don-shaped person. I'd split the job. Put Adam Frost in the chair he's already half-occupying, because audiences hate discontinuity more than they admit and he offers a safe, familiar hand on the tiller. But build the show's actual editorial ambition around Arit Anderson, whose sustainability brief is where gardening as a subject is obviously heading, and give Jamie Butterworth real room to grow into the role Don occupied for a nine-year-old watching in the 1990s. Gardeners' World's genius was never really about one man's charisma, however considerable Don's turned out to be - it was about making an hour of television feel like time well spent in a garden. Whoever gets the job should be judged on whether they protect that feeling, not on how convincingly they can impersonate the man who's leaving.

Max Letek is a marketing consultant and the founder of Garden-Review.co.uk.