Episode list

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.

Monty begins the second leg of his tour of the gardens of Spain in what is generally viewed as the touristy south, and thus many visitors may not inherently think of gardens in the region. He starts on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca where he visits four very different gardens from each other with four very different histories. He then heads to the mainland, coastal Andalusia, where the primary plant of the region is the palm, most specifically the date palm, which serves a purpose beyond fruit production. Urbanization has overtaken many historic gardens of the region, however certain measures, such as one in the town of Estepona, are underway to regain proverbial green spaces. He travels inland, with his first stop being Ronda, one garden which takes advantage of the deep gorge that runs through the middle of the city. He concludes this leg of his journey in Seville, the capital of Andalucía, which has historic significance in the gardening world if only as the trade center where many plants from the new world were brought to for distribution throughout Europe. One of the recurring themes in the discussion of many of these gardens, especially the newer ones, is the adaptation to address climate change in what is already a hot and rather dry region.

Monty begins the third and final leg of his tours of Spanish gardens, this leg in the north of the country, where many people end their spiritual journeys, namely those that make the pilgrimage hiking the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, what is considered the Catholic center of the country. While not all religious in nature, the gardens he visits in and around the city all have some spiritual component to them. He then works his way eastward generally along the Bay of Biscay coast, his final stop in the Basque region specifically in Bilbao, he noticing signs of the Camino all along the way even in the remotest of locations. Two of the gardens he visits en route are as much about how they came into existence as they are about the gardens themselves, one which was literally transplanted, the other developed in a sleepless night's thoughts. In and around Bilbao, the common theme of the gardens is the reclamation of what were heavy industrial sites back into green space, the one in Bilbao itself tied to the city's arguably most famous landmark, the Guggenheim Museum. He ends his Spanish journey after a six hour train ride to Spain's second largest city, Barcelona in Catalonia on the Mediterranean coast. Beyond visiting the public green spaces including the promenade of Las Ramblas, an old riverway, he visits gardens inserted into buildings in this highly built-up city.