Monty Don is one of the most renowned gardening voices in the UK but in recent years the BBC Gardeners' World star has also opened up about his own personal life.

Recently Monty, 70, spoke a little about how he feels about death and how long he thinks he’ll live. He has said he likes the idea of returning to the earth he has spent his life cultivating.

Speaking to the Times about his “good genes” and whether old age would stop him having a garden he said: “No. I’ll drop. You’ll discover me in the cabbage patch. I’ve always had this idea that when I die, I’ll just dissolve into everything. That’s not a scary thought. That’s fine.”

This isn’t the only time Monty has talked about his health in the past few years with the Gardeners’ World presenter writing about his double knee replacement.

Monty admitted that having consulted a GP about problems with his knees, he ignored the advice given, something that ultimately resulted in him having a double knee replacement.

Monty recalled his in column for the BBC Gardener’s World Magazine: "For the last 10 years or more my knees have been giving me the gyp and, it turns out, slowly deteriorating. This is not so unusual or unexpected.

“I have spent 70 years kneeling on them, asking them to stagger about under unreasonably heavy loads or, until 10 years ago, pounding around tarmacked roads. They have had a long, hard time of it.”

Monty added: “[My doctor] prescribed painkillers and told me to stop digging. I ignored both aspects of the prescription.

"Last summer I finally got round to having scans and seeing a surgeon and was duly told both my knees needed replacing. This was a bit of a surprise as I had been working on the assumption that I had one good knee and one bad knee.”

Having had the double knee replacement Monty said it had now enabled him to go back to more vigorous gardening activities and that the operation should enable him to keep going for a little bit longer, a bit, he said, like his beloved Land Rover.

He said: “I shall be able to do things again, to get stuck in and crack on….with a fair wind and thanks to superb surgical skills, I should, like my beaten-up old Defender, keep ploughing on a bit longer.”