Gardeners' World (BBC2, 8.30pm)

WITH spring just around the corner, the green-fingered team returns for the beginning of another gardening year. Monty Don is at Longmeadow tackling urgent pruning, as well as revealing some of the projects he has in store over the coming months. Carol Klein will be visiting some of the nation's greatest gardens to find out why their borders work so well, starting at RHS Wisley in Surrey, while Joe Swift gives the first of three design masterclasses on how to make the most of a small town garden.

Don, 58, doesn't mind sharing his two-acre garden, Longmeadow. with around two million viewers. It stands on low, flat ground in Herefordshire and if Don hadn’t planted more than 1,400 trees and hedges, when he and his wife first moved there more than 20 years ago, they would now be living on a semi-flooded, frozen plain. “We could have left it that way, open and flat, exposed to the elements, but we decided to do something different and plant a garden with shelter,” Don told Radio Times.

Although he has said in the past that gardens are “personal, private and, above all, intimate,” fans of the show feel it is as much their garden as it is his.

Don has 24 small gardens contained in his plot of land. After all his intense and thoughtful planting, does he find the fact that the garden is now public property, complete with a camera crew, difficult to handle for him and wife Sarah and their three children?

“Well, it’s true that we have to live here, but the BBC is very respectful of that and we only shoot 40 days a year. All the rest of the time, it’s my garden; our garden. It’s a long time to have your garden to yourself.”

He does confess to not liking other TV presenters working in his garden. “When other presenters want to come in, I find it difficult. It would be nonsensical to say I didn’t, but I accept it’s part of what happens. It is tricky because it’s my creation and part of the idea of it is that it has hidden parts. There is a private element to the garden. When you are in one bit, you glimpse another but you never see it in its entirety.

“It’s hard to remember that we live here, it is attached to our house and for some days a year it’s as if we live above the shop, but we have two decades of private history that resides there. I accept the fact that there is an element of people thinking it is their garden. I am prepared to share it on television. It hasn’t been a problem so far – touch wood.”

Nelson in His Own Words (BBC2, 9pm)

WHILE we've had more than 30 portrayals of the legendary warrior, most recently in the new Night at the Museum movie, this is an attempt to show us what the real Horatio Nelson was like.

The admiral was a prolific writer of letters, which reveal that he was a very different and more complex man than you'd expect from a battle-scarred leader of the British fleet. Using Nelson's personal correspondence, this drama-documentary reveals how he was measured in his praise of his rivals in case they threatened his own career prospects, as well as revealing how his passionate love affair with Emma Hamilton changed his life forever.

Royal Shakespeare Company thespian Jonathan Slinger - perhaps best known for his work on 2001 movie A Knight's Tale - portrays the man who changed British warfare forever.

Artsnight (BBC2, 11pm)

THIS is a new four-part cultural magazine series for which various famous faces will each guest edit. First up, Silk and The Village actress Maxine Peake takes the reins, as she celebrates voices marginalised by mainstream culture.

She talks to Nottingham-based electropunk duo Sleaford Mods, discusses the role of women in television with an all-female panel that includes actress Jessica Hynes, and explores the life and legacy of Salford playwright and screenwriter Shelagh Delaney.