Mr Meldrew

16 May 2012

Plain simple degrees, and lots of them, are what the garden needs this miserable May. Fahrenheit or Celsius; it won't mind.

The plants are in as much of a muddle as I am, not so much early or late as all over the place and not going anywhere. Oak has never been so far before ash, but magnolias are just sitting, their flowers half open, some petals frosted, others effectively drowned. And my favourite winter-flowering cherry has caught that nasty fungus and lost all its leaves.

Dreaming

14 May 2012

A reverie is a comfortable place to be. I have just spent ten, fifteen, I'm not sure how many minutes watching Berberis petals float over a weir: tiny flakes of gold on black water, drifting slowly, with a growing sense of purpose, over the surface of my little rock-rimmed pond.

Triumphant

5 May 2012

A confession

25 April 2012

When did 'dilettante' become a term of abuse? 'Amateur' no longer has the status it once had, either. I think the probable reason is that both suggest a life in which not every minute needs to be spent in gainful employment. A leisured class, indeed; 'posh boys', even.

Looking both ways

23 April 2012

Is this a moral dilemma, or an aesthetic one - or is it a dilemma at all?

You possess a building which all agree, monotonously, is describing as 'iconic'. One view of it, from a public road and across a riverside meadow, is as well-known (all right, then, iconic) as any view in the country. The catch is that the reverse view, from the building and its surroundings, is the public road, emphasised by traffic lights and the resulting line of the brake lights of waiting cars.

Is there an obligation on the proprietor to leave the view open, both ways,  or would he be justified in planting appropriate trees to screen the road from his own viewpoint?

The building, you may even have guessed, is King's college chapel in Cambridge. During the summer coach parties of tourists make an inevitable stop to photograph the view.

Mandalay (sur Mer)

12 April 2012

My visits to the tropics have never been anything but fleeting and my impressions of tropical gardens have never advanced beyond confused admiration. Do our gardening rules, or conventions, or idioms, apply? If not, what distinguishes a garden in the tropics from a glorious hothouse display?

We are just back from the legendary island of Mustique, a speck in the Caribbean where normal rules are suspended; where tropical nature appears entirely benign. We were guests of Felix Dennis at Mandalay, his house derived from a Balinese temple and surrounded by gardens (many acres of them) that magically answer the questions I just asked. Our rules can certainly apply - and tropical colour and vigour can give them extraordinary new validity. The essence, of course, is control, as it is in gardens everywhere - but control of more powerful forces. There are plants that can grow a yard in a night, and leaves that could brain you if they fell on your head.

Mandalay, though, is almost English in its peacefulness, its composure, its slow revelations, enclosure by enclosure, of potent growth masterfully calmed. What is Balinese (swooping gables like mid-ocean waves, gates and screens, intricate carving, and solemn stone figures) speaks a visual language that justifies the cultural gap.

The Caribbean has no such language of its own: shanties and colonial porches are a pretty limited patois. But the devotional symbolism of the East (you can almost hear the chants and gongs) is at least as potent as the Greco-roman idiom of our own classic gardens.

The first gate, with its concave-gabled roof, shows you a downhill curving avenue of palms though a park of short grass mown not by sheep, you might imagine, but by the tortoises that wander everywhere on the island. Then comes a second gate, flanked by menacing stone warriors and flaming dragons, before the first courtyard, calm, domestic, with two square fountain pools in a carpet of grass. Not grass as we know it, but a deep spongy surface that rears up in random mounds. Enormous conch shells hold water in their white basins on either side of the next gate: the front door of the single-storey house. Fire comes before water; challenge before welcome.

Fast forward

30 March 2012

Young Promise

28 March 2012

Tidy people with orderly minds are excluded, I'm afraid, from the sort of pleasure I had the other day rummaging in the potting shed when I noticed, buried in old seed packets and balls of string, a thick little black book.

It is our garden diary for 1975, a year when we planned and planted with an energy I only half remember. The notes are half in my hand-writing, half in another, much neater and with more complete sentences and many references to nature, as well as this kind of thing: 'April 25th. Made second sowings of lettuce, spinach, beetroot. Planted Helleborus corsicus behind cottage with R. rubrifolia,

iTrad

21 March 2012

I'd be surprised if David Hockney's iPad paintings don't inspire a whole new school of art. Apparently he emails his morning's work to chums - which must create a bit of a problem for his dealer. Are these originals? Since the difference between an original and a reproduction is the whole basis for the fine art trade I imagine some head-scratching must be going on.

iPad painting is not as easy as a real artist makes it look: witness my early effort, my tree of the month, alongside. This was done with my index finger; next step is to acquire a stylus, the sort of pen that works on a screen. I see that there are already a dozen kinds: which to choose is the next question.

I've tried two different painting apps, Brushes (apparently Hockney's medium) and My Brush - which seems to me rather simpler to use. They offer what appears to be an almost infinite range of colours, lines and washes. Also the facility not available to a student before of erasing any stroke at will, and even playing back the whole process of creating the picture, dab by dab.

A taste of honey

12 March 2012

I was ambushed by a blast of honey just now; an overwhelming jar-full of scent, clear, golden, sweet and even waxy. I jumped like Winnie the Pooh. The trees around are bare, a few willow catkins are opening, maples are just showing points of promise where their buds will be ……. Where are the flowers?

Then I saw, behind a screen of the fine twigs of Japanese maples, some modest spots of

Turned inwards

9 March 2012

Reading an article on the gardens of Suzhou by John Dixon Hunt in the excellent Historic Gardens Review  Historic Gardens Review   reminded me of my one visit to this capital of classic Chinese gardening in 1989.

Then it was called Soochow. I took a train (with some difficulty) from Shanghai and hired a bike to join the thousands who pedalled sedately, like a steady humming river, along the avenues of this historic town. There is a flavour of Amsterdam about its canals (which were kept impeccable, at least in the centre, I remember, by men and women in punts with nets to scoop up the slightest litter).

In its concentration of gardens it could be compared with Kyoto - except that Kyoto is a city of temples and palaces in a naturally beautiful valley, while Soochow (do you say Kolkata?) is a commercial centre on a river plain. Its gardens therefore have no prospects, no interest in the world beyond, but concentrate your thoughts on the ingenuities and intricacies within their high circling walls.

The gardener's art was how to make a short stroll satisfying, even exciting, within these

Innocent pursuits

5 March 2012

The Murdoch family has had such a bad press recently that I keep remembering a visit to Dame Elisabeth, Rupert Murdoch's mother, at her garden south of Melbourne, it must be ten years ago. Ten years ago she was only 93; at 103 she remains a central figure in the cultural and charitable life of Melbourne - and a passionate gardener.

We were introduced to her at a garden festival at Hatfield House by Marchioness Mollie. We went to tea with her a year or two later at Cruden Farm, the house her husband Keith gave her when they married in 1928. There was nothing formal about it; she put the kettle on and fetched a cake tin, then told us that she had just driven to Melbourne and back (she drove herself in a small car) to chair a meeting of one of her

charities. The garden, she said, was too big to walk round, so she drove us in her buggy, stopping every few yards to point out a plant with evident knowledge and relish. There was a lot of new planting going on around a recently-made lake.

You reach Cruden Farm down a long curving alley of Corymbia citriodora, the gum tree equivalent of Betula jacquemontii, but whiter of trunk and more sinuous. A

Solitary

4 March 2012

There may not, I suppose, be many records of the birthdays of goldfish, but mine has passed his 35th, and we are quietly celebrating together. What's more, he has passed more than 30 years of his life swimming alone, the only inhabitant of his tank in the conservatory. His companion died and I hesitated to introduce a stranger into his placid life.

I am no judge of a goldfish's state of mind; he may relish his independence, he may be lonely and depressed (or indeed he may be a she) but there he is every morning basking peacefully among the leaves. A few flakes of fish food give him obvious pleasure - but what he likes best is the hose; a jet dropped from high enough to bubble oxygen into his water. Each time I do this he swims a little jig.

His name is Diogenes, after another loner who lived in a tub - although I like to think my Diogenes is more of a philosopher.

Root Cause

20 February 2012

Frost at midnight

13 February 2012

Thought-bytes

6 February 2012

I have embraced my iPad as eagerly as anyone, but I do not twitter and will not tweet. It's not that I disdain brevity of expression. Indeed for almost forty years my Pocket Wine Book has tried to encapsulate the essentials of its field in far shorter phrases than the 120 characters allowed in a tweet. That's what I call verbosity.

Danger Zone

1 February 2012

Nature, noticed

23 January 2012

Ever since Picasso declared war on beauty, especially feminine beauty, mocking it or jumbling it up, artists have fought shy of it. 'Major' artists, at least. Lucian Freud, as major as they come, found ugliness in the human flesh that should, surely, evoke our warmest feelings. It is perverse to say, as some critics do, that he was loving the blotchy flab he painted so precisely. What he was loving was paint.

Steady State

20 January 2012

When it rains properly, instead of the usual desultory dripping, it forms a shining crescent in front of the house around the circular lawn. I enjoy it from the bathroom window, sometimes by moonlight, before going down to see what the raingauge says. Very occasionally (but this takes half a day's downpour) we get a shining circle. To see the beauty of puddles you must live where they are rare, and it feels as though the past year has been as arid as any since we moved in to Saling.

A dream of ponds

9 January 2012

There is a landscape I have never seen that has been haunting and inspiring me for twenty years. It is a chain of ponds in a painting: a retreating procession of silver surfaces that took hold of my imagination and still won't let go.

Wherever I first saw it, presumably in a book, it went with me to France when I was trying, with laughable over-ambition, to impose my will on two hundred acres of deep bocage. I set about channelling the stream that issued from a generous spring in the hillside to form three oval ponds descending into the valley so that from the track at the top they formed a gleaming chain. It was a struggle. The soil was so 'filtrant', to use the French term, that as soon as I cut into the marshy stream bed as it meandered down the hill it immediately carved itself a channel and disappeared in the coarse sandy ground.

Eventually, using a piece of pipe here and a primitive bridge of logs there, I persuaded it into my little ponds. For a few summer weeks I had my picture. Then the deer identified them as drinking troughs; their hooves broke into the lip of each carefully excavated hollow and the water found another way downhill. Cattle joined them from another field and a general swamp began to form.

You would be amazed how soon goat willow seedlings spring up, reeds multiply, and the muddy mix is a pond no more. As for the swamp spurge, Euphorbia  palustris, I optimistically planted;  the Azalea mollis in bold groups, the bluebells and ferns and the red-stemmed willows, their trashing was almost instantaneous. Do you know how much deer love stropping their velvet on young willows? Does the aspririn in the bark cure their headaches?

The picture stayed in my mind though, and came thrillingly to life when Lady Salisbury apparently dreamed the same dream at Hatfield House. Using the spillway over the dam that forms the lake, she remade the identical scene - but solidly in sensible material, and with an abundant supply of water: three shining discs descending, in this case, into an ancient wood.

Did we share the same inspiration? Indeed we did, And last weekend I saw it, in its frame, for the first time. It hangs in the wonderful little gallery in Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. It is Gainsborough's painting of the park at Holywells, a mile

A tree spurge

30 December 2011

The name of my daughter's hillside, the slope at hang-glider pitch overlooking the bay of Beaulieu, is La Petite Afrique. From her house, seven hundred feet above sea level, the mountains of Corsica can appear on the horizon, ninety miles to the south, usually at dawn. There are, remarkably, no springs along this cliff-line, where the Alps stop dead at the coast. Where does the snow-melt go? Much of it out to sea down the flood-drain of the River Var, but presumably also in submarine sweet water springs far below the Mediterranean.

So La Petite Afrique is dry, facing south-east and exposed to the daylong onslaught of the sun. The rubble at the foot of its crowning limestone cliffs is none the less fertile: a forest, indeed, of wild olives and tall pale-green Aleppo pines, with carob and

occasional ash trees, rosemary and thyme, and a strange tree euphorbia that seems to grow nowhere else along the coast.

Euphorbia dendroides is a beauty: a highly desirable dome of brilliant spurge green in spring, flowers of that intense yellow-green covering grey-blue leaves. Old plants are low-branching trees measuring five or six feet high and wide from a single short stem. Seedlings catch your eye as you scramble up the rocks; just four or five tiny blue leaves on

Water on the mind

20 December 2011

Water is always on my mind - or in my prayers. After forty years in Essex I should be used to months without rain, but it still makes me anxious, looking at a barren sky. I'm sure this is why I make it as evident as I can in the garden. I can't manage a stream, but I can do ponds, little cascades and a fountain: six tricks in all, designed to fool you into thinking water is flowing from one end of the garden to the other, coming to light intermittently on the way.

It first appears in the form of a duck pond, the central feature of the little park in front of the house. By the end of the summer, especially this year, there is as much beach as water, and the carp flip about in the muddy shallows with dry backs. Then, a hundred yards away and just beside the house, a little cascade delivers what might be the same water (it isn't) into the moat. The illusion works when the duck pond is

brimming in the spring, but in any case the

Constructive Neglect

12 December 2011

I suppose I used to assume that moss and damp went together; that our mossy bits were just shady and badly drained (as they may well be). I had no intention of cutting down the trees or installing new drainage, so tant pis; let's enjoy the moss.

But here we are, after one of the driest years of our times, and there is more moss than ever, so it can't be rain. Anyway it looks marvellous. If I hadn't read so many lawn care articles I'd say I prefer moss to grass. The Moss Garden in Kyoto (the result, they say, of ages of neglect) makes me want to take up neglect as my retirement hobby.

Back to previous Trad's Diaries

By early April we had had a mere 140 millimetres of rain in the year. Since then we have had 160. If it was the wettest April it is the coldest May. The only plants that keep on growing in this low temperature are weeds and grass; the mower sinks in to the boggy ground and any step on the border to reach the weeds leaves a foot-shaped puddle.

And yet. When I splashed out this morning in my winter coat to see what could be done I walked into a wall of what to me is the Chelsea smell: azaleas in all their boudoir sweetness. The pale faces of Azalea mollis, soft yellow in the grey light, were gently chiding me: look at us, you grumpy old fool.

formation. Individuals feel the same pull and move at the same speed.

I switch focus and look deeper, through clear water to snail trails (if that's what they are); paler tracks on the leaf-littered bottom. It has always baffled me how we can switch our vision from reflections to the surface, and through the surface to what lies below, with only a change of thought.

Three feet from the weir the petals change course, reset their sails and pick up speed. They keep in their flotillas, but now there is urgency in their drift, they collide, form bigger squadrons, then coalesce into a pool of gold to hurry through the gap between the rocks. They fall perhaps an inch, perhaps two, but just enough to break the surface into silver glints.

As a way of seeing the whole world it is much more interesting than a grain of sand.

Why are there no other colours? Two weeks of constant rain seem to have left most plants perplexed. The Crown Imperials have finished; one or two tentative flowers sprinkle little pink geraniums and a burgeoning perennial honesty. The apple trees are in blossom, but the colour seems washed from their petals: there is no wattage in any colour except green - and the bright lamps of White Triumphator, its pointed petals upright despite the downpours.

If it is true, as Christopher Lloyd feared, that this marvellous bulb is growing degenerate, and that its stock is weakening, it would be a terrible shame. It is seventy years old, I learn - though I still don't know who coined its strange name. But if this is weakness; three years in the ground and still standing straight after two weeks of rain; triumphator, meaning hero of a Roman 'triumph', is right.

that only 'expert' opinion is worth listening to. And an expert (disregarding the disrespectful description of 'a drip under pressure') means a person employed to know and pronounce. Even by a district council.

For myself, I reclaim the name of dilettante. And even, indeed, amateur. We are people who do things for their inherent interest and the love of it. We offer views we are not technically qualified to hold - or at least not to mention. A dilettante is probably a hedonist, pleasure being his goal.

A dilettante is not so concerned with the parts that aren't so much fun. There, I've confessed.

Members of the college learn to accept the traffic across the summer view, softened by leafy trees. In winter it is different. From teatime on there is only one thing you see across the Cam from the college: winking red lights.

There are worse problems, I know. But there is also the hope of a solution, at least in part. The college has just succeeded in 'respacing' (which means felling) half the trees between the road and the river. Italian alders planted 40 years ago as a nurse-crop for oaks (this was the plan when we lost all the magnificent elms) have finally gone - in the nick of time: the oaks they were 'nursing' were almost shaded to death.

In their place are planted more oaks, lots of hawthorn, and an entirely new feature for the Backs: a crowd of Chinese dogwoods, which will make a mass of white flowers at May Ball time in June, and (I hope) colour up in an orange/harlequin way in October.

Flanking the rather stark and lonely stone Back Gate of the college we are planting a pair of weeping willows: the first step in screening the intrusive traffic lights. In other words, no obvious move; just slow and sensitive improvements.

o'clock the sun goes down in purple and gold in the centre of this magic mirror.

Now you are in a cloister of gleaming burnished deep brown wood carved in fantastic intricacy and filled with the colours of flowers and fish. Scarlet and silver koi dart and glide among tall blue water-lilies. Pale blue plumbago covers the banks between purple and scarlet flowers and deep green circular leaves. A gallery at one end of the cloister is open to a view of palms and distant hills. And each room off the polished corridors has a balcony revealing another kind of garden: some intense with bamboo and idols, some serenely open to the world.

There are many layers, cultural and physical, at Mandalay; of formality, for instance, from the central drawing room, frescoed as a derelict stone temple, its roof just waving palms, to studies and bedrooms and playrooms and the swimming pool, an alternative heart to the house. The pool, surrounding an island and surrounded by plants, is filled by one long cascade and spills over another, seemingly into the sea far below. I wish I could name half the plants, but among the bougainvilleas, as varied as azaleas, the hibiscus and gingers and strelitzias, heliconias and anthuriums, the frangipani trees with their white flowers on bare branches scent the night. There are layers of lower storeys too, joined by staircases and galleries among the jostling fronds of palms.

Felix Dennis is an extraordinary Maecenas, publisher, poet and author as well as the gardener who, here and in Warwickshire, orchestrates such creative planting. Even Mandalay pales beside the thousands of acres of native trees he is progressively planting for our general benefit near Stratford on Avon.

there will be less and less reason to grow them: a week in flower and a month looking miserable is not going to keep the popular vote.

We rarely pay our lawns much attention, but last winter there was no ignoring the moss/grass ratio. In some places it was hard to find any grass. We scraped out a small mountain of moss with a scarifier and then went to work with a great yellow machine  much like the ones that leave a ribbon of tarmac behind them. Its revolving drum cuts furrows an inch and a half apart and drops grass seed from a hopper straight in. It hasn't rained for a month, though, and I fear we'll have to use the sprinkler before it's banned, any day now, to see any germination.

Hosta glauca, Asters, yellow foxglove, hebe, Viburnum fragrans. Piptanthus flowering'. (Most of which are still here).

Who was my co-diarist? His observations grow sharper: 'Potted geraniums in greenhouse. There are more in flower every day, particularly Catford Belle, which seems more dwarf than miniature. The ferns are doing well, Adiantums especially fine and the effect in the shaded corner is almost sub-tropical. First strawberry flowers out; fed with liquid fertilizer'.

It is bewildering territory. I'm tempted to try my hand at a completely new skill - or at least hobby - simply because it's there, between my emails, my newspaper and the weather forecast.  A flash in the pan, maybe, but at least a great new challenge.

dull yellow. It is Lindera obtusiloba, a Chinese bush I love for its waywardly three-lobed leaves, no two quite the same, memorably bright yellow in October. The leaves are slightly scented too.

I had never noticed its little umbels of flowers before, or even known they were perfumed. I have never seen any fruit. But I wonder at the energy the plant must expend in scenting the air like this. The reproductive urge takes many wonderful forms. The twigs I brought into the kitchen are giving everything we eat and drink a taste of honey.

limits. Rule one, it seems, was to keep pricking the visitor's curiosity, raising his expectations and then frustrating them. Each garden is a complex of elaborate low buildings (their roofs and eaves are very much part of the picture, curved and convoluted and decorated with dragons and creatures of all sorts). A great deal of the space between is filled with great grey rocks, as craggy or water-worn as possible. They are utterly unlike the calm solemn boulders of Kyoto; these gesticulate as though they want to move around and change places.

Often you find yourself squeezing through a claustrophobic chasm between high stones with nothing but stone to see, then emerge beside a little pool full of technicolor carp. A lacquered pavilion in the midst contains the master's desk, scrolls and pens; an icon of tranquil scholarship (or, for that matter, petty-fogging bureaucracy). He cannot, you imagine, sit there long without succumbing to one of the insistent invitations to walk: over these stepping stones, into this rockery to admire the peonies or through that moongate where the skirts of a willow – and perhaps other skirts - are beckoning.

You pass a bamboo screen and glimpse another pool, or flurry of rocks, mysteriously inaccessible. Your steps are frustrated, your exploration interrupted, your expectation raised at each turn. As John Dixon Hunt points out, it is the art of delay, of delicious foreplay. Even a moongate is a means for making you step on alone (or bow your companion through before you). But I don't think these are companionable gardens. A drinks party would be a solecism, almost an outrage. As, indeed are the crocodiles of visitors, both here and in Kyoto. Such gardens are turned inward to the point of obsession - or is it me obsessing?

Rugby goalpost, as it were, with hips. Tall trees shade the white clapboard house, one of them an oak I have never seen before or since, an evergreen with leaves rather like Quercus turneri but immensely tall and as deeply drooping as a weeping beech. Its name is Q. Firthii. I want one. Hydrangeas are stacked in tall banks round the house, their feet in a lush bed of agapanthus; blue and white the predominant colours.

But any memory of the planting is hazy beside my memory of the woman who was brought home here as a bride at 19 and has reigned in the garden (and in Melbourne) ever since. The innocent pursuits of philanthropy and gardening have occupied her for eighty years.

to their trunks) while the squadrons scattered on the long grass were just showing their heads.

The same thing doesn't quite seem to apply to winter aconites. I planted them close in to a mature beech where the tree roots are densest. They flowered, but sparsely. Each year, though, their seedlings form a wider circle round the tree, growing better and flowering earlier as they reach what is presumably less rooty ground. Or is it? Are the most active roots in reality under the edge of the canopy? Do aconites agree with snowdrops?

I listen, straining to hear - not that there is a blast to drown the sound of drops. On the contrary, 'trance' is the very word for the suspended animation of the invisible garden. Yes: there is a sound: a timid tinkling of water on the move, in a downpipe, into a drain. I wait, to be sure, seeing nothing. In clear daylight all life, all movement was locked. Has the wind changed? There are no stars; the pressure from the east must be deflating and letting a gentle front of mildness steal in, not seen but very faintly heard.

Coleridge will not go away. ' Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee ……' But I still prefer spring to winter

contents of each other's minds.

Surely this is the whole point of literature. The power and delight of a library is that each book you open is a glimpse into another's consciousness. Lectures, essays, sermons were formal means of exposition. And the highest means of all was poetry.

Now we have twitter; the thumb-jerk expression of fleeting thoughts. It is pure chance if they have any significance beyond their moment of conception - and transmission. Will some future Jobs or Zuckerberg find a way of validating second thoughts - even third ones? Could there be a shiny new format for joined-up thinking?

Here in the seclusion of a much bigger garden there is near-silence. A couple of blue tits come to the peanuts in the feeder, a woodpecker cackles and a pheasant shouts. One blackbird sings in the weeping willow but there is hardly any movement in the bushes. I wonder why. And then I realize. There is nowhere in this garden, literally nowhere, that a squirrel can't reach. Our trees have given them a monopoly; total control. Birds have to go into the village to nest.

scenery or sunsets. Not the faintest memory of Turner. His Yorkshire Wolds (or the corners he chooses) are interchangeable with the bottom of your lane - or indeed my daily Essex walk.

Loving trees as I do, I find endless details to admire even in my 40 minutes to the bridge over the stream and back: the alders, the oaks, the bat willows and the hazel bushes (their catkins are starting to lengthen). Their winter colours, in sun or shade, or rain, form a palette of extraordinary richness and beauty and their tracery against the clouds is infinitely fine.

Hockney is celebrating precisely these things, and giving us permission to do the same. He uses strong colours partly in celebration, out of sheer excitement at what he sees. Partly, perhaps, to surprise his metropolitan viewers into looking at something they would otherwise take for granted.

Does it sound smug to say that I could never take a tree for granted: that I am right up there with the painter? Not many, I fear, are as lucky. This is the importance of what Hockney has done: an old man with the eyes of a child is making nature mainstream.

dribbles in the rain gauge 2011 gave us a total of 21 inches; five inches more than our driest year, 1976. The most striking figure to come out of the statistics is the steadily mild temperature. It is ten months since we had anything more than a ground frost. March 15, 2011 to January 20, 2012 is an extraordinary run.

I was surprised enough to make our summer-bedding marguerites, still going strong, a Flower of the Week back in November. Here they still are in January, not actually flowering, but apparently so hardened off that they'll do for next summer.

Gainsborough's Holywells at Ipswich

Reflected at Hatfield?

away in Ipswich, made by John Dupuis Cobbold, the local brewer, with water from the Holywells spring on its way to be made into beer. Or is it? The evidence is that in Gainsborough's time there was a brickyard where he painted trees and that he invented the church spire in the picture. Perhaps the perfect chain of ponds was only a dream of Gainsborough's, too.

Euphorbia arborescens on La Gomera

a stick. What you can't do is move them. Transplanting never seems to work, and I have had no luck with seeds. In any case conditions in Kitty’s irrigated garden would be far too humid.

Or would they? The other place I have seen a colony of tree spurge is out in the sea mists of La Gomera in the Canaries, on a similar rocky hillside but swathed in Atlantic fog.

Is there a good book about Euphorbia? From soft little scramblers of wet meadows to giant Mexican cacti they are an adventurous race. We all grow Euphorbia wulfenii; would be lost without it, in fact. Now my ambition is to grow its arborescent cousin.

moat (a rectangle sixty yards long), fed from one end, can pass for a broad stream feeding the next watery event, the water garden, out of sight and at a lower level, across the back drive.

Its two square stone ponds are secluded in a dell of profuse planting; one still, one with a single fountain jet splashing and sparkling. Stone steps lead from the fountain to a long alley among the trees. No more water, until a sudden drop of seven feet into a hidden valley, where it dribbles down rocks into a vaguely Japanese-looking pool.

You couldn't know it, but this water comes from a completely different source: a ram pump on a spring four hundred yards away and fifty feet down hill. The seeming magic of the ram, using nothing but water power to move a steady flow uphill, always fascinates me. And this water is made to work again - trickling from a buried pipe to feed the last of the watery manifestations and I think the prettiest of them, the Red Sea, curling round a promontory of white-barked birches in front of the little garden temple.

The gleam of water in one form or another, reflecting the trees, in broad surfaces or damp tinkling corners, provides my unifying theme, and reminds (not that I need reminding) me how scarce and valuable a commodity it is.

Why is our moss shameful, where theirs is a matter of pride? Because, I fear, Japanese summers have plenty of rain, and ours, in spite of folklore, not nearly enough, or only during Test matches.

We have to keep tipping the balance in favour of grass, because grass is our default ground cover. Even if the evidence, in large parts of this aging garden, points in the direction of ivy as nature's choice. Ivy is fine in surplus areas where no one walks. I am rather pleased with a patch under an alley of Norway maples which I decided, a year or two ago, to dedicate entirely to ivy, suppressing any competition or variation that cropped up. An annual strimming keeps it flat and tidy - except of course, where it sets off up the trunks of the trees. But finger-nailing the invading shoots of ivy off my tree-trunks is a part of my garden psychotherapy. It delays my getting on with proper jobs: there is always an ambitious tendril somewhere in sight, an urgent distraction and soothing balm.