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.

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.

In for a big surprise

10 December 2011

To Wales for a walk in our woods, on a day as clear and glowing as only winter can offer. Summer is just a distraction in this wild upland country; in winter you see the real thing, the flesh and bones of the countryside painted in its deepest, warmest, most varied colours.

As a forester I try to look at the woods from a business point of view. This block of trees (black, in this low light, gothic, jagged and aggressive) is due to be felled next year. How much will it fetch? The price of timber is right down (this is the right stuff; what they use for homes - only they're not building any). The trees will safely grow on for a couple of years, but perhaps the euro will die, and then who'll build houses?

My natural interest, though, is what the view will be when they're gone. Cader Idris is straight ahead, and over to the right shall we just catch a glimpse of Cardigan Bay? There will be a dreadful mess for a couple of years, then new plants will start to give it a pattern; timid lines of green. I hope to see at least a low cover of new trees in my lifetime: but then what?

This is the nearest a forester comes to a gardener's perspective: weighing the impact of the different possibilities on the fallow

Spikes at risk

2 December 2011

So many plants have reacted strangely to this endless autumn that one more may seem inconsequential. It is sad to see Japanese maples standing with shrivelled brown leaves because there was no cold to trigger their abscission process, no autumn colour and no leaf fall, but they will rearrange themselves.

I'm not so sure about my favourite

True Blue

1 December 2011

I get self-conscious when the time comes for winter bedding plants. It's probably the snob in me that recoils from popping in the same blue and yellow pansies as you see for sale on garage forecourts at this time of year. Surely I should be more original?

But whereas I blithely plant perfectly routine perennials (in what I hope will be original and ravishing combinations), I never get round to sowing anything for the winter. I hope my wallflowers will do it for themselves. Indeed I spent half a morning in the summer slipping seeds from a self-sown wallflower in a wall deep in all the gaps in the brickwork around it. There followed 10 weeks without rain. I hosed down the wall once or twice when I remembered to, but none of the seeds germinated.

So here I am with trays of pansies and wallflowers from Springwell Nurseries, a jolly spot on the road from Saffron Walden to Cambridge, deciding how to deploy them

casually, as if they had volunteered. That is not how they will look, but nor should they;

Chocolate box

21 November 2011

A mere half lemon-slice of moon was enough to light the garden last night - or rather to fill its shroud of mist with light. November, moon and stars and mild air is an unusual mixture, the garden seems to hold its breath for winter, with no change more urgent than another leaf spiralling to the ground.

Moonlight views have always fascinated me. They are almost impossible for painters (or so I suppose, or wouldn't we see them in every gallery?)

A late glimpse

18 November 2011

The ground was squelching after weeks of rain when we arrived in Scotland - and the sun was shining. The rain we had been praying for in the South made a four-day visit, leaving the North clear of cloud and lit by a low sun so bright that driving westwards in the afternoon became a challenge.

It is a strange light for gardens, gilding half the scene and casting the rest into deep shadow; not the time to take decisions (or photos). On our way home we called at Howick, the extraordinary arboretum  on the

coast near Alnwick that puts most other tree collections to shame in the originality and

Patina

16 November 2011

It’s a simple question, but not easy to answer: why am I so drawn to old gardens, old houses… anywhere palpably old? What is the appeal of history? What does it matter that (let’s say) a garden has been growing,  in more or less recognizable form, for a century, or centuries?

To people who think or feel as I do age gives a sense of validity. I am easily seduced by the word ‘authentic’ – although who is to say that what’s left of the past is more authentic than what has just been created? It’s hard to

More than a Medley

31 October 2011

It is not easy to plot the chromatics of autumn. Timing is tricky, but so is the matching of tints that vary from year to year. A tree that turns yellow one year will do orange the next, or a bush usually reliably red go off in a sulk of yellow. There are consistent performers; Acer palmatum Osakazuki is famously hard-wired for a fiery climax, but mainly we just trust that October and November will give us the visual warmth we crave.

Spring is not so different: pricks and splashes of bright colour on bare branches or   bare ground are scarcely susceptible to colour coordination. We just have to put up with pink screaming at yellow.

When someone does make a successful effort, though, at more subtle and considered colouring the result can be marvellous. We walk more and more often these days in the rapidly developing arboretum at Marks Hall, twelve miles away near Coggeshall. The Winter Walk beside the lake there is planted with real sensitivity for quiet autumn tints. (We do well in East Anglia for winter gardens: Anglesey Abbey and the Cambridge Botanics both have splendid examples.)

Tick over

26 October 2011

The frost (it was only a touch) that browned the face of the Bishop of Llandaff last night was the first here for seven months. Mid-March was our last even moderately cold weather. The cold spell that gave last winter its fearsome name started in late November and reached its climax over the weekend before Christmas, when I recorded two days of bitter cold and clear blue skies, and the greenhouse door froze shut. The lowest temperature on our thermometer, sheltered on a north wall, was -9°C. Since then the coldest night has been January 31st, with a low of -1°C.

Spiritual Space

24 October 2011

Beauty in a state of déshabille is a stiff test for a garden. It can be poignant, though, and it can reveal the quality of a good design. We went to her garden to remember the peerless Jill Cowley last Sunday; the garden she made with her architect husband Derek Bracey at Great Waltham. Jill suffered for ten years with a bone cancer that put her through hell. Only in the last two years did it stop her gardening, though, or playing a key role as deputy chairman of the National Gardens Scheme (she was its Essex County Organizer for ten years).

For two years now the grass has been cut and the hedges trimmed; in the borders, though, among the roses (they clamber up every tree) and the unpruned shrubs, it has been the survival of the fittest, The result? A revelation of the gardening style of the 1970s and '80s, powerfully geometrical, decisively linked to the old farmhouse and dairy and linking them to a garden house, a pergola, statues, a bridge over a (now dry) pond, and memorable views into the surrounding farmland. We have an advantage here in Essex: the fields are lined with shimmering silver willows, now in autumn the precise shade of olive green that seems to be de rigueur in fashionable decorating.

The Gibberd Garden at Harlow belongs to the same school of design. So, to a point, does our own at Saling. The difference in Jill's is the intelligent exuberance of her planting, still traceable in its déshabille. Jill

Steady State

19 October 2011

We have been travelling far more than usual in the past couple of months, coming home for a few days only to set off again - to Germany, Italy, Wales, France (twice). And, strange to say, the garden has hardly budged. You can't keep dashing off like this in the first half of the year, but in autumn the garden settles down to a gentle tick-over. And there has never been an autumn more settled and stately than this.

Backward glance

11 October 2011

How much can you recall of the priorities of the past? I read of the recession of the '80s, or the collapse of the '70s, with only a dim recollection that there was trouble of some kind. The decades rumble past like goods wagons down the track. I take down the green bound volumes of The Garden that contain the first four decades of this diary (or most of them) without a clear idea of what I'm going to find.

Each in its box

10 October 2011

I aspire to be decisive. I am capable of drawing up a plan, arguing and agreeing with myself about, it, and even putting it into execution. But then I'll spoil it with second and third thoughts, unneeded extras, something white to complement the blue or vice versa - and the impact is lost.

Which is why I so admire Susan Orr and her Dorset garden. It is a series of low-walled yards nestling up to the farmhouse and the barn where she keeps her horses. Perhaps they once divided sheep from pigs. Sue has used their geometry with the assurance of a Le Nôtre.

From the kitchen door your eye follows box hedges to a white iron gate, but the hedges themselves spell out more patterns to come. At each corner there is a slightly raised square, ending that run and announcing a crossroads. The pattern repeats, a series of squares with quite sober filling: the first four simply crab apples laden with fruit blushing green to red, further on sedums or artichokes.

Why does this work so well? The proportions are comely; nether mean nor

Seasonal shift

5 October 2011

Autumn arrived yesterday, apparently from the Sahara, riding on a hot wind that crisped the leaves of unprotected trees and threw them around the garden. It also put a gleam on the pond which for a month has been a dismal sink of duckweed. At last it slid to one side and let the sky in.

The still hot days seemed like a fantasy. There were no garden suppers all summer - until late September. Is the climatic confusion on balance bad for plants? Are they like children that need a good routine and a story before bed? It has certainly been good for the grass. The leaves are scrunching on an emerald carpet. It rained enough at the right time and the growth has been ideally slow and steady for weeks.

Autumn music

28 September 2011

Who on earth is chopping down a tree this beautiful autumn morning? It must be a big one, to judge by the length of the demented racket of the saw. But there is no tree, and the random roaring corresponds to no pattern of felling and logging. The noise fills the neighbourhood, obliterating the peace of every garden, annulling anemones and

Harvest Festival

26 September 2011

France has no RHS, or anything like it, so no Chelsea Show, let alone Wisley or Rosemoor. What it does have are two chateau-shows, competing genteely twice a year, in spring and autumn, near enough to Paris to attract the curious aspirant who seems to make up the main constituent of French gardening today.

Les Journées des Plantes de Courson is the better-known and more competitive of the two, recruiting British judges and attracting more specialists in woody plants. Last weekend we went to its rival, the Fête des Plantes at St Jean de Beauregard, whose autumn show has the air of a harvest festival, subtitled Fruits et Legumes d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui.

The chateau of St Jean is on the southwest fringe of Paris on the road to Chartres. It's 17th century builder was Pierre-Pail Riquet, creator of the greatest public work of his age,

the Canal du Midi. His descendants, the Curel family, achieve the almost equally difficult feat of keeping up a 17th century château and its gardens rather uncomfortably close to Orly airport.

I am always amazed at the self-confidence of such chateaux. Their scale, and the scale of  their dépendances (stables, offices,

The German Riviera

19 September 2011

Back from a dendrologists' outing of one of those blessed parts of Europe where trees find exactly what they need and grow to their full potential. High rainfall is nearly always part of the recipe - but so be it. It was an inspiring visit - and not just because of the trees.

Weep, Wisley. Gnash your teeth, Hyde Hall. There is a magic island garden that outshines you. Not, for sure, in every department: not for variety of plants or of horticultural idioms. But for design, cultivation, taste and above all setting Mainau has no peer in this country. It is the Tresco of Germany; an island with a privileged climate at Germany's southernmost point, on the country's biggest lake, bordered by Switzerland and Austria, surrounded by orchards and sheltered by Alps.

The castle and garden of Mainau were created in the 19th century by the Grand Duke of Baden and continued by the family of the Kings of Sweden, the Bernadottes.  Jean-Baptist Bernadotte was the most fortunate of Napoleon's marshals; a solder from Pau who was elected King of Sweden and whose family is still in place. The late Count Lennart Bernadotte was a naturalist, a dendrologist and a natural gardener. His daughter Bettina is now queen of the island, which is run as an environmental and educational trust.

Count Lennart inherited a near-jungle of huge trees towering in each others' shade. He calculated the precise effect of removing almost half of them, tree by tree, drawing projections of the probable effect of each removal. Today the arboretum seems ideally spaced, the lawns between monster cedars and sequoias and oaks perfectly proportionate. You approach the schloss along an alley of giant tulip trees. Glimpses of sails on the lake below draw you across

Four seasons

18 September 2011

When we built our kitchen, forty years ago, we commissioned the stained-glass artist Jane Gray to make us a panel over the door between kitchen and conservatory. It illustrates our four favourite plants, one for each season, surrounded by a garland of autumnal vines. The flowers are a Corsican hellebore for winter, a Crown Imperial for spring, blue agapanthus for summer and white Japanese anemone for autumn.

Who’s bats?

29 August 2011

Is it guilt that makes us, or at least our legislators, so absurdly over-protective of badgers? No creature has so many walls of regulation, euro and home-grown, keeping it from harm. Guilt for what? They should be feeling the guilt, not us, if the disappearance of our hedgehogs is their doing. We haven’t seen one of our spiky friends all summer. Or do we feel guilty for preferring furry things that can't answer back to the young of our own kind, which resoundingly can?

And if badgers are molly-coddled, what about bats? The bat lobby is so powerful that

at least one ancient church (St Hilda's, at Ellerburn in North Yorks) has become

Taking the long view

22 August 2011

Back from a week in Snowdonia. Chilly for August, but ideal for long steep walks. Our favourite, starting from our woods overlooking the Mawddach estuary, follows the ancient Harlech road from Dolgellau, more or less straight uphill (which is why hot weather is not ideal) to a ridge at 1800 feet.

You are walking through heather and reeds, with low gorse here and there; the track often a glittering rivulet under your feet. The gate in the wall at the top opens on a panorama of Snowdonia and Cardigan Bay, from Bardsey Island at the tip of the Lleyn peninsula to the west, to Snowdon itself almost due north. On the western horizon the hills of Wicklow are a faint line. To the east rises the smooth shoulder of Diffwys, to 2500 feet. Turn around and the long leonine ridge of Cader Idris forms the southern horizon, with our dark woods and the silver arrow of the Mawddach far below.

We took a rough scramble down a too-steep path last week, arriving at the woods hot enough to plunge straight into our pine-fringed tarn. But not for long; there has been no summer to take the chill off the black water.

The pace of growth in these woods, with 60 or 70 inches of rain a year, is constantly surprising. A great deal of the forester's job is to discourage over-vigorous interlopers that take space and light from the main crop, whether it be spruce, larch, fir or the long

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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.

landscape. One is to leave it fallow, or at least parts of it, and watch the first-year foxgloves and the gradual return of the heather and bilberry, and gorse and brambles and bracken, the inevitable birch and rowan seedlings, volunteer spruce and larch, and hopefully a smattering of oak. Leave it two hundred years and, theoretically, oak will be the climax vegetation - at least in sheltered spots and gullies where soil has accumulated over the ungiving granite.

I have planted a lot of oak. It struggles. Local Welsh oak has no sense of direction: mostly it goes sideways, with a nudge of course from sheep. In autumn its patchwork of colours is wonderfully wayward: one tree is copper, one gold, its neighbour jade and the next as dark as an Amsterdam front door.

Larch I love; its pale seedlings brighten the woods as fast, even, as birch. But there is a threat hanging over it: the same Phytophthera ramorum that threatens our oaks. It has reached South Wales, apparently travelling north. No one is planting it around here any more. Our tall stands of larch, planted in the 1960s and now seventy feet high, straight poles to a thin canopy, are the most graceful parts of the woodland, and their pale spring green and autumn gold two of its principal delights. If we see trees browning in summer we have to call the authorities, and they will say fell. I remember the elm disease, thirty five years ago, and I tremble.

But now, in the short days with long shadows, I can spend time on the details, see the  work that nature puts into arranging heather and rock and  bilberry, gorse and bracken and long-jumping brambles; none of them, not even the brambles, quite destroying the magical equilibrium. I can prod little freshets into new courses, promote them to streams, yank a ponticum from a path, play the gardener on a domestic scale within the implacable macrocosm of the forest.

delphinium, which looks set to flower in December. It is one of the noble named varieties that seem to be gradually disappearing from nurseries, their propagation (by cuttings in March) being a chancy business. My 'Clifford Sky', the purest blue with a white eye, came as a rooted cutting from the admirable Kevin of Beeches Nursery at Ashdon. In its first season it sprang from the border like a rocket. Last year it produced nine splendid spikes. Perhaps I dead-headed it too enthusiastically: back to one foot from the ground. Now it has gathered all its forces to flower again. A bad freeze and its strength will be sadly depleted; small chance of many cuttings or a good show next year.

at least not the pansies. Their wonderful satin extravagance needs a more or less formal frame. There is a new one (to me) this year; not bright yellow but pale primrose. I will speckle it with the one called 'True Blue' in the bed behind the cottage where the rugosa roses stand gaunt in winter.

My favourite wallflower for years has been the old cultivar 'Scarlet Bedder'; a gauge, I'm sure, of my deep conservatism in choosing flowers. This year there is an F1 hybrid called 'Treasure Bronze' which is so much healthier looking, stockier and more compact that I am planting it instead. Sadly there is no chance of a true F1 seedling in a wall.

Heaven knows what the provenance of the pansies may be. 'True Blue' is a strong colour I would have called violet until I checked in my old RHS Colour Chart. The name is right and I am wrong; it corresponds, making allowance for its lustrous texture, with colour 95A, Cornflower Blue.  The Colour Chart originated in the 1930s with the British Colour Council, now long defunct. Another of their publications was a Dictionary of Colours for Interior Decoration, in two bulky volumes, which goes to the length of having three samples of each colour: one matt, one glossy and one a piece of carpet. My copy belonged to Anthony Denney, who gave it to me when I started to garden. His message: texture is as important as hue. And light of course decides everything.

They simplify so much that they reveal the very basics of mass and proportion. But they falsify by cutting out the details of colour and texture on which we base most of our gardening judgements.

It's odd, isn't it, that only the sort of painters who hang on park railings dare to paint inherently beautiful scenes. There was rising mist on the ploughed land yesterday as I took my usual walk through the low meadow among the bat willows, then up to what I think of as our Downs - the swell of sandy land and short grass. For a moment the dark plough, the verticals of the willows and thin white mist were absurdly picturesque.  No real artist would have looked twice. 'Chocolate box' describes a subject as much as a technique.

profusion of its planting. Lord Howick seems to have almost commuted to the Far East. His collections of seed-raised trees and shrubs cover acre after acre.

You may have to navigate through long wet grass to read the label on a tree in heavy berry mode or colouring brilliantly, but the bold way a plantsman can take on a whole landscape is inspiring. The valley winding a mile down to the sea was clearly once a beech wood. Immense old trees stand with a faint air of doom among the wind-torn remnants of their contemporaries; a landscape from nature that suggests natural continuity rather than the imposed order of a botanical garden. And yet there are trees here we would consider touchy in the south, and trees we never see, in a bewildering range of families prolifically interwoven. The light was fading, the sun brilliant on the western horizon, the urge to return intense.

argue rationally that Dickens’s London is more authentic than, let’s say, Canada Square.

Surely what speaks of today, made and inhabited by living people, is more real than anything remembered – let alone reproduced. Yet I hanker for traces of the past, for scraps of grey brickwork or stone that have, as we say, ‘seen a lot of history’. Somehow they offer  reassurance.  I see new buildings, or new planting, as something provisional, as though it were waiting for some sort of authentication that comes only with  passing time.  Patina adds a vital dimension to the actual. It lets imagination get to work, ‘authentic’ or not.

Do you remember Stanley Holloway in the Tower of London? ‘It’s ‘ad a new ‘andle, and per’aps a new ‘ead, but it’s still the original axe’. It’s what you might call an existential question.

Marks Hall (it was raining)

At Marks Hall the groundwork, as it were, is done in tufts of a delicate buff grass, a pennisetum, like big stitches in a tapestry.Through it run skeins of dogwoods and spindles that turn tender shades of pink and buff, grey and rose and yellow. There are gold-leafed ginkgos overhead, white-trunked birches and sage-green sarcococcas. It is the deliberate limitation of the palette, the avoidance of high-pitched colours, that gives it resonance.

We are not spoilt for good woodland gardens in Essex. Beth Chatto's is an exception, of course. Marks Hall Arboretum is becoming important enough (as I have risked before) to be dubbed our Easternbirt.

Now we are cruising in an autumn so benign that the dahlia is the only plant complaining. My complaint is drought. Ten months have given us only 400 millimetres of rain. We need 200 more in two months to hit our long term average. The wonderful thing about averages is that they always turn out about right.

In spring I complain that everything is happening at once; I panic at the hectic pace of growth and the daily changes in shapes and colours. I fall behind in even seeing, let alone being constructive Now the garden has slowed almost to a standstill is the time to plan ahead, to decide on winter work, to make serious decisions.

But no; lassitude takes over. I am not seeing clearly or analytically; not seeing the garden as a picture, just passively absorbing  the atmosphere of the settled, somnolent world.

Park Farm, Great Waltham

was a traveller, a reader and writer, a gambler, a person who filled more spiritual space than others - which, perhaps inevitably, made her a great gardener too.

that fill the borders now, the dahlias and salvias and fuchsias and cosmos and cleomes, gradually expand, put on weight, begin to lean and topple, but the picture scarcely alters. The purple vine is heavy with clusters in the branches of the golden acacia. 'Buff Beauty" has heavier flower-trusses than in June.

An unexpected bonus of last winter's cold is the late flowering of one of my favourites: Francoa ramosa with its graceful white saxifrageous flower-spikes.  After last winter there was hardly anything left of its low furry-leaved clumps. In their slow recovery they missed their summer flowering date altogether. For six weeks now they have been keeping company with the bright blue Salvia 'Guanajato'; unlooked for, dazzling, lovely.

Trust, then almost ten years old. It already had 15,000 members and had just bought Stour Wood, 134 acres in Constable country, for £70,000. I was also celebrating our new-built conservatory, and marvelling at how quickly its new plants were growing.

Ten years later I was preoccupied with our new property in the Auvergne, and with the murky water in the moat at home. Another ten years and the theme was a year of prodigious growth: 2001 went from a wet winter through a mild, frost-free spring (rather like 2011) to a summer weighed down with flowers, fruit and foliage. I measured a young oak that grew 14 inches in a single day.

That's the joy of gardening: you could change the century, as well as the decade, and we'd be banging on about the same old things.

Malus 'Red Sentinel' in early October

grandiose. There is a powerful unity in repeated quiet green: stronger in simple shapes repeated, I think, than in the curlicues of a decorative parterre. Colours speak out clearly: the pink crab apples, the deep red sedums or the sugar-pink nerines, each in its box.

looking a bit shrivelled. My favourite golden Acer japonicum (I won't trouble you with its latest name) has been blowtorched, and in future articles I shall remember that the forest-dwelling vine maple, A. circinatum, really needs its forest.

We have just said goodbye to two trees. It can take years to realize that a tree has morphed from impressive to oppressive. I was reluctant to fell a big Lawson cypress, the golden 'Winston Churchill' - largely because my father was so devoted to 'Winnie'. But its gleaming flat yellow fronds, beautifully overlapping to create a wonderful texture, were effectively blocking the view from the Long Walk to the fountain in the Water Garden.

making roses irrelevant. There is an oily smell with it, too.

Yes, it is a leaf blower: an infernal contraption designed to cost fifty times more than a rake without fulfilling its purpose. Every autumn the nuisance gets worse. We were woken at five in a French hotel the other morning when the council sent a man round to blow the leaves off the pavements into the path of the almost equally noisy street-scrubbing lorry that followed at six. Would a 200 per cent VAT rate put a stop to it? I doubt it.

St Jean de Beauregard

farmyards,dairies, dovecotes, bothies and the rest) seem more remote from modern life every year. Which makes the Curels' jardin potager as rare as it is beautiful.

Did gardeners of the time of Louis XIII really mix up the edible and the beautiful, or is it a modern fancy? It is a well- worked convention today; often stiffly, with contrasting colours and regular lines. At St Jean the vast parterre potager, several acres in a single wall, mingles the serried and the inspired as beautifully as I have ever seen it done. Ancient fruit trees line the walls and trace the principal axes. The rest is a tapestry woven with vegetables and perennials and annuals in patterns and harmonies that seem endless and effortless.

Has modern English taste been a major influence? In the freedom and profusion of the flowers, yes. In the subtlety of their blending I'm not so sure.

Lake Konstanz from Mainau

emerald lawns between soaring cedars to a hayfield on one side; a rose garden on the other; the epitome of a German lordly estate where agriculture and horticulture are easy partners. In fact it is much more: an institute for developing high horticulture and teaching ecology side by side.

The trees were reason enough to visit Mainau, but even hardened dendrologists were awed by the flower gardens by the lake, from the thousands of dahlias, in banks and swirling borders by the water, to softly-contoured enclaves of subtle planting, of grasses and late daisies and salvias that merged with meadows and woody groves.

What park or garden in England, we asked ourselves, has settled so many questions on the marriage of garden and landscape so harmoniously?

forming a long alley beside the box hedges along the central garden path and in clumps seemingly at random elsewhere. We loved upending the bells to show visitors the five white drops of nectar under each. Nothing in spring was more exotic than these oriental apparitions.

Today I'm not so sure. They are still here - but not in anything like an orderly alley. We soon discovered that they wander around at will, mysteriously displacing their huge bulbs. The result: you never know when you are going to spear or dissect one as you dig: until the strong sweet smell hits your nose. Every year as I work in the border I find myself reassembling their fat juicy segments. I bury them in the corner of a wall until they recover and form new bulbs ready to flower again. They die off slowly, too: you have to tolerate their thick stems yellowing and flopping right through the spring before you can yank them off. Glorious flowers they may be and with a fascinating story, but I am slowly moving them (when I can find them) to a wild corner they can have to themselves.

What replaces them as the icon of spring? We're still thinking.

unusable; its congregation is rated irrelevant while bats leave their messages on the altar and the stink of their urine in the air.

I had a letter recently from the bat authorities that left me worrying about their belfry. 'You have a cave on your property', they wrote. (This is true). 'You have closed it with a gate made of vertical bars'. (Also true: to keep people out. The bars are four inches apart). 'You may be unaware that bats prefer horizontal bars'. I admit I'd never asked. Nor can I imagine why my money and yours is being spent on civil servants asking bats their preferences.

Bats are our ecological allies. They eat lots of insects. Some are rare, even endangered. The lesser horseshoe bat, though, is abundant, and if it suffers some inconvenience in barrel-rolling to fly through my gate I shan't beg its pardon.

Cardigan Bay, Harlech in the middle distance

term goal and point of the enterprise, oak and beech. I have a kill list, with the most pernicious weeds at the top: rhododendron and the invasive and useless lodgepole pine, mistakenly planted (it is useless timber) in the 1960s and self-sown everywhere ever since. Next come Lawson cypress (a similar story) and, sadly, western hemlock. Hemlock is one of our most beautiful trees, pale green, graceful, drooping, with a formidable straight trunk. The trouble is no one wants its timber.

Birch needs weeding because it comes up everywhere, fast, and its slender twigs can enfold and stifle the far slower oak. In fact nurturing oak, even pruning young trees (they have precious little sense of which way is up) is my most time-consuming job. I can spend all morning moving slowly through bracken and brambles liberating little trees, with a deep sense of doing good.