Trad is not only a single-minded scribbler, he has been known to actually do some gardening, and even had a go at designing gardens. Half of them have been in France, though intervention would in most cases be a truer word than design. Several of them are related to Trad’s other obsession, wines.

Only one has been on a landscape scale; my absurdly ambitious attempt to transform the fields, woods and riverside of a more or less abandoned farm, some 240 acres in all, into a unified and recognizable ‘landskip’. It had the potential: the west slope of a small river valley facing, on the eastern crest, the traces of a Roman oppidum, its earthen ramparts still apparent. The slope was a typical forest of the centre of France, largely a mixture of oak and cherry and hornbeam, until its latest owner felled the tall wild cherries and left their trunks in rotting heaps (having no idea how to sell them).

The numbskull then tried to extract the oaks, but was largely frustrated by the steepness of the land. His predecessors had more sense; they converted them to charcoal, a process that removes ninety per cent of the weight and maintains most of the value. Every twenty metres through the wood a wide black circle showed where a charcoal clamp had been. I pictured the scene fifty years before; the woodland noisy and smoky, loud with voices and axe blows, donkeys or mules ferrying the charcoal out to a wagon on the track at the top.

The little river Aumance at the bottom was too shallow to be much use. In spring it could float the raft we made of an old barn door, down past a sturdy little chateau to Vallon en Sully. The chateau (manoir is more accurate) has a stone plaque on the gateway claiming that it was the eastern most limit of an English advance from Gascony in the Hundred Years War.

Much of the farm was in a revolting state, covered with scraps of the black plastic used for covering straw bales and fiendish strands of barbed wire. Its recovery is entirely due to the generously constructive

Pale purple magnolia globes are nodding in the wind outside the front window, and their petals falling far too soon on the paving in the front yard. They have banana-skin propensities; I have to keep sweeping them up. It’s strange to think that this extravagant flower was apparently an early arrival in the course of evolution. They don’t seem to be good at attracting insects; there are none in sight. Their fleshy petals, it seems, were designed – if that’s the word – as food for beetles. Flowers became more economical as nature grew up; just look at the tiny red dots on an oak.

Is this the most showy spring for years? So it seems, looking along the street at explosions of pink and white in cherries and magnolias. I always wonder who splashed out on Kensington’s floribundance. The comparative austerity (and superior elegance) of our neighbour’s Cercidiphyllum – Katsura to its friends – could almost be seen as a piece of snobbery.

Meanwhile a strong west wind (odd: surely it should be east) keeps coat collars turned up, and garden pottering is rather discouraged by what seems almost constant chopper noise. I suspected Kensington Palace, half a mile away, of causing the nuisance, but surely they don’t fly off every twenty minutes. So at present I am just looking out of the windows to see what’s in flower. The white flowering currant bush, Ribes sanguineum White Icicle, is the eye-catcher of the moment. After ten years it measures seven feet high and wide. Behind on the wall Chaenomeles speciosa Nivalis keeps the white theme going; then there’s a white Bergenia and a pot of Ipheion uniflorum. Not much colour, it’s true. Camellia alba Simplex is another cool customer, but we inherited a big bushy Camellia ‘Top Hat’ which is generous with pink petals. It’s spring alright, but not shirtsleeves yet.

Who do we have to thank for the splendid variety of trees that adorn our local streets and parks?

Not everyone looks at, or even notices, the trees they walk under everyday. Perhaps in April when they light up with blossom and scatter confetti on every car. Perhaps in September when they begin to cover the pavement with potentially treacherous leaves.We rarely thank them, though, for the grace of their branches against the sky and the welcome shade they offer on a hot sunny day. Our part of Kensington is blessed with more trees, and mote different kinds of trees, than most, from the stately planes that give Pembroke Square its special dignity, to flowering cherries that for a few weeks in spring completely change the mood of otherwise unexceptional streets. Planes and cherries are commonplace; the bread and butter of street planting. The council’s tree officers, though, are doing a more imaginative job.

We live in Scarsdale Villas, which already has the advantage of being a double-width street. It was part of the property that Lord Kensington (of Holland House) sold to developers in the early years of Queen Victoria. One of these speculators had property in South Wales – hence our cluster of Pembrokes (square, road, villas…). Viscount Scarsdale had a mansion approximately where High Street Kensington station now stands. (Sutton Scarsdale, his seat in Derbyshire, is now a baroque shell, its rooms in a museum in Philadelphia.)

This doesn’t answer, though, the question of why we are so well endowed  with trees. One of our biggest and best is a common ash which stands in the middle of the private Edwardes Square, hence hidden from public view. I suspect it may date from the creation of the square just after the Battle of Waterloo. (They say many of its first residents were the families of captured French officers). Long may it be spared from the die-back which is killing ashes round the country.

Two other huge specimens in our streets are the so-called Tree of Heaven (heaven knows why), Ailanthus altissima, originally from China. Others call it the tree from hell; it can produce overwhelming numbers of suckers from its roots. One stands on the corner of Abingdon Road and Stratford Road, mercifully not – or not yet – sending up suckers. Another, a tall straight specimen, is on the corner of Edwardes Square nearest the Scarsdale Tavern. Their ash-like pinnate leaves have a distinct smell of onions.

Scarsdale Villas is almost a linear arboretum, or ‘dog’s dinner’ as one council officer describes it. I have still to identify some of its ingredients. A fine Zelkova serrata, from the Caucasus, is an unlikely tree to plant in a street, being characteristically as wide as it’s high. There are plenty of beauties, though. I am only disappointed by the council’s recent planting of amelanchiers, charming light-weights that will never make fine tall shade trees. The best advice for planting street trees is to stick to the tried and tested; the classics.     There is a reason why the great Platanus x hispanica is called by  this formal botanical name. It has no native country. It is a hybrid between the talismanic Chennar tree of the East and the rare (in Europe) American native plane. Did the marriage happen in Spain, as the name suggests? Nobody seems to know.

We all have our favourite views – probably lots of them. One of mine is along our little narrow London gardens, from the breakfast table in the kitchen. Favourite perhaps because I can not only name each plant, remember where we got it, and in some cases the number of its flower buds. The pink camellia on the right currently has forty-four, beginning to open. Its name is Top Hat: I didn’t plant it and wouldn’t. Cold things, camellias; soft and sexy, but scentless, and scent is the soul of a flower.

My favourite nighttime view is from an upper window of a cottage at Keyhaven on the Solent, looking at the Isle of Wight over the wide salt marshes, sheltered from wind and tide by the long narrow Hurst Spit, the shingle bank that protects the Solent from the west. Its tip, Hurst Castle, is only a mile from the Isle of Wight. The night view takes in the lighthouse by the castle, a slow intermittent white light, and off in the right distance the blinking red light on the Needles. Their syncopated flashes become hypnotic – and I in my pyjamas.

The starting gun is the tree in front of the house, its flowers beginning dark purple, opening to show their white insides. Judy dates her paintings, so I know it’s early this year, just shedding their furry bracts, the prompt to get down to Kew to visit its relations. It is not a big collection there (nor is that of flowering cherries) but it includes the splendid Magnolia campbellii and its hybrid – Kew-bred I believe – M. x veitchii. This is the one I should have planted at Saling Hall in large numbers, fifty years ago. Its smooth swollen limbs embody health and vigour. What a grove that would be today.

Some say that no hybrid ever has the pure beauty – perhaps class is a better word – of the God-created species. There is evidence for this view here at Kew, right next to the crowded clusters of grey trunks of the veitchiis grows a tall, decidedly elegant tree, Magnolia denudata, the Chinese Yulan, dressed with wide flowers hesitating between white and cream. It was the first Chinese magnolia to reach Europe in the 18th century and remains among the best.

that is forever England. Rupert Brooke has his. I nominate Le Bois des Moutiers, 150 miles south of Portsmouth, perched on a white clifftop sloping steeply north, a jewel box of precious plants in ideal conditions round the first (and perhaps best) country house of one of our best twentieth-century architects, Edwin Lutyens. His working partner, Gertrude Jekyll.

The house was built for the Mallet family of bankers in the last years of the 19^th century, while the pre-Raphaelites were a recent memory, and Arts and Crafts were germinating. Something tells me Lutyens had seen Gaudi’s work in Barcelona. His is more spare, less Gothic, a strong stone block austere on the inland side, facing its formal gardens, and a wall of many windows looking north to the sea.

In Devon this steep-sided sea-facing valley would be called a combe. A little stream wanders sinuously down the middle to a pond perched (artificially, I assume) on the edge of the sea-cliff, with the port of Dieppe visible in the distance. The sense of arrival here is complete; behind, the woodland hemmed into the combe, below and beyond the great horizontal the French call, with accidental poetry, ‘le grand large’.

Tall blue cedars process down the valley bottom, sheltering a collection of rhododendrons and their customary companions in a pattern familiar from Leonards Lee, Borde Hill…. and many English Gardens. None that I know, though, have quite this sense of destination, of inevitability, of paradise found.

Happily the present owners, the Seydoux family, tycoons in the film industry, allow visits to the gardens if you book in advance.

Trad (that’s me) was back at home in Lambeth the other day for a fiftieth birthday lunch, hosted by Christopher Woodward, director of The Garden Museum that puts Trad’s (that’s John Tradescant’s) church, the churchyard with his remarkable decorated tomb and a few of his possessions to excellent use; a shrine to horticulture. We were also celebrating, we said, Tradescant’s 600^th birthday.

There are always interesting exhibitions in the little art gallery in the former church. The current one is a collection of the drawings and watercolours of Rory McEwen, surely one of the greatest plant-artists, to my eyes a rival even of Durer or Ehret or Redouté. McEwen tragically died aged only 50, a genius in many fields, musical as well as with pen and brush.

I urge you to visit the museum. It is only fifteen minutes’ walk form Parliament Square over Westminster Bridge, next door to the Tudor gatehouse of Lambeth Palace. Tradescant’s tomb (and that of Captain Bligh of The Bounty) are in the little churchyard west of the church, screened by tall plane trees from Lambeth Road. Go at lunchtime: the museum’s café serves delicious and notably stylish food, strong on fresh veg. We had whole baked brill and a chicken and mushroom pie under flaky pastry.

Late summer sees the Snowdonia Forest at its lushest. “Tulgey’ is Lewis Carroll’s word for it, though it’s the neighbours’ sheep, not the Jabberwock, that emerge from the leafy depths of the wood. You can tell which neighbour  by the colour of the splotches of blue or red on their wool.

We are watching the gradual filling of the new pond. We only discovered a little stream coursing down a fold in the hillside when we felled the tall spruce, to go to their destination as rafters and purlins. The stream crosses the forest road at the bottom in a culvert; block that and its water naturally fills a depression, maybe thirty yards long and wide, around what instantly became a birch-crowned island.

Then along comes Will, our forest manager, bringing his two white spaniels. Springers, mother and daughter. Spring? They belly-flopped noisily in, paddled to the island, scrambled up over it and trotted back to shake their coatsful of water all over us. Instantly, da capo. The performance went on into the afternoon while we measured some of the tallest trees around us. 140 feet seemed a good result since they were planted in 1964 by the Forestry Commission. In a well-rained-on part of the world (at 60 inches a year North Wales qualifies) a yard a year is good average growth. In technical forestry terms ‘Yield Class 20’ means 20 cubic metres of timber are added per hectare per year. Not bad going.