William Robinson could be called the grandfather of modern gardening, with John Claudius Loudon as great grandfather. Loudon’s work is pretty remote today: Robinson’s though is among us still, (he founded, with Gertrude Jekyll, the original The Garden magazine) and at his own house, Gravetye Manor, is palpable and ready for us to admire.

Gravetye is now a luxurious hotel. It’s Robinsonian origins and detailed story are precisely spelt out, and plants he describes in his writings lovingly preserved and reproduced. He died here in the year I was born: the grandfather feeling is not inherently absurd.

As a lad in Ireland in the 1880s he worked in the gardens of Curraghmore, near Waterford, the estate of the Beresfords, Marquesses of Waterford, where my own great great great grandfather Owen Johnson was steward in charge of the estate in the 1830s. It’s not impossible that grandpa and Robinson shared a pot of tea.

Gravetye before Robinson’s arrival was almost a wreck, the house not lived in, the grounds overgrown. Characteristically he recorded everything he did in modernizing and beautifying the hundreds of acres, planting thousands of trees to create what are now maturing beech and oak woods. From the terraces of the house, indeed, the views are entirely Robinson’s creation. The terraces look down on the lake he created. Higher on the hillside is his circular walled kitchen garden, now again in applepie order. Credit for the initial restoration belongs to Peter Herbert, formerly of the De Vere Hotel in Kensington.

All round the house itself you walk through degrees of what Robinson called ‘wild’ gardening – though the walled garden west of the house is scarcely what anyone else would call wild. Tulips are something of a speciality here. In April they dominate the borders near the house (the dining room is separated from them only by a simple glass wall). Blue is not a common colour in tulips, but a lovely one new to me called Bleu Aimable is now on my list of bulbs to plant this autumn.

 The road home to London from Snowdonia and our Welsh woods is long and winding. There was a blizzard of sleet as we threaded our way along the lovely green valley of the River Elan. We arrived with deep pleasure at our overnight stop, precisely on the English border and my favourite garden for half a century. Yes, Hergest Croft.

I see I first wrote in this diary about Hergest Croft in the 1970s, when the third of the five generations of the Banks family was in charge. The fourth, my friend Lawrence, my contemporary at Rugby and Treasurer of the RHS, is succeeded by his widow Elizabeth and their son Edward. They are quite a family. Elizabeth was the first professional landscape architect (her briefs included the Royal Parks) to become RHS President.

From the elegant new bungalow in the garden she calls her ‘enderhome’ she supervises a garden that summarises all the amenities of traditional country house walled gardens, and leads on into one of the country’s most distinguished collections of trees and shrubs, flourishing, fascinating, and mostly rare.

A further walk through rolling parkland takes you to Park Wood, a place sacred to me as where I first conceived my passion for trees. It was Lawrence’s father Dick who inducted me; tall, benign and omniscient, he introduced me to birch and silver fir as one does a friend. Streams and pools reflect the soaring larch and oak, a hundred feet above, with the red flowers of rhododendron arboreum mingling in the intricate canopy. Bright green and yellow skunk cabbage circles the pools where a frog plops and a flower drops from high above.

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 French system of grants. I wrote to the departmental office of the Eaux et Forets, the department of state established by the genius of Jean Baptiste Colbert under Louis XIV. The reply came from the boss in Moulins, the ‘country town’, Alain Maciare, who in due course became a firm friend and the source of funds I never expected. Effectively the French government subsidised my ambition to turn our scrapy property into the dignity of a ‘domaine’.

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.