Root Cause
20 February 2012

I've often noticed that snowdrops flower earlier in drier ground. They spread better where it's damp, but there is little doubt that the extra warmth of ground dried out by, in particular, the roots of trees and shrubs encourages their flowering. We had little bouquets fully open at the foot of cypresses (which have mats of roots concentrated close

Frost at midnight
13 February 2012

Coleridge rings insistently in my head as I prowl round the garden in the icy dark. 'Whether the eave-drops fall, heard only in the trances of the blast, or if the secret ministry of frost shall hang them up in silent icicles ……..' Which side of zero is it tonight? Will the white hand release its grip and give us back green and the balm of living things?

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.

No, it's not the language I fear for. It's our minds. Once we had, and thought we needed, a variety of ways to learn the

Danger Zone
1 February 2012

Our friends' little gardens between the houses in the middle of the village are noisy with birdlife already. Tits, chaffinches, sparrows, robins and blackbirds are hopping and swooping everywhere.

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.

No wonder, then, that David Hockney's paintings of trees in his native Yorkshire landscape are causing queues round the block at Burlington House. Here is a major artist daring to admit that he loves nature and wants us to share his feelings. The point of his huge canvasses of the most humdrum of woods and lanes is that they are worth studying in minute (or rather magnified) detail. These are not beauty spots, sublime

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.

But it hasn't. When I tot up all the drips and

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

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

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.

Remind me who it was who said that England doesn't have a climate; it has weather. The past twelve months have proved them wrong - there's hardly been any weather at all.

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.