The C.P.G.
3 June 2011

Trad's Diary began in the first issue of The Garden, Volume 100 part 6 of the R.H.S. Journal, in June 1975. I happened to look it up because it contained the first article on The Chelsea Physic Garden; up to then, as Allen Patterson said in the article, 'something of a mystery to contemporary Londoners. Its four acres of fascinating garden beside the Thames are never open to the public'. In 1975, for the first time, Patterson, its new curator, made arrangements with the R.H.S. for 'Fellows' (as we were then called) to visit it on certain days.

We were there again last week, for an evening party to celebrate the installation of a new curator, Christopher Bailes. Having given Christopher his first gardening job, 39 years ago, I felt not only a proprietary interest but a surge of

The Peak
2 June 2011

'Roses at their peak' is one of the notes I write in my diary every year - but never quite as early as this.12 months ago we were actually anxious about them: our daughter was getting married and roses were the main theme of the party décor. They peaked on cue: June 26th, while this year the entry went in on June 2nd.

The 'peak' is a pretty artificial concept; to me it means the moment just before we have to start dead-heading the bush-roses, when the major climbers are just revealing how far they have scrambled with outbreaks of colour high in the trees. You can see and smell the flowers on a bush more easily, but the ultimate rose picture is one of swags and flying sprays

Carpe Diem
27 May 2011

Do I have a weakness in the Carpe Diem department? I suspect it's because I find I take less pleasure than I should (certainly than most others do) in the full-on pleasure of, say, a field of tulips or exotic summer bedding. Why should it mar my enjoyment that when it's over, that's that? After all it's even more true of a plate of food.

Anticipation, on the other hand, gives me a disproportionate amount of pleasure. My friends thought I was crazy when I showed them my incipient arboretum: a field of sticks with labels. The analogy of laying-down wine is obvious. Am I really enjoying bottles that I won't open for years? You bet I am.

These reflections always come round again at Chelsea time. My second, if not my first, thought is 'what next?' When the white
foxgloves are over what will there be to look at? Carpe diem. Enjoy what is in front of your eyes. And this year there was so much to enjoy that I did just that. Carpe without carping, as one might say.

The annual Trad Award went this year to Diarmuid Gavin's extravaganza - though not to the flying contraption that reminded me of The Night Garden, the Ninky Nonk and Iggle Piggle. What I

Country battleship
25 May 2011

To Heveningham to enjoy the sight of a great showhouse of the 18th century being restored to its original purpose and on its original scale. If this vast austere house is not quite ducal in its pretensions, it still rides the green swell of Suffolk like a grey battleship of formidable proportions and power, its little flotilla of follies around it. It is the archetype of the sort of pile that was pulled down in hundreds in the last century, built for occasions that will never recur and dynasties that have died out.

Among gardeners the word has already got round that earth has been moved here. Perhaps it is not so surprising that the style of landscaping that used to involve hundreds of navvies and wheelbarrows has come back into fashion with the bulldozer and the JCB. Charles Jencks led the movement with his garden of Cosmic Speculation, awakening memories of the sublime geometrical folly of Studley Royal three centuries ago. Kim Wilkie has since mastered the art of digging,

Mind games
20 May 2011

I give myself one point for an English name and two for a Latin one. Names of weeds, that is. I play silly mind games in my weeding time, or recite poems - or even sing songs. One of the games is categorizing my fellow gardeners into tribes or tendencies - of which those who enjoy weeding is, or so I'm told, one of the rarest. I don't believe a word of it. Weeding is the very essence of gardening - and in May, when leaves are at their most aromatic, its most sensuous task.

There is, though, a clear division between those who relish perfecting an already orderly picture and those who are

The butcher's bill
18 May 2011

It's still too soon to have a final body count, but there are a few victims of last winter I'm sure we shan't be seeing again. Acacia pravissima, for example, the mimosa with odd square-shaped blue leaves, was always a long shot, even tucked into our south-westest corner by the thatched barn, sheltered on all sides. Minus ten was too much to ask.

A much greater cause of grief, and also surprise, was a long-established bush of Ribes sanguineum, the red-fuchsia-flowered gooseberry from California, discovered, like so many things, by

Seconds out of the ring
9 May 2011

Gardening never features on the Sports pages, yet there is a competitive element in most of us, and looking back on my most active garden-making years I realize I was often really gardening against one friend or another.

Mostly it was John Hedgecoe, an alarmingly creative photographer who in due course became the first Professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art, and sadly died late last year. His last and most ambitious gardening enterprise was at Oxnead Hall in Norfolk, but 30 years ago we were neighbours in Essex and battling it out, tit for tat.

John planted an avenue; I responded with a grove of trees. I built a 'Japanese' cascade; back came a fountain. Roses:

Back to previous Trad's Diaries

pride, augmented bythe spectacular blooming of what was once a pretty humdrum botanical garden, however historic. The four acres are now a brilliant demonstration of horticulture at its most business-like, regimented in order beds at one end, then turning more and more romantic among the trees towards the river. Towering over the guests on the lawn by the house where Philip Miller wrote his Gardener's Dictionary 350 years ago is London's finest rose: Rosa brunonii from the Himalayas, having consumed the whole canopy of an ancient catalpa and clearly longing for another.

Trad, in that first article, dedicated the new magazine 'to be the link between serious gardeners everywhere ……. To report all that is new and interesting, or that needs explanation, either on the scientific or on the aesthetic side of horticulture?' It is a promise many editors have made down the years.

The R.H.S. was foolish to abandon the term 'fellows' for its members, not long after the time I am talking about. It should have been retained as a mark of seniority for those who had been loyal for, say, 25 years. Now we learn it is coming back, but as a sweetener for a substantial cheque make out to the Society. Autre temps …..

far out of reach, sending down showers of perfume and petals as you stand wondering below.

The peak of the garden here, its most thrilling spot, has migrated from the concentration of its walled centre, where roses make a patchwork with a score of other flowers; alliums and thalictrums, campanulas and day lilies, Aruncus and poppies and delphiniums, to a secret corner of the wood. Standing there, bathed in sweet perfume, I look up through an arch of a 'Felicia', never pruned and stooping from 12 feet or so, mingling with 'Natchez', a tousle-flowered philadelphus. The grey/pink Rosa glauca has somehow infiltrated above head height, carrying my eyes up to 'Wedding Day', ascending in plateaux and glacis of cream and white through a pear tree into the flowering branches of an acacia.

Most soul-melting of all, though, glimpsed through the flanking bushes, are the apricot-fleshy-white flowers of 'Treasure Trove' surging over a little bower of the purple clematis 'President'. This is Eden, and words cannot express its beauty.

The green scones of Cork

loved was the soft Irish greenery underneath: the soft scones of box and waving grasses (the wind was a great help) among pale circular pools.

Green was the theme in my other favourite garden, too: the Malaysian jungle around a quite marvellous pavilion like a giant barcode ending in a bracket. They were, of course, all tender exotic plants. I tried to convert it mentally into hardy evergreens, but after the experience of last winter it would not be worth trying.
Inside what I still call the marquee my favourite was Raymond Evison's clematis tunnel, bold enough to take on the rosarians at their own game but in the pastel poetry of clematis.

sculpting and terracing on a scale scarcely seen since the British dug Maiden Castle. At Boughton House in Northants he had the audacity to sink a massive hole where you expect an avenue; at Heveningham he has carved out an amphitheatre to give the massive house a stage.

Houses at the bottom of steep slopes always find themselves in an awkward situation. Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire is another example that feels trapped under its hill. The Wilkie solution at Heveningham has been to remove all traces of the garden along the south front of the house and cut the slope back in dramatic arcs that splendidly complement the immense unadorned façade.

Moreover he has contrived the terracing so as to retain three veteran cedars on the bank, swerving his curves to avoid them and emphasis their status. It is masterly performance, calling out for an opera company on the largest scale.

There is work on hand all around. The orangery is still in a state of gracious déshabille (and all the better for it) but the walled gardens are coming back to life, orchestrated with characteristic firmness, good sense and sparkling taste by Arabella Lennox-Boyd. In the wider park, and for miles around, (the estate has grown to over 3000 acres) the owner’s love of trees is obvious - he, by the way, is John Wood of Foxton's fame. Countless new plantations of native trees are not only protected by tall tree-guards but are actually pruned to make shapely specimens. That doesn’t happen in an ordinary forest.

only happy tackling chaos. It is partly, of course, a matter of how many acres you command, but those whose idea of heaven is rearranging granite chips around a Lewisia are likely to be daunted by my idea of a great afternoon: pulling nettles, digging docks and gathering great sticky armfuls of goose grass (cleavers for one extra point, Galium aparine for two).

I worked my way this afternoon to an isolated and overgrown rose bush, a tall dome spangled with dishevelled pink flowers in a wide skirt of cow parsley (Queen Anne's Lace, Anthriscus sylvestris). The scent reached me yards away, achingly sweet. I picked a flower (it is R. Californica plena) and asked a visitor what it reminded her of. 'My mother', she said.

No, weeding is the wrong word for the springtime editing of the flora that distinguishes a garden from a meadow.

Archibald Menzies early in the 19th century. Bean said it was hardy in the open at Kew; here it had a super-snug berth. Could cold perhaps not be the culprit? Drought, maybe?

Meanwhile I'm fairly sure we won't see a reprise from the majority of hebes, nor from an only recently planted Hoheria 'Glory of Amlwch'. New Zealand doesn't see winters like this. Goodbye, Pittosporum tenuifolium. Farewell, Hebe salicifolia (I always thought you were a toughie).

I'm more sanguine about Escallonias, though, and delighted that Abelia triflora, a pale droopy bush, exquisitely scented, is completely unharmed. Its predecessor was eliminated by the winter of 1982/83. In fact my impression so far is that that was a damaging winter here in Essex.

John used to tip on neat pig manure for bigger flowers. John introduced us to the architect Sir Freddy Gibberd, who was creating his wonderfully theatrical garden at Marsh Lane on the outskirts of Harlow New Town (for which I fear he must take a great part of the responsibility). Freddy was miles ahead, in time and in resources. (The Corinthian columns from Coutts Bank in the Strand ended up in his garden, and huge rocks from a Welsh reservoir became available to line his little river).

Gibberd's wife Patricia had a brilliant eye for sculpture, which led in turn to more and more garden incidents - made, incidentally, with the quickest materials to hand: a poplar avenue takes a fraction of the time of a lime one. Ideas came so thick and fast that Freddy would take up the stones of a path he had just laid to make a different one.

It was the right atmosphere for pressing on with one's own ideas, however half-baked. (I'm sure my garden would be much duller without the lurking spirit of competition. And now I'm just home from another garden that started my fingers itching to do something foolish - if that's the definition of a folly.