Spontaneity
4 November 2010

Spontaneity. Is it more than a positive gloss on indecision - or indeed on a mistake? Positive it certainly is; it suggests warm-hearted effusions. Spontaneous malice is just conceivable, I suppose, but Iago and the ugly sisters seem to have the monopoly. No: if spontaneity gets into a review it counts as a plus - even in gardening.

So how do you recognize it? There is no forethought in spontaneity, but nor is it a synonym for afterthought. Afterthought: you stand back, survey your handiwork, and decide that a splash of orange would set the blues and purples singing. Spontaneity can't undo: to move something out of the picture would be an afterthought. But spontaneity implies more: it is self-created, like combustion in a haystack. The elements present reach a point in their relationship where equilibrium breaks down, or fizzes up, with surprising results. It is sudden, inevitable and unarguable. It is also a quality desired by the Dutch Wave school being celebrated at the moment in an exhibition at the Garden Museum.

Says its leader (or one of them), Piet Oudolf, 'inside I want to be spontaneous.

Winding down, heating up
1 November 2010

There has hardly been a really dark night for a month. When I part the curtains after midnight the lawn has been painted in tiger stripes by the moon shining through the poplars and the Plough has been diamond-bright above the pond. So little or no cloud-cover - and yet no frost. There has been ground-frost on several mornings, but no cold enough air to crisp and brown the leaves of poplars, even, or ashes. Border flowers may be dying away, but their plants are standing green and unscathed, while roses keep offering limp efforts.

It is the slowest-moving autumn I remember, the fullest in volume of mellowing leaves and the brightest for the roadside hedges, as the maples move from green to a medley of yellows. Since the elms went, field maple has become our principal hedge-row tree, and nothing in the countryside holds more consistent and enduring gold. Norway maple is

Slow mellow
18 October 2010

Mid-October and still no real sign of autumn. The last-minute salvias in their brilliant range of primary colours are as good as they are likely to get before they are stopped by frost. Most gardeners seem to agree that it's hardly worth the trouble for something whose flowers you will only enjoy for two, three of maybe four weeks - but you wouldn't say that about a spring bulb, would you?

The only trees that are clearly signalling their intention are the predictably early leaf-droppers: Prunus sargentiana is reddening, Fraxinus 'Jaspidea' yellowing (but Fraxinus 'Raywood' - see my Tree of the Month - only just starting to flush at the top). It was very different in Herefordshire last weekend, on a visit with the I.D.S. to one of England's greatest maple collections, Hergest Croft, for a maple (or Acer, as we anoraks call them) study day. The climax is still some way off, but the many forms of Acer palmatum and japonicum are certainly firing up. Acer 'Sengo-kaku' ('Senkaki' to me, and probably you) has already reached its special pitch of delicate pale yellow. It was à propos of its name that Lord Ridley declared there is a special circle of hell for botanists who change long-honoured names.

We learned how to sow maple seed (as quickly as you can, complete with its wings, before it dries out and goes dormant, in any damp but open compost. Leave outside for the winter, keeping rodents at bay). How to do that? Aha: attend the Rodent Study Day.

Grafting came next - and is something I am going to try. A fascinating hour was

Nice to see
13 October 2010

My recent Flower of the Week, Kirengeshoma palmata, struck a chord with a kind correspondent in Japan, who tells me that the name is an exact phonetic equivalent of what the Japanese call it. The first professor of botany at Tokyo University, in the nineteenth century, called it a yellow Anemonopsis macrophylla, (which it certainly resembles), coining a word that my

Dropping in
11 October 2010

Every year at this time the hornets come into my study to die. I don't know why, or even how they get in.

I sit down to work on a sunny morning, the anemones shining in at the window and the breeze scattering yellow poplar leaves on the lawn. Suddenly a buzz-bomb of a hornet whizzes by my head and lands with a slap on the table. They are huge; a good inch long.

A la recherche….
4th October 2010

Back to our old French property, after an absence of two years, to see how my trees are getting on. A tree you've planted yourself is always yours, whoever else may be its legal proprietor. I am always happy to take credit - and there was plenty to take in the ranks of pines - pale Scots and dark Corsicans - the fluttering files of poplars and the battalions of young oaks, wonderfully wayward in comparison, mobbed by brambles and wild roses: an impenetrable mass of prosperous native vegetation.

When you set out a new plantation and watch anxiously over its first few years every rabbit is a threat and a deer a disaster. Only fifteen years later do you realize that if one tree in four is spared to make serious growth your wood will be over-crowded.

In all our time in France I never saw a squirrel. Deer, boar, hares, badgers, foxes, martens (and once a wildcat), but no squirrels. This time, to my joy, I saw two red squirrels attacking 'our' walnuts. Can they be on the increase in France? At last Europe is waking up to the threat of greys spreading from Italy (where they

No joke
29 September 2010

A few summers ago I proposed a competition to find France’s funniest rond point. It was the early days of a gardening fashion that has done nothing but expand. It started with concrete planters of the most durable shrubs wasting valuable space in shopping streets. It flourished in more and more exotic concoctions of the most emphatic flowers anywhere the municipality could find to perch them, seizing on roundabouts as empty spaces where excesses of horticulture could be committed in the fullest public view with little likely retribution.

We soon had golfers, astronauts, vignerons, fishermen and of course cyclists and their habitats represented, often on a huge scale and in unmissable materials. This year a mélange of banana plants, tall blue grasses, cannas and camphor plants and every brilliant daisy have been in play – and of course a gazillion petunias. No street lamp, meanwhile, has been without its hanging basket. Today a ville fleurie, to gain even one star, must mortgage the mayor’s chain to splurge on flowers.

All this is harmless, summer-seasonal, gaudy, potentially comic, and fun. Not so a newer tendency: to let the spirit of

But I know I must control.' The resulting tension is the attraction of the Dutch Wave style - even if its influence on this country is still only recognized among the hortiscenti. And perhaps in the number of grasses offered in garden centres.

Christopher Woodward, the Garden Museum director, has published a fascinating little booklet to accompany the exhibition. While in this country, he writes, we 'languidly elaborate on old patterns', Oudolf and company 'wash their eyes' to see everything afresh.

Working as they mainly do on the modest scale of Dutch domestic gardens, their medium is usually restricted to herbaceous perennials - or indeed annuals - with hedges playing a vital structural role.. The essence is focus on plant details (they love, for instance, the structure of unbellifers) and above all colour. They evoke watercolours, with their transtional wash-passages - if there is such a term - and their interwoven patches and bands of grasses and astilbes and thistles and knotweeds. In his contribution to the booket Stephen Lacey says he originally found the new Dutch planting 'wild and scruffy' - before he realised it could be 'revolutionary, highly refined'. "Scruffy', 'spontaneous': could they amount to the same thing?

The style began in the 1980s in nurserymens’ gardens in Holland, inspired, at least in part, by the work of Jacques Wirtz ten years before in Belgium. Wirtz re-invented the hedge to make memorable, even monumental, landscapes for the Belgian haute bourgeoisie. He used grasses and massed perennials to powerful effect. But Wirtz gardens belong in Belgium's most prosperous neighbourhoods. The Dutch school were humble nurserymen, starting with little money and working on a small scale - just as the Impressionists did. And it was the Impressionists' little canvases that found a world-wide market.

brighter yellow, and wild cherry glows with a pink-blushing light. The oaks are undecided; all the chromatic possibilities of slow decay still before them.

I always reckon on having the most candle-power in the first week of November - and always from the same trees. Japanese maples are the latest. First to turn are varieties of Acer japonicum: 'Aconitifolium' is reliably orange-scarlet, at its best now. A.j.'Vitifolium' is following it hard in a paler set of colours; yellow, scarlet and pink. Acer koreana has turned an even pillarbox red with no variation, a little matt compared with the best. A. mono is quite different, taller with shiny three-lobed leaves (sometimes five-) rather like starfish, that hesitate between green, scarlet and purple. Osakazuki is celebrated as the best and brightest of all, starting green, now deep maroon, eventually traffic-light red with bulbs that are definitely not energy-saving.

But to me the ultimate performance is from the big bush of tiny fretted leaves called Acer palmatum 'Seiryu'. It starts the autumn by fading from fresh green to a darker shade that modulates into purple and maroon, even within one tiny segmented leaf. Then current starts to run through it, the filaments heat up, glow and begin to burn. Scarlet brightens to orange, then flecks with gold. Eventually - and there is still two weeks to go, given fair weather - the bush becomes a burning fiery furnace, hottest of all, it seems, as dusk fills the garden.

Acer palmatum 'Sengokaku'

passed contemplating (photos of) maple flowers. Does any family of trees have a comparable range of flower designs and colours (and seasons)? Far from their leaves in their extraordinary variety being the only attraction of maples, their flowers, fruits - and of course barks - make every other genus look positively pedestrian.

The stop after Hergest Croft was Llanover near Abergavenny, where Robin Herbert, former president of the R.H.S., has been collecting trees for 50 years or so. It was here that I photographed the coral-bark maple illustrated above. (Easier to call it that than to get back into the Sengo-kaku/Senkaki tangle).

I had never expected to see Quercus alba, the American 'white oak', as a big tree in Britain. The books all say it doesn't work here. The Llanover specimen is not a monster, but large, handsome and vigorous. Among many marvels (one of them the rare American butternut, Carya cordiformis, a 60 foot tower of butter) we saw a huge Viburnum cylindricum from the Chinese Himalayas. The USP of V. cylindricum is its big ovate leaves, covered with a thin layer of wax that takes a signature perfectly. Hillier's manual warns against hooligans signing them - which I suppose makes me a hooligan.

correspondent describes as 'soul-stirring; nice to see and to say'.

Kirengeshoma is an endangered plant in the mountains around Tokyo today, threatened with extinction by, among things, the deer. 'Please look after your plant', she says, 'the muntjac kept far away. Yours in Essex might one day be the last survivor as Japan turns into a tropical island'. I love these notes from another culture. It is too easy to see our gardens and plants only through our own eyes. The common language of gardening and botany, though, can give us glimpses of a strange kind of poetry.

They buzz around aimlessly, slamming into the windows or splatting down on my desk, in the bin, on the carpet ……. so far, happily, not on me.

There are four in the room now. I've opened the window in the hope they will discover the great outdoors again. Two did, a moment ago, but most of them stay, soon to be found dead on the floor. I pick up four or five a day. The chimney is closed by a sealed log-stove. The doors and windows are usually shut. Yet this morning the end of the runway at Martlesham would be a quieter place to work.

are proliferating) through Piemonte into the Alps, and through the Alpine beech woods into France.

It is almost twenty years since we found our place in France: at exactly the same time as two Paris architects found an abandoned priory 25 miles away in the Cher and started what is now a famous garden (and enchanting small hotel), Le Prieuré de Notre Dame d'Orsan. (www.prieuredorsan.com).

Orsan today has an air of long establishment. Some of its visitors are convinced that it has always been like this, that it really was monks who planted and shaped the intricate hedges and espaliered apples and pears. We have nothing like this in England, and I wonder whether it has ever been in the English psyche to create a whole landscape on the theme of sustenance.

There is a vineyard in the middle, the vines trained on hurdles copied from the 1471 Augsburg edition of Petrus Crescentius. In the first compartment, surrounded by tunnels of hornbeam, the autumn crops are leeks and cabbages, all perfect, steely blue against the green-brown of the hedges. Beyond the vineyard, which has a simple stone fountain at its heart, are compartments of soft fruit, of roses (sustenance spiritual), of pumpkins in waist-high osier beds and of espaliered pear trees forming a circular maze. The next room has tall apples, the next pears, the next service trees…until finally you come to alleys of perfectly trimmed oaks, an archery ground, and coppiced woodland.

Calm vegetable geometry like this seems timeless. But then so does the forest. Neither takes as long as you think.

horticultural gaiety invade the sobre rhythm of an avenue.

The Avenue de Champagne in Epernay was once described by Winston Churchill as France’s greatest address. For a mile or so it is lined with the rather comely factory buildings labelled Perrier Jouet, Pol Roger, Moet et Chandon….. their courtyards protected by gilded gates. Now, in the spirit of the times, the street has been dug up and relaid at half the width as an anti-motor measure. On either side is a broad strip of granite setts to prevent smooth walking, and in the setts, instead of an avenue, is a sort of linear arboretum ; an omnium gatherum of the most ill-assorted trees you can imagine : maples, cherries, ginkgos, pines, oaks, larches…. There is nothing so unsuitable for street planting that they haven’t popped one in. The effect, young, is simply demented, like a building put together with whatever materials came to hand. Long term, if it is allowed to remain, it will become more and more grotesque as the habits and proportions of the trees become more assertive and more different.

What does this tell us about public taste in the country that invented the allée and gave us majestic gardens in harmony with majestic buildings? Do they really have to relearn the lesson that repetition is the essence of harmonious planting ? An avenue works by repeating the form and scale of a perfectly-chosen tree without hesitation or deviation.

Twenty years ago Westminster City Council committed the same solecism, putting planters with such trees as birches and spruces along Pall Mall and St James’s Street. Public ridicule got rid of them within half a year. The trees of the Avenue de Champagne are not in planters, though, and where is the ridicule to undo this ignorant and tasteless folly ?