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Backward glance
11 October 2011

How much can you recall of the priorities of the past? I read of the recession of the '80s, or the collapse of the '70s, with only a dim recollection that there was trouble of some kind. The decades rumble past like goods wagons down the track. I take down the green bound volumes of The Garden that contain the first four decades of this diary (or most of them) without a clear idea of what I'm going to find.

1981, 1991, 2001 …… what was I writing about three, two and one decades ago? I can tell you. At this time of year in 1981 it was the remarkable success of

 

 

 

Each in its box
10 October 2011

I aspire to be decisive. I am capable of drawing up a plan, arguing and agreeing with myself about, it, and even putting it into execution. But then I'll spoil it with second and third thoughts, unneeded extras, something white to complement the blue or vice versa - and the impact is lost.
Which is why I so admire Susan Orr and her Dorset garden. It is a series of low-walled yards nestling up to the farmhouse and the barn where she keeps her horses. Perhaps they once divided sheep from pigs. Sue has used their geometry with the assurance of a Le Nôtre.

From the kitchen door your eye follows box hedges to a white iron gate, but the hedges themselves spell out more patterns to come. At each corner there is a slightly raised square, ending that run and announcing a crossroads. The pattern repeats, a series of squares with quite sober filling: the first four simply crab apples laden with fruit blushing green to red, further on sedums or artichokes.

Why does this work so well? The proportions are comely; nether mean nor

 

 

Seasonal shift
5 October 2011

Autumn arrived yesterday, apparently from the Sahara, riding on a hot wind that crisped the leaves of unprotected trees and threw them around the garden. It also put a gleam on the pond which for a month has been a dismal sink of duckweed. At last it slid to one side and let the sky in.

The still hot days seemed like a fantasy. There were no garden suppers all summer - until late September. Is the climatic confusion on balance bad for plants? Are they like children that need a good routine and a story before bed? It has certainly been good for the grass. The leaves are scrunching on an emerald carpet. It rained enough at the right time and the growth has been ideally slow and steady for weeks.

I'm worried about our autumn colours, though. The best of the Japanese maples really catch fire in late October or early

 

 

Autumn music
28 September 2011

Who on earth is chopping down a tree this beautiful autumn morning? It must be a big one, to judge by the length of the demented racket of the saw. But there is no tree, and the random roaring corresponds to no pattern of felling and logging. The noise fills the neighbourhood, obliterating the peace of every garden, annulling anemones and

 

Harvest Festival
26 September 2011

France has no RHS, or anything like it, so no Chelsea Show, let alone Wisley or Rosemoor. What it does have are two chateau-shows, competing genteely twice a year, in spring and autumn, near enough to Paris to attract the curious aspirant who seems to make up the main constituent of French gardening today.

Les Journées des Plantes de Courson is the better-known and more competitive of the two, recruiting British judges and attracting more specialists in woody plants. Last weekend we went to its rival, the Fête des Plantes at St Jean de Beauregard, whose autumn show has the air of a harvest festival, subtitled Fruits et Legumes d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui.

The chateau of St Jean is on the southwest fringe of Paris on the road to Chartres. It's 17th century builder was Pierre-Pail Riquet, creator of the greatest public work of his age,
the Canal du Midi. His descendants, the Curel family, achieve the almost equally difficult feat of keeping up a 17th century château and its gardens rather uncomfortably close to Orly airport.

I am always amazed at the self-confidence of such chateaux. Their scale, and the scale of their dépendances (stables, offices,

 

 

 

The German Riviera
19 September 2011

Back from a dendrologists' outing of one of those blessed parts of Europe where trees find exactly what they need and grow to their full potential. High rainfall is nearly always part of the recipe - but so be it. It was an inspiring visit - and not just because of the trees.

Weep, Wisley. Gnash your teeth, Hyde Hall. There is a magic island garden that outshines you. Not, for sure, in every department: not for variety of plants or of horticultural idioms. But for design, cultivation, taste and above all setting Mainau has no peer in this country. It is the Tresco of Germany; an island with a privileged climate at Germany's southernmost point, on the country's biggest lake, bordered by Switzerland and Austria, surrounded by orchards and sheltered by Alps.

The castle and garden of Mainau were created in the 19th century by the Grand Duke of Baden and continued by the family of the Kings of Sweden, the Bernadottes. Jean-Baptist Bernadotte was the most fortunate of Napoleon's marshals; a solder from Pau who was elected King of Sweden and whose family is still in place. The late Count Lennart Bernadotte was a naturalist, a dendrologist and a natural gardener. His daughter Bettina is now queen of the island, which is run as an environmental and educational trust.

Count Lennart inherited a near-jungle of huge trees towering in each others' shade. He calculated the precise effect of removing almost half of them, tree by tree, drawing projections of the probable effect of each removal. Today the arboretum seems ideally spaced, the lawns between monster cedars and sequoias and oaks perfectly proportionate. You approach the schloss

 

 

Four seasons
18 September 2011

When we built our kitchen, forty years ago, we commissioned the stained-glass artist Jane Gray to make us a panel over the door between kitchen and conservatory. It illustrates our four favourite plants, one for each season, surrounded by a garland of autumnal vines. The flowers are a Corsican hellebore for winter, a Crown Imperial for spring, blue agapanthus for summer and white Japanese anemone for autumn.

I remember exactly how and why we chose them. Even where. We would still choose exactly the same flowers forty years later - with one exception. At that time we had just discovered the Crown Imperial; the sumptuous, juicy, rather smelly Fritillaria imperialis. There were scores in our new garden, both yellow and deep umber-orange,

 

 

Who’s bats?
29 August 2011

Is it guilt that makes us, or at least our legislators, so absurdly over-protective of badgers? No creature has so many walls of regulation, euro and home-grown, keeping it from harm. Guilt for what? They should be feeling the guilt, not us, if the disappearance of our hedgehogs is their doing. We haven’t seen one of our spiky friends all summer. Or do we feel guilty for preferring furry things that can't answer back to the young of our own kind, which resoundingly can?

And if badgers are molly-coddled, what about bats? The bat lobby is so powerful that at least one ancient church (St

 

 

Taking the long view
22 August 2011

Back from a week in Snowdonia. Chilly for August, but ideal for long steep walks. Our favourite, starting from our woods overlooking the Mawddach estuary, follows the ancient Harlech road from Dolgellau, more or less straight uphill (which is why hot weather is not ideal) to a ridge at 1800 feet.

You are walking through heather and reeds, with low gorse here and there; the track often a glittering rivulet under your feet. The gate in the wall at the top opens on a panorama of Snowdonia and Cardigan Bay, from Bardsey Island at the tip of the Lleyn peninsula to the west, to Snowdon itself almost due north. On the western horizon the hills of Wicklow are a faint line. To the east rises the smooth shoulder of Diffwys, to 2500 feet. Turn around and the long leonine ridge of Cader Idris forms the southern horizon, with our dark woods and the silver arrow of the Mawddach far below.

We took a rough scramble down a too-steep path last week, arriving at the woods hot enough to plunge straight into our pine-fringed tarn. But not for long; there has been no summer to take the chill off the black water.

The pace of growth in these woods, with 60 or 70 inches of rain a year, is constantly surprising. A great deal of the forester's job is to discourage over-

 

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The Woodland Trust, then almost ten years old. It already had 15,000 members and had just bought Stour Wood, 134 acres in Constable country, for £70,000. I was also celebrating our new-built conservatory, and marvelling at how quickly its new plants were growing.

Ten years later I was preoccupied with our new property in the Auvergne, and with the murky water in the moat at home. Another ten years and the theme was a year of prodigious growth: 2001 went from a wet winter through a mild, frost-free spring (rather like 2011) to a summer weighed down with flowers, fruit and foliage. I measured a young oak that grew 14 inches in a single day.

That's the joy of gardening: you could change the century, as well as the decade, and we'd be banging on about the same old things.

 

 

 

 

 

Malus 'Red Sentinel' in early October

grandiose. There is a powerful unity in repeated quiet green: stronger in simple shapes repeated, I think, than in the curlicues of a decorative parterre. Colours speak out clearly: the pink crab apples, the deep red sedums or the sugar-pink nerines, each in its box.
Perhaps I am drawn to it most of all as a glimpse into an orderly mind - a state of being to which I can aspire, but which will forever remain out of reach.

 

 

 

November. Ones in full sunlight are already looking a bit shrivelled. My favourite golden Acer japonicum (I won't trouble you with its latest name) has been blowtorched, and in future articles I shall remember that the forest-dwelling vine maple, A. circinatum, really needs its forest.

We have just said goodbye to two trees. It can take years to realize that a tree has morphed from impressive to oppressive. I was reluctant to fell a big Lawson cypress, the golden 'Winston Churchill' - largely because my father was so devoted to 'Winnie'. But its gleaming flat yellow fronds, beautifully overlapping to create a wonderful texture, were effectively blocking the view from the Long Walk to the fountain in the Water Garden.

Across the way, a Portugal laurel, also just 40 years old, had gone native, thirty feet high and suckering widely (this surprised me). Both went in a moment of decision that has changed the garden. We ground over their stumps and their space is already smooth and billiard green, completely dissolving the old sight-lines so I feel almost lost in the space. The new monument, formerly hidden by the cypress, is a more-than-respectable Syrian juniper, a broad thirty-foot pillow of the subtle juniper grey that Getrude Jekyll loved. How shall I bind it into the picture? It needs an anchoring block of soft foliage. Another maple?

 

 

 

making roses irrelevant. There is an oily smell with it, too.

Yes, it is a leaf blower: an infernal contraption designed to cost fifty times more than a rake without fulfilling its purpose. Every autumn the nuisance gets worse. We were woken at five in a French hotel the other morning when the council sent a man round to blow the leaves off the pavements into the path of the almost equally noisy street-scrubbing lorry that followed at six. Would a 200 per cent VAT rate put a stop to it? I doubt it.

 

 

 

St Jean de Beauregard

farmyards,dairies, dovecotes, bothies and the rest) seem more remote from modern life every year. Which makes the Curels' jardin potager as rare as it is beautiful.

Did gardeners of the time of Louis XIII really mix up the edible and the beautiful, or is it a modern fancy? It is a well- worked convention today; often stiffly, with contrasting colours and regular lines. At St Jean the vast parterre potager, several acres in a single wall, mingles the serried and the inspired as beautifully as I have ever seen it done. Ancient fruit trees line the walls and trace the principal axes. The rest is a tapestry woven with vegetables and perennials and annuals in patterns and harmonies that seem endless and effortless.

Has modern English taste been a major influence? In the freedom and profusion of the flowers, yes. In the subtlety of their blending I'm not so sure.

 

 

Lake Konstanz from Mainau

along an alley of giant tulip trees. Glimpses of sails on the lake below draw you across emerald lawns between soaring cedars to a hayfield on one side; a rose garden on the other; the epitome of a German lordly estate where agriculture and horticulture are easy partners. In fact it is much more: an institute for developing high horticulture and teaching ecology side by side.

The trees were reason enough to visit Mainau, but even hardened dendrologists were awed by the flower gardens by the lake, from the thousands of dahlias, in banks and swirling borders by the water, to softly-contoured enclaves of subtle planting, of grasses and late daisies and salvias that merged with meadows and woody groves.
What park or garden in England, we asked ourselves, has settled so many questions on the marriage of garden and landscape so harmoniously?

 

 

 

forming a long alley beside the box hedges along the central garden path and in clumps seemingly at random elsewhere. We loved upending the bells to show visitors the five white drops of nectar under each. Nothing in spring was more exotic than these oriental apparitions.

Today I'm not so sure. They are still here - but not in anything like an orderly alley. We soon discovered that they wander around at will, mysteriously displacing their huge bulbs. The result: you never know when you are going to spear or dissect one as you dig: until the strong sweet smell hits your nose. Every year as I work in the border I find myself reassembling their fat juicy segments. I bury them in the corner of a wall until they recover and form new bulbs ready to flower again. They die off slowly, too: you have to tolerate their thick stems yellowing and flopping right through the spring before you can yank them off. Glorious flowers they may be and with a fascinating story, but I am slowly moving them (when I can find them) to a wild corner they can have to themselves.

What replaces them as the icon of spring? We're still thinking.

 

 

 

 

Hilda's, at Ellerburn in North Yorks) has become unusable; its congregation is rated irrelevant while bats leave their messages on the altar and the stink of their urine in the air.

I had a letter recently from the bat authorities that left me worrying about their belfry. 'You have a cave on your property', they wrote. (This is true). 'You have closed it with a gate made of vertical bars'. (Also true: to keep people out. The bars are four inches apart). 'You may be unaware that bats prefer horizontal bars'. I admit I'd never asked. Nor can I imagine why my money and yours is being spent on civil servants asking bats their preferences.

Bats are our ecological allies. They eat lots of insects. Some are rare, even endangered. The lesser horseshoe bat, though, is abundant, and if it suffers some inconvenience in barrel-rolling to fly through my gate I shan't beg its pardon.

 

 

 

Cardigan Bay, Harlech in the middle distance

vigorous interlopers that take space and light from the main crop, whether it be spruce, larch, fir or the long term goal and point of the enterprise, oak and beech. I have a kill list, with the most pernicious weeds at the top: rhododendron and the invasive and useless lodgepole pine, mistakenly planted (it is useless timber) in the 1960s and self-sown everywhere ever since. Next come Lawson cypress (a similar story) and, sadly, western hemlock. Hemlock is one of our most beautiful trees, pale green, graceful, drooping, with a formidable straight trunk. The trouble is no one wants its timber.

Birch needs weeding because it comes up everywhere, fast, and its slender twigs can enfold and stifle the far slower oak. In fact nurturing oak, even pruning young trees (they have precious little sense of which way is up) is my most time-consuming job. I can spend all morning moving slowly through bracken and brambles liberating little trees, with a deep sense of doing good.