In for a big surprise
10 December 2011

To Wales for a walk in our woods, on a day as clear and glowing as only winter can offer. Summer is just a distraction in this wild upland country; in winter you see the real thing, the flesh and bones of the countryside painted in its deepest, warmest, most varied colours.

As a forester I try to look at the woods from a business point of view. This block of trees (black, in this low light, gothic, jagged and aggressive) is due to be felled next year. How much will it fetch? The price of timber is right down (this is the right stuff; what they use for homes - only they're not building any). The trees will safely grow on for a couple of years, but perhaps the euro will die, and then who'll build houses?

My natural interest, though, is what the view will be when they're gone. Cader Idris is straight ahead, and over to the right shall we just catch a glimpse of Cardigan Bay? There will be a dreadful mess for a couple of years, then new plants will start to give it a pattern; timid lines of green. I hope to see at least a low cover of new trees in my lifetime: but then what?

This is the nearest a forester comes to a gardener's perspective: weighing the

Spikes at risk
2 December 2011

So many plants have reacted strangely to this endless autumn that one more may seem inconsequential. It is sad to see Japanese maples standing with shrivelled brown leaves because there was no cold to trigger their abscission process, no autumn colour and no leaf fall, but they will rearrange themselves.

I'm not so sure about my favourite

True Blue
1 December 2011

I get self-conscious when the time comes for winter bedding plants. It's probably the snob in me that recoils from popping in the same blue and yellow pansies as you see for sale on garage forecourts at this time of year. Surely I should be more original?

But whereas I blithely plant perfectly routine perennials (in what I hope will be original and ravishing combinations), I never get round to sowing anything for the winter. I hope my wallflowers will do it for themselves. Indeed I spent half a morning in the summer slipping seeds from a self-sown wallflower in a wall deep in all the gaps in the brickwork around it. There followed 10 weeks without rain. I hosed down the wall once or twice when I remembered to, but none of the seeds germinated.

So here I am with trays of pansies and wallflowers from Springwell Nurseries, a jolly spot on the road from Saffron Walden to Cambridge, deciding how to

Chocolate box
21 November 2011

A mere half lemon-slice of moon was enough to light the garden last night - or rather to fill its shroud of mist with light. November, moon and stars and mild air is an unusual mixture, the garden seems to hold its breath for winter, with no change more urgent than another leaf spiralling to the ground.

Moonlight views have always fascinated me. They are almost impossible for painters (or so I suppose, or wouldn't we see them in every gallery?)

A late glimpse
18 November 2011

The ground was squelching after weeks of rain when we arrived in Scotland - and the sun was shining. The rain we had been praying for in the South made a four-day visit, leaving the North clear of cloud and lit by a low sun so bright that driving westwards in the afternoon became a challenge.

It is a strange light for gardens, gilding half the scene and casting the rest into deep shadow; not the time to take decisions (or photos). On our way home we called at Howick, the extraordinary arboretum on the coast near Alnwick that puts most other tree collections to shame in the originality

Patina
16 November 2011

It’s a simple question, but not easy to answer: why am I so drawn to old gardens, old houses… anywhere palpably old? What is the appeal of history? What does it matter that (let’s say) a garden has been growing, in more or less recognizable form, for a century, or centuries?

To people who think or feel as I do age gives a sense of validity. I am easily seduced by the word ‘authentic’ – although who is to say that what’s left of the past is more authentic than what has just been created? It’s hard to

More than a Medley
31 October 2011

It is not easy to plot the chromatics of autumn. Timing is tricky, but so is the matching of tints that vary from year to year. A tree that turns yellow one year will do orange the next, or a bush usually reliably red go off in a sulk of yellow. There are consistent performers; Acer palmatum Osakazuki is famously hard-wired for a fiery climax, but mainly we just trust that October and November will give us the visual warmth we crave.

Spring is not so different: pricks and splashes of bright colour on bare branches or bare ground are scarcely susceptible to colour coordination. We just have to put up with pink screaming at yellow.

When someone does make a successful effort, though, at more subtle and considered colouring the result can be marvellous. We walk more and more often these days in the rapidly developing arboretum at Marks Hall, twelve miles away near Coggeshall. The Winter Walk beside the lake there is planted with real sensitivity for quiet autumn tints. (We do well in East Anglia for winter gardens: Anglesey Abbey and the Cambridge Botanics both have splendid examples.)

Tick over
26 October 2011

The frost (it was only a touch) that browned the face of the Bishop of Llandaff last night was the first here for seven months. Mid-March was our last even moderately cold weather. The cold spell that gave last winter its fearsome name started in late November and reached its climax over the weekend before Christmas, when I recorded two days of bitter cold and clear blue skies, and the greenhouse door froze shut. The lowest temperature on our thermometer, sheltered on a north wall, was -9°C. Since then the coldest night has been January 31st, with a low of -1°C.

Spiritual Space
24 October 2011

Beauty in a state of déshabille is a stiff test for a garden. It can be poignant, though, and it can reveal the quality of a good design. We went to her garden to remember the peerless Jill Cowley last Sunday; the garden she made with her architect husband Derek Bracey at Great Waltham. Jill suffered for ten years with a bone cancer that put her through hell. Only in the last two years did it stop her gardening, though, or playing a key role as deputy chairman of the National Gardens Scheme (she was its Essex County Organizer for ten years).

For two years now the grass has been cut and the hedges trimmed; in the borders, though, among the roses (they clamber up every tree) and the unpruned shrubs, it has been the survival of the fittest, The result? A revelation of the gardening style of the 1970s and '80s, powerfully geometrical, decisively linked to the old farmhouse and dairy and linking them to a garden house, a pergola, statues, a bridge over a (now dry) pond, and memorable views into the surrounding farmland. We have an advantage here in Essex: the fields are lined with shimmering silver willows, now in autumn the precise shade of olive green that seems to be de rigueur in fashionable decorating.

The Gibberd Garden at Harlow belongs to the same school of design. So, to a point, does our own at Saling. The

Steady State
19 October 2011

We have been travelling far more than usual in the past couple of months, coming home for a few days only to set off again - to Germany, Italy, Wales, France (twice). And, strange to say, the garden has hardly budged. You can't keep dashing off like this in the first half of the year, but in autumn the garden settles down to a gentle tick-over. And there has never been an autumn more settled and stately than this.

Day after day in October with a clear sky; high pressure yet mild temperatures.

Back to previous Trad's Diaries

impact of the different possibilities on the fallow landscape. One is to leave it fallow, or at least parts of it, and watch the first-year foxgloves and the gradual return of the heather and bilberry, and gorse and brambles and bracken, the inevitable birch and rowan seedlings, volunteer spruce and larch, and hopefully a smattering of oak. Leave it two hundred years and, theoretically, oak will be the climax vegetation - at least in sheltered spots and gullies where soil has accumulated over the ungiving granite.

I have planted a lot of oak. It struggles. Local Welsh oak has no sense of direction: mostly it goes sideways, with a nudge of course from sheep. In autumn its patchwork of colours is wonderfully wayward: one tree is copper, one gold, its neighbour jade and the next as dark as an Amsterdam front door.

Larch I love; its pale seedlings brighten the woods as fast, even, as birch. But there is a threat hanging over it: the same Phytophthera ramorum that threatens our oaks. It has reached South Wales, apparently travelling north. No one is planting it around here any more. Our tall stands of larch, planted in the 1960s and now seventy feet high, straight poles to a thin canopy, are the most graceful parts of the woodland, and their pale spring green and autumn gold two of its principal delights. If we see trees browning in summer we have to call the authorities, and they will say fell. I remember the elm disease, thirty five years ago, and I tremble.

But now, in the short days with long shadows, I can spend time on the details, see the work that nature puts into arranging heather and rock and bilberry, gorse and bracken and long-jumping brambles; none of them, not even the brambles, quite destroying the magical equilibrium. I can prod little freshets into new courses, promote them to streams, yank a ponticum from a path, play the gardener on a domestic scale within the implacable macrocosm of the forest.

delphinium, which looks set to flower in December. It is one of the noble named varieties that seem to be gradually disappearing from nurseries, their propagation (by cuttings in March) being a chancy business. My 'Clifford Sky', the purest blue with a white eye, came as a rooted cutting from the admirable Kevin of Beeches Nursery at Ashdon. In its first season it sprang from the border like a rocket. Last year it produced nine splendid spikes. Perhaps I dead-headed it too enthusiastically: back to one foot from the ground. Now it has gathered all its forces to flower again. A bad freeze and its strength will be sadly depleted; small chance of many cuttings or a good show next year.

deploy them casually, as if they had volunteered. That is not how they will look, but nor should they; at least not the pansies. Their wonderful satin extravagance needs a more or less formal frame. There is a new one (to me) this year; not bright yellow but pale primrose. I will speckle it with the one called 'True Blue' in the bed behind the cottage where the rugosa roses stand gaunt in winter.

My favourite wallflower for years has been the old cultivar 'Scarlet Bedder'; a gauge, I'm sure, of my deep conservatism in choosing flowers. This year there is an F1 hybrid called 'Treasure Bronze' which is so much healthier looking, stockier and more compact that I am planting it instead. Sadly there is no chance of a true F1 seedling in a wall.

Heaven knows what the provenance of the pansies may be. 'True Blue' is a strong colour I would have called violet until I checked in my old RHS Colour Chart. The name is right and I am wrong; it corresponds, making allowance for its lustrous texture, with colour 95A, Cornflower Blue. The Colour Chart originated in the 1930s with the British Colour Council, now long defunct. Another of their publications was a Dictionary of Colours for Interior Decoration, in two bulky volumes, which goes to the length of having three samples of each colour: one matt, one glossy and one a piece of carpet. My copy belonged to Anthony Denney, who gave it to me when I started to garden. His message: texture is as important as hue. And light of course decides everything.

They simplify so much that they reveal the very basics of mass and proportion. But they falsify by cutting out the details of colour and texture on which we base most of our gardening judgements.

It's odd, isn't it, that only the sort of painters who hang on park railings dare to paint inherently beautiful scenes. There was rising mist on the ploughed land yesterday as I took my usual walk through the low meadow among the bat willows, then up to what I think of as our Downs - the swell of sandy land and short grass. For a moment the dark plough, the verticals of the willows and thin white mist were absurdly picturesque. No real artist would have looked twice. 'Chocolate box' describes a subject as much as a technique.

and profusion of its planting. Lord Howick seems to have almost commuted to the Far East. His collections of seed-raised trees and shrubs cover acre after acre.

You may have to navigate through long wet grass to read the label on a tree in heavy berry mode or colouring brilliantly, but the bold way a plantsman can take on a whole landscape is inspiring. The valley winding a mile down to the sea was clearly once a beech wood. Immense old trees stand with a faint air of doom among the wind-torn remnants of their contemporaries; a landscape from nature that suggests natural continuity rather than the imposed order of a botanical garden. And yet there are trees here we would consider touchy in the south, and trees we never see, in a bewildering range of families prolifically interwoven. The light was fading, the sun brilliant on the western horizon, the urge to return intense.

argue rationally that Dickens’s London is more authentic than, let’s say, Canada Square.

Surely what speaks of today, made and inhabited by living people, is more real than anything remembered – let alone reproduced. Yet I hanker for traces of the past, for scraps of grey brickwork or stone that have, as we say, ‘seen a lot of history’. Somehow they offer reassurance. I see new buildings, or new planting, as something provisional, as though it were waiting for some sort of authentication that comes only with passing time. Patina adds a vital dimension to the actual. It lets imagination get to work, ‘authentic’ or not.

Do you remember Stanley Holloway in the Tower of London? ‘It’s ‘ad a new ‘andle, and per’aps a new ‘ead, but it’s still the original axe’. It’s what you might call an existential question.

Marks Hall (it was raining)

At Marks Hall the groundwork, as it were, is done in tufts of a delicate buff grass, a pennisetum, like big stitches in a tapestry.Through it run skeins of dogwoods and spindles that turn tender shades of pink and buff, grey and rose and yellow. There are gold-leafed ginkgos overhead, white-trunked birches and sage-green sarcococcas. It is the deliberate limitation of the palette, the avoidance of high-pitched colours, that gives it resonance.

We are not spoilt for good woodland gardens in Essex. Beth Chatto's is an exception, of course. Marks Hall Arboretum is becoming important enough (as I have risked before) to be dubbed our Easternbirt.

Now we are cruising in an autumn so benign that the dahlia is the only plant complaining. My complaint is drought. Ten months have given us only 400 millimetres of rain. We need 200 more in two months to hit our long term average. The wonderful thing about averages is that they always turn out about right.

In spring I complain that everything is happening at once; I panic at the hectic pace of growth and the daily changes in shapes and colours. I fall behind in even seeing, let alone being constructive Now the garden has slowed almost to a standstill is the time to plan ahead, to decide on winter work, to make serious decisions.
But no; lassitude takes over. I am not seeing clearly or analytically; not seeing the garden as a picture, just passively absorbing the atmosphere of the settled, somnolent world.

Park Farm, Great Waltham

difference in Jill's is the intelligent exuberance of her planting, still traceable in its déshabille. Jill was a traveller, a reader and writer, a gambler, a person who filled more spiritual space than others - which, perhaps inevitably, made her a great gardener too.

The michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums that fill the borders now, the dahlias and salvias and fuchsias and cosmos and cleomes, gradually expand, put on weight, begin to lean and topple, but the picture scarcely alters. The purple vine is heavy with clusters in the branches of the golden acacia. 'Buff Beauty" has heavier flower-trusses than in June.

An unexpected bonus of last winter's cold is the late flowering of one of my favourites: Francoa ramosa with its graceful white saxifrageous flower-spikes. After last winter there was hardly anything left of its low furry-leaved clumps. In their slow recovery they missed their summer flowering date altogether. For six weeks now they have been keeping company with the bright blue Salvia 'Guanajato'; unlooked for, dazzling, lovely.