Under glass
9 January 2010

The garden has been hidden under snow and the ground frozen for a week now. The conservatory is the only place to see plants (and to how realise how much it means to see leaves and flowers). The days have been reasonably sunny but the nights regularly down to 27’ Fahrenheit or so. We rely on two little electric fan heaters to keep the frost out – with a Calor gas stove for emergencies. At breakfast time we are down to 40’; on one morning 36’, yet a surprisingly long list of plants are in flower – some only residually, but some making steady headway.

Pelargoniums are still providing most of the colour; ivy-leaved, pink, white and red, ‘Apple Blossom’ now seven feet

Private Princedom
8 January 2010

Snowed up, the sun painting sharp blue shadows on a ground of silvergilt between my window and the churchyard wall. It is too cold to enjoy being outdoors. Time to look through a drawer of old papers about the house and garden accumulated over nearly forty years. One is an inscription I never got round to putting in the garden temple (I couldn’t decide between a floor slab and a frieze).

New Trees
3 January 2010

The great joy of the reading season is meeting people of like mind who have dedicated their thoughts, sometimes for whole lifetimes, to subjects that obsess you, too. There is a style of thinking and writing, focussed but unhurried, that you find in works of what I call field scholarship.

Having observed, read, travelled and thought, the writer has no intention of skipping any detailed information. Having mastered it, though, he or she can recount it as a story in a personal voice.

It is a style I associate with the New Yorker, in those sometimes improbably long pieces on seemingly inconsequential subjects. British magazines rarely dedicate the space. Do they not trust us to calm down and pay attention? It is the peculiar pleasure of little private magazines like Hortus to gather the family round, as it were, for a good story leaving out none of the details.

I catch glimpses of bloggers these days, as I trawl the web, indulging their studies and their passions without inhibition. The sum total of the plant-centred web, indeed, is massive and no doubt worth hours of exploration. It can’t compare, though, with the warm and fertile mind of a good author in full cry.

At the moment it is John Grimshaw I am enjoying, in his New Trees, a worthy successor to a long series of deep books on my favourite subject. It starts with John Evelyn’s Silva, the first paper ‘read’ to the newly-formed Royal Society, on October 15th, 1662, in response to ‘certain quaeries propounded to the illustrious assembly by the honourable the Principal Officers and Commissioners of the Navy. Rarely can quaeries have had such a resounding answer (or the bonus of an Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves.)

I possess an edition edited by John Hunter and annotated by A. Hunter, M.D., published in York in 1776 with a list of some 700 subscribers. The additional notes make it a compendium of the advancing knowledge of trees between the Restoration and the Age of Enlightenment – Diderot’s Encyclopedia was finished at the same time. Some of Evelyn’s observations seemed quaint, no doubt, by Hunter’s time. Now they seem to overflow with excitement and experience. He nips from Pliny to pruning tips, from weeding to Vitruvius, from friends to fables, sometimes in a single paragraph.

Happy Christmas
21 December 2009

The garden has been hidden by snow now for as long as I can remember in recent years. There is still snow frozen to the highest branches of tall trees. The only tree seriously damaged so far is, of course, one of my rarest, Quercus x warburgii, the semi-evergreen

Headlong Hall
16 December 2009

Is there a difference between a glimpse and a glance? Or between a view and a vista? It is the sort of question I would have liked to put to the amiable philosophers who assembled for Christmas in 1814 or thereabouts at Headlong Hall in Wales. If Thomas Love Peacock was not part of your education, and if you have a taste for argument and a weakness for Wodehouse, or if you have just forgotten how he made you laugh, take Headlong Hall to bed with you.

The chapter that gardeners remember best begins thus: ‘I perceive’, said Mr Milestone, after they had walked a few paces, ‘these grounds have never been touched by the finger of taste’.

They begin to discuss the difference between the picturesque and the beautiful, Mr Milestone being an eminent landscaper of the picturesque persuasion. Mr Gall, the literary critic, joins in. ‘I distinguish’, says Mr Gall, ‘the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness’.

A grubby business
9 December 2009

The green woodpecker is on the lawn outside the window, immaculate in his army fatigues and red beret, concentrating hard on something tasty under the grass. I hope he hasn’t found chafer grubs. I had a nasty start last week in Cambridge when I saw the croquet lawn at King’s looking as though wild boars had been at it. The culprits in fact are crows. There is a serious infestation of chafer grubs in lawns along the Backs. The light soil and well-mown turf seem to give them just what they want. The crows find them, and peel back the turf to eat them. It is an emergency – if not quite a national one – and there is no quick cure.

There is a chemical treatment available, but you have to wait till spring, or even next summer, when the young grubs come up from their winter quarters. It also costs several thousand pounds, and has to be repeated each summer for three years.

high, leaning against the wall, P. echinatum, a girly pink called ‘Lavender’ and a single white. Salvias are coming to an end, but S guaranitica and the yellow S. madrensis are still in business, the spikes of the latter tangling with the white tassels of Buddleja asiatica, and the buddleja’s honey scent just beginning.

A purple Hardenbergia is quietly doing its business up under the lights, and more surprisingly Solanum Crech ar Pape has decided to flower again. Correya pulchella has its dusky red bells, Camellia Narumigata has a few white flowers, cyclamen are flowering (when are they not?) and twining white Dipladenia likewise.

Blue cape primroses are getting on with it, a good colour beside orange calamondins and Meyer’s inestimable lemon, bowing with fruit. There are still flowers on Fuchsia Thalia, a purple plectranthus and the frothy little euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’. Cymbidiums keep relentlessly on and a deep red auricula, while not exactly perky, must detect spring on the horizon.

Every man’s proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theatre of his Hospitality, the Seat of Self Fruition, the Comfortablest Part of his own Life, the Noblest of his Son’s Inheritance, a kind of Private Princedom, nay, to the Possessor thereof, an Epitomy of the whole World, may well deserve, by these Attributes, to be Decently and Delightfully Adorned.

This is Sir Henry Wotton, in 1624, introducing his Elements of Architecture in the manner of Bacon. He does not speak directly of gardening, but his lapidary language spoke strongly to me when I was younger. Does it sound absurd today? No more, I suppose, than the whole idea of a garden temple.

He describes trees in vivid phrases and their cultivation in earthy detail, founding, it seems to me, a school of writing that continues, through many forester’s manuals and such horticultural compendia as Loudon’s Arboretum at Fructicetum Britannicum (I have the abridged edition of 1842, shortened to 1162 pages), to the seven great volumes of Elwes and Henry.

Henry John Elwes and Augustine Henry set out to give a complete account to all the trees which grow naturally or are cultivated in Great Britain. Trees, that is, that reach timber size. It took them seven volumes. ‘We have the special qualification’, they wrote in their introduction, ‘that we have seen with our own eyes and studied on the spot, both at home and abroad, most of the trees which will be included in this book’. Not only did they visit every notable park, arboretum and forest in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (up to that time little studied); they travelled to see the trees ‘of every country in Europe, of nearly all the States of North America, of Canada, Japan, China, Western Siberia and Chile’.

Elwes and Henry, as a result, seem to hover over and dart about the tree world like Puck. In one paragraph they combine first-hand observations and measurements of trees in Oxford and Yunnan, or Idaho and Hokkaido. Their reading and acquaintance allows them to speak on every scientific and aesthetic aspect of their subjects, to cite records, letters and catalogues, to recall individual plantings, successful or failed, and to report on the health of specimens thousands of miles away. They also took photographs, with immense pains, and sometimes on several visits, to record hundreds of the best specimens – an undertaking never yet repeated (except in a small way, perhaps, by Thomas Pakenham for his Meetings with Remarkable Trees).

As a catalogue Elwes and Henry, published in 1907, was rapidly succeeded by Bean. It is Bean’s Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles which has stood unchallenged as the standard work since 1914. Bean was Kew-based. He was shown the proofs of Elwes and Henry but had a wider remit: all the woody plants that we can cultivate, after the example of Loudon.

Bean has remained incomparable but grown increasingly out of date. The last revision was started in 1970 and completed in 1980. Desmond Clarke, its editor, produced a supplement in 1988. Meanwhile plant introductions were arriving at a pace not seen since Edwardian times. The number of recognized species of oaks alone, to take one example, has almost doubled during this period. Enter the International Dendrology Society, and enter John Grimshaw, a scholarly botanist, a galanthophile if you please, who works for J H Elwes’s great grandson on the family estate at Colesbourne. . It was Giles Coode-Adams, as chairman of the Scientific Committee of the I.D.S, who determined that a new work was needed and found Grimshaw for the work. Like Bean, it was to be Kew-based.

Compilers of such books today have resources their forebears did not dream of. The greatest, of course, is access to and friendship with experts and explorers round the world. It still needs, however, a writer with a personal grasp of what is important, what to emphasize and how to make it interesting, to make a reference book come alive. I am enjoying New Trees because the chemistry works. John, with Ross Bayton, who wrote the botanical descriptions, and Hazel Wilks who did the beautiful drawings, has written a book in the Silva tradition, engaged and engaging, cheerful even. Best news of all, he is helping me update my own modest contribution to the genre, published in 1973, to offer you later this year.

‘Cambridge’ oak, wonderful in spring with its red emerging leaves and red catkins. It pulled down the too-pliant stem and snapped it three feet from the ground.

I leave the robin admiring himself in a mirror I have just hung on the woodshed wall, to travel to Switzerland for a white Christmas, and wish all my readers a happy one, and a happy new year.

‘Pray, sir’, says Mr Milestone, ‘by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?’

Can you repeat a surprise? The question is central to the way we look at gardens. There is a difference between a glimpse and a glance – and it lies in the brain of the looker as much as the design of the gardener. A glimpse is a view frustrated; the inference is that you would have liked to have seen more; a glance says that curiosity is readily satisfied; the view is worth no more than a fleeting attention. What other units of looking are there? Examination (or scrutiny) is perhaps the most intense. A peep is faintly illicit – and all the more fun for it. An outlook is limited in scope. A view is the scene full-on and a vista or a prospect a long wide-ranging view. A panorama is the view from a height.

These may be a designer’s building blocks, but they don’t constitute a design. Where the designer’s intentions become clear is in the passage from one to another – the state of transition. Surprise is clearly one transitional idea; the most striking, perhaps, and certainly most obvious. But there are others, that might be expressed in such words as ‘consequently’ or ‘furthermore’, or ‘nevertheless’, or even ‘besides’. There is a nevertheless moment at Sissinghurst, and a consequently one at Hidcote, to name only two familiar transitions. Mr Gall might have had much to say on the subject, had not the Picturesque and the Beautiful, those unprofitable abstractions, monopolized the conversation.

The croquet lawn

Cambridge’s gardeners are deeply troubled; but not, I imagine, as troubled as the green keepers of golf-courses that become unplayable.