Silver threads…

8 August 2011

It looks as though the early spring may be mirrored by an early autumn. Is there only a set length of time that plants can keep up their mid-season functions?

To my alarm, already in July I could see turning leaves - even on a few trees quite dramatic changes of colour. Our red maple, an American not usually at home in our alkaline soil, but making a good shift of it over 30 years here, shows more of its red capabilities now than in most autumns. (Here it usually turns pale yellow in October).
Koelreuteria, the so-called pride of India (it comes from China) is turning red when its usual choice, much later in the year, is a vibrant orange. And Toona sinensis, perhaps more familiar as Cedrela, is already going the clear yellow it usually reaches in short misty days.

Mind you, the Toona has had a rough

Brightness at dusk
6 August 2011

Why does the sun come out as it goes down? It has happened so many times this summer that I am looking for an explanation. It is happening as I write.

Is it a local phenomenon? Obviously it depends on your viewpoint. There have been pesky grey clouds all day. It is too cold and breezy to sit outside. Then, just as I start wondering where I left the corkscrew, the garden floods with light.

It could be a weather front moving on at the end of the day. Sometimes it clearly is; the cloud formation shows it . Not this evening, though, with what appears to be an equal covering of cloud everywhere except this window in the northwest where orange light is streaming in. It sets light to the old red bricks of the Tudor chimney above the conservatory. It gilds the grey flint of the church tower, evening after evening.

Purposefully wild
1 August 2011

Gravetye Manor in the Sussex Weald was William Robinson's home for fifty years and his workshop for the ideas he first expressed in his hugely successful earlier books, the Wild Garden of 1870 and The English Flower Garden of 1883. The English Flower Garden went into fifteen editions in his lifetime. No doubt the cheques from his publisher, John Murray, paid for much of the 1000 acres of woods protecting his paradise. (I found a first edition for sixpence at a village fête many years ago).

When he died in 1935 he rashly left the estate to the Forestry Commission. The condition of the woods three generations later does them no great credit. Gravetye had a renaissance as a hotel in the 1960s until the turn of this century in the hands of Peter Herbert, a perfectionist and conservative hotelier. Since he retired in 2004 there has been a lull, but hearing that the new owner is once again taking the garden in hand we visited in July.

There is a great deal to do (the garden covers 30 acres) but we were delighted by what we saw and heard. The Great Garden and Little Garden, with their doors directly from the house, once again have a Robinsonian feel; the sensation of an exotic meadow profuse in tall flowers. Uniting the borders, filling much of the space with its foam of white umbels, is
Ammi majus or bishopsweed (or lady's lace), perhaps as a rapid space filler while

A hack at work
25 July 2011

'Pruning' is too polite a word for what I am doing in the garden at the moment. 'Hacking back' describes it more accurately - and it is one of my favourite annual jobs, comparable with weeding, and with the same essential purpose: to rebalance the growth of the past weeks and months in favour of less vigorous plants that I prefer.

I am usually as sentimental as the next gardener, but this is no time for soppiness. People say 'I can't cut that, there's a flower on it'. Let it alone and you'll have fewer flowers next year. Stragglers go in the buttonhole while I get hacking.

I set out with my favourite Japanese secateurs in my belt and with some particular plant in mind. This morning it was a philadelphus with long new shoots shooting up vertically from its drooping,

The smell of rain
18 July 2011

John Grimshaw (John Grimshaw's Garden Diary) John Grimshaw's Garden Diary) has responded to my coinage of Pluviophily as a word for the love of rain with one for the scent of it: 'petrichor'.

Petrichor combines the greek for stone and the blood of the gods. Two Australians coined it in 1964 in the journal Nature, explaining that the smell

Gardeners' Delight
14 July 2011

The opening of the tomato season is not quite the red letter day it used to be. The first bite of the first Gardeners' Delight, the little scarlet globe exploding on your palate in a rush of sweetness and greenness, was a moment as important as the first asparagus, broad beans, sweet corn ……. No, more important - it ushered in a long late-summer season of perfumed salads and stews, tomato sharpness with bacon and eggs, the red tomato signature everywhere.

That was before the supermarkets woke up to the variety of tomatoes. There used

Pluviophily
9 July 2011

I'm such a pluviophile (and with so few opportunities to practise my passion) that I find myself watching the rain, or at night listening to it, and trying to calculate how many millimetre marks it is filling in the perspex cone in the kitchen garden. I picture the big juicy drops making the tiny water surface jump, or the minuscule misty ones accumulating on the sides until a nice fat teardrop tumbles to the bottom.

We need rain, almost always, and we sure do enjoy it when it comes.

Last night it was forecast. The BBC weather maps were spot on with light brown, darker brown and light and bright

Foolhardy
5 July 2011

The outdoor trial of our aspidistra, planted out in a bed through one of our

Minute particulars
4 July 2011

"He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer". Blake might have added (and probably meant) the politician.

I love reading Blake. He is the hippy's Samuel Johnson: trenchant, terse, and often deep. These lines came to me in a context that might surprise you; reading the Annual Report of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. The M.P.G.A. does good, horticulturally, in

Raspberry rapture
27 June 2011

It is often the play of light or the surprise of scent that triggers moments of real rapture in the garden; surges of feeling that go beyond the pleasures and satisfaction of growing plants.

I just had a moment of raspberry rapture. This season has been perfect for them. I have never seen such a crop on our tall-growing canes. Lashings of gentle rain

Garbure
20 June 2011

Here's another funny thing about the French. They have the world's most beautiful, best kept, most photogenic, most productive and various, most orderly and desirable vegetable gardens. But where does the veg go? It never turns up at table.

The mystery deepens. French markets are a wonder. There can be as many photographers as customers around the jewel-like trays of fruit and veg in the dappled light of a summer market place. The restaurant across the way? It gives you a few radishes and, with your Suprême de Whatever, a little plate of sticky rice.

I exaggerate of course. But we're just home from a few days’ journey, in perfect early summer weather, from the Côte d'Azur to Burgundy. We went back, 46 years later, to the hotel at Lamastre in the Ardèche that Elizabeth David sent us to on our honeymoon. Chez Barattero no longer has rooms, but the restaurant is still in the family, and still offers its famous Pain d'Ecrevisses Sauce Cardinal and Poularde de Bresse en Vessie. Vegetables? There were a few

pretty little carrots. Barattero may be in a

Meeting of minds
10 June 2011

The other morning we had a visit from a combined party of readers of Hortus and supporters of The Garden Museum. (I dare say most of them are both). Is there a better treat for a gardener than the company of like-minded, well-informed fellow-sufferers in his own garden?

It was an enthralling morning, because of course everybody sees something different, conversation goes off at all angles, and you end up absorbing far more information than you dispense. It was also a beautiful morning, mild and rose-scented, each plant full of promise and my most egregious mistakes still more or less in embryo so early in the season. The week before I had turned the hose on the climbing roses, which with nothing to drink were seemingly stuck in bud. Almost unanimously they responded. The rose of the moment, to

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year. It was pillaged by pigeons from earliest spring. They sit on its dome and peck, peck, peck at new shoots, littering the ground and leaving the canopy threadbare. This summer, choosing a day when a party of dendrologists was due to inspect us, it suddenly cast a huge branch, one of its three principal stems; a prone 30 feet of heavy red timber and elaborate leaves that would have been painful to anyone on the lawn. Note: this is the second such collapse. This is a tree with poorly-engineered branches. They must emerge at the wrong angles.

Japanese maples don't seem to be taken in by the funny seasons, or at least not to work to rule. Some nights have been coolish, but perhaps not cold enough to make them react. Meanwhile an extraordinary weight of fruit is taking its toll - undoubtedly the result of such a perfect warm spring and impeccable flowering. All the apple trees are bending and shedding barrow-loads of fruit. I have just been round shaking the branches I can reach and cowering from the cascades.

Poor John Downie, our most prolific crab, is stooping under the weight of lovely little glowing apples, right out of my reach. Yesterday I found a major branch on the ground in a pool of fruit. I fear more may succumb.

The redness of the evening sky can be explained by the fact that sunlight at an oblique angle passes though more of the earth's atmosphere than when the sun is overhead. The opening of the sunset window is what puzzles me. Is it a meteorological fact, or do we just live in a lucky spot?

Bishopweed and larkspur at Gravetye

other plants mature, but in any case a seed I can't wait to sow. There are masses of cosmos, of blue larkspur, campanulas, tobacco, aanemones, romneya and vetch: lightweight plants that none the less add up to an extraordinarily festive summer scene.

A memorable feature of the Great Garden, west of the house, is the broad bank, perhaps 60 feet wide, that separates it from the croquet lawn. Is there a bolder border anywhere? The clumps and drifts of semi-wild plants are heroic in scale; the effect exactly what Robinson intended by his invention of the Wild Garden.
A young gardener, his shoulders emerging from the towering tapestry, turned out to be a Breton, trained at Kerdalo, then at Great Dixter, and working his way round England. England, he told me, is the only place to learn gardening. William Robinson's first book was Gleaning from French Gardens. How appropriate that a Frenchman is gleaning in his surviving masterpiece.

flowered-out branches. They were pressing down on and shading out whatever grows below.

I haven't finished with the first philadelphus, cutting off all the old stuff and bringing light and air to a young golden Cotinus, a stylish
but slow growing Trochodendron araliodes and a thicket of epimedium, when I remember another. Then I remember a deutzia, which needs exactly the same treatment to rescue the geraniums underneath. Zigzagging with my barrow from one to the other I suddenly realise that it is two years since I tamed a Mahonia 'Charity', now sending its shoots soaring like palm trees above a hapless Viburnum davidii. I clamber into the thicket; the half-inch Mahonia trunks snap easily under my secateurs, revealing their bright yellow wood.

I pass a corner where Viburnum tinus is thrusting its dull and dusty branches out through a pretty white-variegated privet, a form of lonicera nitida I can't find in the books. It is worth spending time choosing its best feathery sprays to show off against the dark background. A vine maple is invading and shading out the bottom of my Syrian juniper, J. drupacea; more branches join the heap on the barrow.

It is not a methodical process. I look about me, sometimes in the middle of a bush where I have never stood before, and lay about me with my blades. I'm afraid hacking back is the proper expression.

derives from oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, then absorbed into clay particles. Rain releases it into the air along with another compound, geosmin. These are what we smell - or at least what Australians do.

We have different plants and different soils. Having looked up geosmin (literally 'earth smell'). I am more inclined to think it is its associated microbes that give me so much pleasure.
Although the long-range forecast suggests the novelty will soon wear off.

to be one on their shelves. It was red, round,watery and tasteless. It still has a public - and still appears at breakfast in Greasy Spoons. I started writing about its inadequacies 25 years ago or so, and pestering the press departments of Tesco and Sainsburys. I remember the hallelujah day when one of them called me to say that their purchasing board was in shock. Tomatoes had overtaken bananas in turnover.

In the past three years new varieties have been pouring in, even from growers in England. We started seeing good ripe tomatoes, in pretty funny shapes, some of them, as early as February. It is a wholly benign development; who could not be thrilled?

And my tomato plants? As iffy as ever. But I still nip down to the greenhouse for a surreptitious Gardeners' Delight.

blue amoebas floating across, representing clear, cloudy,drizzly and wet patches (almost always from left to right, on the prevailing wind).

I was swimming when the first little drops made themselves felt, from a merely light grey sky. When rain comes on slowly you know it is the real deal. The merest pitter at 8.00 became a patter by 8.15. By now I was in the conservatory. By 8.30 it was a steady hiss punctuated by urgent tapping. The fishscale panes of the conservatory roof were delivering constant rivulets down the centre of each bay. I went out into the yard; yes, there was the gutter overflowing, splashing and spattering on the paving. It always does this after a dry spell; moss from the roof blocks the downpipe. But I love taking a kitchen stool out, climbing on it and reaching to clear the moss, and the subsequent slosh into the drain.

The smell of the soaking garden is best of all. How does rain release so much scent into the air?

coldest winters, with a minimum temperature of -12° C, ended in disappointment. It survived.

minute particulars. Since it was founded in 1862 to transform derelict sites in London into green oases for recreation it has touched hundreds of little-known corners and turned them green. Often only the locals notice, but a tree or a bench or a planting of bulbs can be a very worthwhile contribution. This is basically what the Association does: it gives small grants where they are keenly appreciated.

A long-established and respected body can be useful in other ways: its moral backing can put gentle pressure where it can do good …….. carefully, though, and never General Good (see Blake above).
I was delighted to be asked by the chairman to succeed my friend Michael Birkett as President of this modest body, and of course accepted.

after the three month drought seems to be a perfect recipe - and picking raspberries in the rain may be a perverse sort of pleasure, but it has an appropriately Scottish feel.

Suddenly at nine in the evening of the longest day, while I in my Barbour was deep in the leaves, plunging to the heart of the bushes for the ripest fruit, the sun broke from the clouds and the raspberries became gleaming jewels among jade leaves. I felt elevated to a gardening nirvana, my senses (my mouth, too) overflowing with the purest pleasure.

time warp, but we then stayed at a château known for its Table d'Hôte and distinguished for its potager. A deep terrace on the south side of its hotel is a model of generous cultivation. An old orangery is now a prolific potting shed, where the rotovators and sprays crowd in among enormous benches of seedlings ready for pricking out, the seed packets on sticks promising every known variety of succulent leaf and root. Raspberry canes are trained along the walls, irresistibly ready to pick. The tomato patch is the size of a small vineyard. And the deep crumbly tilth ………

Dinner? A little lettuce salad with mushrooms and croutons. Then Blanquette de Veau with rice. You could just detect carrots: red dice in the veal sauce. Never a green leaf, no potato, no courgettes or beans.

But in the gastronomic temple of Dijon, Le Pré aux Clercs (you'll think we do nothing but eat), things got worse. The melting and mega-rich piece of beef in red wine sauce was accompanied by..... a spoonful of rhubarb purée. That was the nearest we came to a vegetable in the whole evening.

I have a theory. The grander the meal, or the more the cook wants to impress, the less chance you have of seeing the produce of the potager.

In my dreams I see the Potage Garbure I ate years ago in a hotel in the Franche Comté. Cabbage, beans, peas, potatoes, turnips, onions, carrots, kale, tomatoes, nettles and herbs could all be seen and tasted in the translucent broth. The tureen was tall, the ladle battered silver.
Oh France, why do you hoard your true riches?

my eye, was Madame Alfred Carrière (or Mad Alf, as one visitor called it) hanging heavy heads of pink-tinged white from the tops of Ilex kohneana, the noble 'chestnut-leaved' holly. Unless it was Scharlachglut, scarlet and gold, lunging out from twenty feet up in the glossy green of an incense cedar.

A minor player in the borders that won a surprising amount of admiration was the little Amsonia hubrichtia, a pool of pale blue stars beside the almost royal blue of a tradescantia, just across from the identical indigo of Baptisia australis and Clematis x durandii.

We shall be hearing much more of the Garden Museum. Christopher Woodward, the director, is steering it boldly out of its Lambeth backwater into the mainstream of modern gardening. Just now there is an excellent exhibition of Tom Stuart-Smith's work. But his future plans include more exhibition space, building on to provide a possible London base for such bodies as The Garden History Society and/or The Association of County Gardens Trusts, and the essential task of building an archive of such primary material as designers records and plans.

Spring is in the air …….