Roman holiday
6 April 2010

Three days of visiting gardens around Rome with the International Dendrology Society (or a harmonious subset of it) was not quite the fast-forward spring we had expected. It had been cold and wet for weeks and just brightened up for our visit. If our English spring arrived four weeks late the Roman one was certainly no more punctual. You might be surprised how many Japanese cherries grow in and around Rome, though, and how well they blossom. Above all, to one who usually visits later in the year, the shock impression was of green. The Campagna looked like Ireland. And there are so many elms.

I had almost forgotten how the elm does something no other tree does: it flowers and fruits before it produces leaves. The unripe fruit appears as little pale green discs that make it the greenest tree of all when the forest is just thickening to fawn and tan and purple with catkins. Rome is full of elms, a green counterpoint to the black banners of what should be called the Roman pine – the huge umbrellas that shade streets and squares and crowd the sky of the Borghese Gardens.

Ninfa was our first out-of-town call. ‘The most romantic garden in the world’ seems to have stuck to it as a subtitle. I wouldn’t argue. Our party was small enough for it to be easy to hang back and be alone by the river (subtitle: ‘the most

The cusp of spring
17 March 2010

A weekend in North Wales (let’s say Merioneth, for the poetry) to see how the winter has treated the woods. Kindly, is the answer. The grass on the hills is still sere, snow hangs in the high gullies and dusts Cader Idris again in the night. The larches, pines and spruces stand impassive, a few leaning, a few prone, but no mass casualties in a winter with no strong gales. It is catkins that provide the excitement, close up where the hazels are clouds of yellow down-strokes and here and there pussy willows flash like shards of mirror, and in the distance where they begin to paint the hills.

The brilliant colours of massed twigs always surprise me: the oaks pale buff,

Unseen mouths
12 March 2010

The other day I caught myself putting on a tie to go out in the garden, and realised I was doing it simply for warmth. Things had come to a pretty pass …

Then I reflected, not for the first time, on how much hardier women are than men. A bare throat, at least, is de rigueur. Long stretches of leg are routine, clad in, at most, thin tights. A year or two ago the fashion was a bare midriff in all weathers.

True, there are builders who expose their lower backs to the cold, but men in general have the sense to put a bit of fabric between

World without conkers
1 March 2010

There is very little we can do about the two problems that beset our horse chestnuts, leaf miner, and possibly fatal canker, except insure against a future without them. It is by no means inevitable, but we should be prepared.

What to plant to succeed them depends, of course, on what part they are playing. An avenue presents the worst dilemma. There is scarcely ever space to plant another avenue for succession outside the root-zone and the shade of the incumbent

Sketched from life
24 February 2010

It was a regular customer who suggested I should change my nom de terre to Treedescant. You’re always writing about them, she said.

Touché. But it’s largely a winter habit. At this time of year they are the only thing in the garden to look at – and this is the time when you really can see them; they’re not all covered with leaves. It is the intricacy of their frameworks that I love to see, and the intimacy of their just-swelling buds. The comparison with

Castelgandolfo

beautiful river ……’) It is mesmerizing to watch the long green weed that undulates below the speeding ripples and the long trout that hang motionless below the bridges. Magnolia and cherry blossom were almost the only flowers. Oranges and huge grapefruit lit the deep green of the orchard like lamps.

Ninfa is by no means the only great garden concealed on an ancient estate within a few miles of Rome, nor the only one sheltering in massive ruins. Pines and cypresses, white-trunked planes and magnolias are the common theme. In a month or so it will be roses.
The Pope, we were told, only goes to Castelgandolfo, his summer residence, in July. It stands on a ridge between the Tyrrhenian Sea and Lake Albano in its volcanic crater, where breezes keep the dense shade under its evergreen oaks perpetually cool. The immense terrace looking towards the sea is to topiary what St Peter’s is to altars. Most memorable of all, though, is the half-submerged cloister, seventy feet high and 120 yards long, built for Diocletian’s after-lunch exercise (in his day it stretched 300 yards). There are as many ghosts as people in Rome.

the birches purple, ashes the colour of bone and hazels en masse, as their catkins ripen, bright orange. Spruces are dull green with silver flashes if the wind shows you their petticoats. European larches are pale custard colour, Japanese larches pinky-orange. In forest land the colours are laid on in random brush strokes. The silver slash of a waterfall (there is very little water after a long dry spell) hangs from a hill top.

The ponds and puddles are fecund with frogspawn and loud with froggy noises, sharp croaks above a long soft purr like a contented cat – the sound of spring warming its engine.

Home to a quite different scene from the one we left. What unit of energy do you use for a spring garden getting going? Kilojoules? Megatonnes? The energy driving the buds on every bush and tree, driving the crocuses and daffodils and fritillaries, driving every blade of grass (not to mention every weed and bramble) is immeasurable. If knotweed can split concrete, the concerted force of this garden could reach the moon.

themselves and the elements. You warm up, of course, once you start gardening in earnest. Shedding layers, though, is quite different from venturing out to admire the indifference of buds to the East wind. ‘Overcoat plants’ (who coined the expression?) is all too applicable at the moment.

Crocus tommasinianus offers the only colour with any warmth (snowdrops have no calories) and this morning I discovered the crocuses are being neatly mown by unseen mouths by night. The flowers go, leaving just the white stalks; no sign of the petals and the no-doubt-sweet working parts. Rabbits? Voles? The moorhens would surely leave a mess.

It happened last year (a month earlier), and I said I would try watering them with a repellent product called Grazers and report back. This is the report back.

Fell alternative trees and replant in the gaps? It is hard to take such a radical long-term view, but it is probably the best answer. And replant with what? Limes are the safe choice.

To replace a screen of chestnuts, which is what I need to do (they are the only big trees between the house and the village street) I am planting beech under and around the chestnuts. Beech grows quite quickly when its young and demands less light than other candidates. By planting the trees small and quite thickly I hope they will be forming an almost hedge-like screen (though not cut as a hedge) by the time the horse chestnuts succumb – if they do. Then I shall be able to choose the best beeches – some may well be damaged by falling timber – and train them up as worthy successors.

people, with and without clothes, did occur to me – but you never know where these things will lead.

Certainly there’s nothing outside the window so well worth study as the Siberian crab that rises like a wind-blown fountain a hundred yards down the drive. Its jet black silhouette perfectly expresses its experiences over 60 years or so; the constant shove of the west wind inclining it to the east, the perennial effort to find more light for its leaves ……

An artist who could draw such a telling design would be rightly celebrated. Every tree out there is a drawing of an autobiography, expressed in a different medium and a different style. Call me Treedescant if you like.