Taking stock of spring
19 May 2010

How did spring get so mixed up this year? Or is it just that we have become used to more benign winters and steadier openings to the growing season?

I am not at all sure what to expect when I go out these days. How far have we got? Winter ended with the best blackthorn season I’ve ever seen – hedgerows snowy for three weeks - under a genial sun, while all the bulbs flowered at once and spring-flowering plants seemed to be playing leapfrog with their schedules. Cherries were late and magnolias early; I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had come round a corner and seen a dogwood in flower. So what can the weather record say in explanation? I have the book from the greenhouse in front of me.

January: 46 millimetres (approximately: you can ‘t really measure the rain in snow, as it were). 14 days of snow from the 4th to the 18th. 10 days with no precipitation at all scattered through the

Little Africa
5 May 2010

I’m lucky enough (and that’s very lucky) to be intimately engaged with a garden on the Riviera. More precisely, looking down on the Riviera from a hillside called La Petite Afrique. In this mildest of climates, sheltered by the Alps and insulated by the sea, this plunging slope, below vertical limestone cliffs is the one to be compared with Africa.

We started work on the ancient terraces five years ago. They were originally farmed for olives and vines, and latterly, when the railway was laid along the route of the Roman Via Aurelia, for early flowers for the markets of Lyon and Paris. There are still flower-fields terraced up the hills at Villefranche, and many plastic tunnels once you cross the Italian border. Beaulieu-sur-Mer has no terraces wide enough; it was colonized as a fishing village by the late Victorian English. Prime Minister Salisbury had a villa here, the Duke of Connaught helped to build the Anglican church; there may be a reconquista by the French one day, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Focus
28 April 2010

When something as exciting as this spring weather happens there is always the question: try to photograph it or just revel in it? There is no doubt that one detracts from the other. Either you see through a camera or with all your senses, and mind, and soul.

I’ve been taking pictures with my miraculous new camera, a tiny Cybershot that adjusts itself to any range – even a close-up at two inches – without pressing buttons. (It doesn’t really understand light, but you learn not to give it tricky problems). I’ll be glad to have the photos, automatically dated, as reminders of what was out with what – which is almost everything with everything. Magnolias have overtaken peaches, mid-season Japanese cherries are flowering with the autumn one. Tulips are sharp-elbowing the ‘February’ daffodils.

Blackthorn winter
20 April 2010

The blackthorns have never put up a braver show. They line the edges of the field and woods with frothing white blossom in heaps haystack high. What happened to its own winter? It missed the cold weather, delayed its flowering and connected with the same premature summer weather as the Iceland Volcano. It is an easy period of calm: the silent skies are blue from horizon to horizon. The garden is rushing as though it had missed its alarm clock and has a train to catch. Spring always unfolds too quickly to enjoy all the details, but this month is inducing panic.

Desk bound
15 April 2010

You might think, if you followed my recent entries, that I was seldom at home. The truth is different; the trouble (my trouble, that is) is that home these last four months has meant desk and screen. I have been in the throes of composition. My books, down an awful lot of years, have been long, intricate, densely composed of text, pictures and captions. I promised Mrs Trad I wouldn’t go there again, not in this intensity. And yet here I am. It was tolerable (actually, very satisfying) while winter dragged on. Everything changed as the deadline came alarmingly close and spring suddenly tooted its horn.

April is when the conservatory goes wild. So many plants have been ticking over; some still dragging out last year’s achievements, most launching a whole new programme of growth and flowering. The list this morning is an intoxicating mixture of debuts and encores and long-running lists.

Wise not mouldy
9 April 2010

A correspondent in Japan reassures me about my apple trees. ‘Is the moss hurting them?’ was the question.

She says ‘No prunus mume or actually no tree of the Rosaceae family should be without moss and lichen here in Japan. ‘Moss’ is even in our national anthem to represent life and eternity. In Ikebana

month. Highest temperature 43°F (6°C) on the 16th, lowest 26°F (-3°C) on the 7th.

February: 82 millimetres of rain, with only four days completely without, Maximum 48° (9°C) on the 5th, minimum 28° (-2°C) on the 15th. The January/February total of 128 millimetres or 5 inches is about a quarter of our annual total rainfall. But if not in winter, when should it fall?

March: 38 millimetres with 17 dry days. Maximum temperature 59°F (15°C) on the 18th, minimum 26°F (-3°C) on the 7th. A dry cold month with moderate sunshine, neither urging on nor holding back.

April: Only 10 millimetres, and 24 days with no rain: a very dry month with long sunny periods, reaching 68° (20°C) on the 28th with a minimum temperature of 36° (2°C) on the 21st.

May, to date: The only rainfall, 9 millimetres, on the 1st of the month. No extraordinary temperatures; no frosts until the middle of the month when there was enough new growth to hurt (as the ashes have been).

Now we have the full panoply of spring, early and late at the same time, in a sea of Queen Anne’s lace. Confusing, but brilliant. Snow in January, rain in February, drought in March are hardly unlooked for. Drought and sunshine in April were the surprise.

We have parts of the four top-most terraces before it becomes a steep scrub of Aleppo pines and wild olives, then cliffs. Across the bay, 500 feet below, we look down on the eastern cape of Cap Ferrat. From the western end of the top terrace the view takes in the whole garden, the cliffs above and the bluffs leading to Cap d’Ail and Monte Carlo, crowned by three perilously perched castles you only notice at night, when they are disneyfied by floodlights.

The terrace rises in steep steps to the western end, backed by high stone walls. We have given each step a corresponding cascade, so you walk up to follow the glinting water-spouts to their source under a monster olive tree. This is where the gazebo offers you the full view, after you have reached a platform of orange and lemon trees and another more severely furnished with a box parterre under an umbrella pine. The sea is hidden, until you reach the top, behind an iron pergola of roses and grape vines.

Then looking back you see that the uppermost terrace, or the central hundred feet of it, is a tunnel of grape vines and a wisteria, a cutting from one on Cap Ferrat that covers a quarter of an acre with flower-streamers that start above your head and almost reach the ground.

On this visit we were not lucky with the weather. The cold wet blast that had hit England two days before followed us there. There was plenty to do, weeding and trimming and planning future planting, but none of that contemplative lazing such pampered gardens are supposed to be for.

I only really see the garden, though, when I put my camera in my pocket and stop to contemplate. Scents tie up with flowers when you open all your senses. The chorus of birds reveals its soloists. You see the spent flowers, and the fallen petals, and the buds waiting to open, and the furry bracts shoved aside by the swelling fleshy cup of a magnolia.

The amelanchiers are passing that peak of open starry flowers jumbled in pinky-brown new leaves that only started two days ago. The pear trees are as white as the double-flowered cherries: what a crop we’re going to have this autumn. By my window scarlet ‘Japonica’ and wall flowers and orange tulips are burning away. Spurges are their thrilling yellow-green. Primroses and cowslips are all at it.

Yellow daffodils are the only flowers that refuse to fit in. Next year will I have the willpower to suppress them? With all this white and pink and a hundred shades of green the bulbs that really add are blue ones. Little grape hyacinths are nearly over, but camassias…… that’s what I’ll plant more of.

Characteristically the weather forecast, morning after morning, proclaims anothernice day, temperatures struggling a bit perhaps, a touch of frost at dawn, but fine and dry. There is no one at Barometer House capable of making the connection between fine weather and cancelled flights. Like passengers in the 18th century, waiting at Dover for a westerly to fill the sails of the Channel Packet, we urgently need the Atlantic to reassert itself over the Continent, give us a gale and blow away the stubborn high pressure north east of us – and the ash with it.

Most springs we have the same; a couple of weeks, sometimes three, of a cutting east wind, no rain, and a general feeling that we’re ready to move on. We can’t this week; certainly not by air, until Zephyrus stirs his stumps.

But the Met Office thinks we’re only interested in the banality of sunshine.

Oranges and lemons have the longest runs, fruiting and flowering together all through the cold weather – or do they? What about these salvias that slowed down but never gave up all winter? The dusky red brown ‘van Houttei’ has been going since mid summer last year; so has my old blue friend S. guaranitica. The extraordinary Pelargonium ‘Apple Blossom’ should be relabelled arborescens: it has reached eight feet by the door, flowering non-stop.

Camellias, of course, are at full blast. The soft purple of the Australian mint bush is a cloud behind the tiny oranges. Orange clivias are opening their trumpets like fledglings in green nests. Jasmine is crowding into the roof light and making the air almost too thick to breathe. My ancient potted rose ‘Maréchal Niel’ hangs its tired-looking (are they overweight?) flowers from the wall, and I am excited to see the wide pink blooms of ‘La Follette’ come out among its new red-stained leaves.

‘La Follette’ is the first rose out on the Côte d’Azur, scrambling through silver olive trees as though a great couturier had just ordained pink and silver for the season. (The designer was Lord Brougham’s gardener at Cannes). And the show-stoppers, the full-dress pelargoniums, are breaking open their heavy buds among leaves that proclaim much more vigour to come.

arrangements, especially for New Year's or other felicitous occasions, we even paste on bits of Parmelia tinctorum to give branches an aged look, to represent all that is old and wise and venerable still able to bring forth fragrant flower and sweet fruit, even in very cold weather. (Take that, young saplings). As you write, I do know that non-Japanese will look upon such branches as ‘mouldy’, unfortunately.’

But then we try to grow moss-free lawns under our apples, not an idea you will often meet in Japan.