Who do we have to thank for the splendid variety of trees that adorn our local streets and parks?

Not everyone looks at, or even notices, the trees they walk under everyday. Perhaps in April when they light up with blossom and scatter confetti on every car. Perhaps in September when they begin to cover the pavement with potentially treacherous leaves.We rarely thank them, though, for the grace of their branches against the sky and the welcome shade they offer on a hot sunny day. Our part of Kensington is blessed with more trees, and mote different kinds of trees, than most, from the stately planes that give Pembroke Square its special dignity, to flowering cherries that for a few weeks in spring completely change the mood of otherwise unexceptional streets. Planes and cherries are commonplace; the bread and butter of street planting. The council’s tree officers, though, are doing a more imaginative job.

We live in Scarsdale Villas, which already has the advantage of being a double-width street. It was part of the property that Lord Kensington (of Holland House) sold to developers in the early years of Queen Victoria. One of these speculators had property in South Wales – hence our cluster of Pembrokes (square, road, villas…). Viscount Scarsdale had a mansion approximately where High Street Kensington station now stands. (Sutton Scarsdale, his seat in Derbyshire, is now a baroque shell, its rooms in a museum in Philadelphia.)

This doesn’t answer, though, the question of why we are so well endowed  with trees. One of our biggest and best is a common ash which stands in the middle of the private Edwardes Square, hence hidden from public view. I suspect it may date from the creation of the square just after the Battle of Waterloo. (They say many of its first residents were the families of captured French officers). Long may it be spared from the die-back which is killing ashes round the country.

Two other huge specimens in our streets are the so-called Tree of Heaven (heaven knows why), Ailanthus altissima, originally from China. Others call it the tree from hell; it can produce overwhelming numbers of suckers from its roots. One stands on the corner of Abingdon Road and Stratford Road, mercifully not – or not yet – sending up suckers. Another, a tall straight specimen, is on the corner of Edwardes Square nearest the Scarsdale Tavern. Their ash-like pinnate leaves have a distinct smell of onions.

Scarsdale Villas is almost a linear arboretum, or ‘dog’s dinner’ as one council officer describes it. I have still to identify some of its ingredients. A fine Zelkova serrata, from the Caucasus, is an unlikely tree to plant in a street, being characteristically as wide as it’s high. There are plenty of beauties, though. I am only disappointed by the council’s recent planting of amelanchiers, charming light-weights that will never make fine tall shade trees. The best advice for planting street trees is to stick to the tried and tested; the classics.     There is a reason why the great Platanus x hispanica is called by  this formal botanical name. It has no native country. It is a hybrid between the talismanic Chennar tree of the East and the rare (in Europe) American native plane. Did the marriage happen in Spain, as the name suggests? Nobody seems to know.

We all have our favourite views – probably lots of them. One of mine is along our little narrow London gardens, from the breakfast table in the kitchen. Favourite perhaps because I can not only name each plant, remember where we got it, and in some cases the number of its flower buds. The pink camellia on the right currently has forty-four, beginning to open. Its name is Top Hat: I didn’t plant it and wouldn’t. Cold things, camellias; soft and sexy, but scentless, and scent is the soul of a flower.

My favourite nighttime view is from an upper window of a cottage at Keyhaven on the Solent, looking at the Isle of Wight over the wide salt marshes, sheltered from wind and tide by the long narrow Hurst Spit, the shingle bank that protects the Solent from the west. Its tip, Hurst Castle, is only a mile from the Isle of Wight. The night view takes in the lighthouse by the castle, a slow intermittent white light, and off in the right distance the blinking red light on the Needles. Their syncopated flashes become hypnotic – and I in my pyjamas.

The starting gun is the tree in front of the house, its flowers beginning dark purple, opening to show their white insides. Judy dates her paintings, so I know it’s early this year, just shedding their furry bracts, the prompt to get down to Kew to visit its relations. It is not a big collection there (nor is that of flowering cherries) but it includes the splendid Magnolia campbellii and its hybrid – Kew-bred I believe – M. x veitchii. This is the one I should have planted at Saling Hall in large numbers, fifty years ago. Its smooth swollen limbs embody health and vigour. What a grove that would be today.

Some say that no hybrid ever has the pure beauty – perhaps class is a better word – of the God-created species. There is evidence for this view here at Kew, right next to the crowded clusters of grey trunks of the veitchiis grows a tall, decidedly elegant tree, Magnolia denudata, the Chinese Yulan, dressed with wide flowers hesitating between white and cream. It was the first Chinese magnolia to reach Europe in the 18th century and remains among the best.

that is forever England. Rupert Brooke has his. I nominate Le Bois des Moutiers, 150 miles south of Portsmouth, perched on a white clifftop sloping steeply north, a jewel box of precious plants in ideal conditions round the first (and perhaps best) country house of one of our best twentieth-century architects, Edwin Lutyens. His working partner, Gertrude Jekyll.

The house was built for the Mallet family of bankers in the last years of the 19^th century, while the pre-Raphaelites were a recent memory, and Arts and Crafts were germinating. Something tells me Lutyens had seen Gaudi’s work in Barcelona. His is more spare, less Gothic, a strong stone block austere on the inland side, facing its formal gardens, and a wall of many windows looking north to the sea.

In Devon this steep-sided sea-facing valley would be called a combe. A little stream wanders sinuously down the middle to a pond perched (artificially, I assume) on the edge of the sea-cliff, with the port of Dieppe visible in the distance. The sense of arrival here is complete; behind, the woodland hemmed into the combe, below and beyond the great horizontal the French call, with accidental poetry, ‘le grand large’.

Tall blue cedars process down the valley bottom, sheltering a collection of rhododendrons and their customary companions in a pattern familiar from Leonards Lee, Borde Hill…. and many English Gardens. None that I know, though, have quite this sense of destination, of inevitability, of paradise found.

Happily the present owners, the Seydoux family, tycoons in the film industry, allow visits to the gardens if you book in advance.

Trad (that’s me) was back at home in Lambeth the other day for a fiftieth birthday lunch, hosted by Christopher Woodward, director of The Garden Museum that puts Trad’s (that’s John Tradescant’s) church, the churchyard with his remarkable decorated tomb and a few of his possessions to excellent use; a shrine to horticulture. We were also celebrating, we said, Tradescant’s 600^th birthday.

There are always interesting exhibitions in the little art gallery in the former church. The current one is a collection of the drawings and watercolours of Rory McEwen, surely one of the greatest plant-artists, to my eyes a rival even of Durer or Ehret or Redouté. McEwen tragically died aged only 50, a genius in many fields, musical as well as with pen and brush.

I urge you to visit the museum. It is only fifteen minutes’ walk form Parliament Square over Westminster Bridge, next door to the Tudor gatehouse of Lambeth Palace. Tradescant’s tomb (and that of Captain Bligh of The Bounty) are in the little churchyard west of the church, screened by tall plane trees from Lambeth Road. Go at lunchtime: the museum’s café serves delicious and notably stylish food, strong on fresh veg. We had whole baked brill and a chicken and mushroom pie under flaky pastry.

Late summer sees the Snowdonia Forest at its lushest. “Tulgey’ is Lewis Carroll’s word for it, though it’s the neighbours’ sheep, not the Jabberwock, that emerge from the leafy depths of the wood. You can tell which neighbour  by the colour of the splotches of blue or red on their wool.

We are watching the gradual filling of the new pond. We only discovered a little stream coursing down a fold in the hillside when we felled the tall spruce, to go to their destination as rafters and purlins. The stream crosses the forest road at the bottom in a culvert; block that and its water naturally fills a depression, maybe thirty yards long and wide, around what instantly became a birch-crowned island.

Then along comes Will, our forest manager, bringing his two white spaniels. Springers, mother and daughter. Spring? They belly-flopped noisily in, paddled to the island, scrambled up over it and trotted back to shake their coatsful of water all over us. Instantly, da capo. The performance went on into the afternoon while we measured some of the tallest trees around us. 140 feet seemed a good result since they were planted in 1964 by the Forestry Commission. In a well-rained-on part of the world (at 60 inches a year North Wales qualifies) a yard a year is good average growth. In technical forestry terms ‘Yield Class 20’ means 20 cubic metres of timber are added per hectare per year. Not bad going.

If you garden by the sea you have to put up with the wind, or contrive what shelter you can. A famous garden on the shingle at Dungeness made its name with the former; one we have just visited in Cumbria ingeniously enjoys both extravagant planting and its views over Morecambe Bay within, let’s say, a bow shot rather than a stone’s throw of the sea. The solid barrier of a wall would create its own problems of wicked eddies and sneaky draughts. The preferred formula of filtering the wind calls for a screen of some kind; usually trees, that eventually lean to leeward.

At Low Frith gardening fells unconstrained, taking advantage of a range of farm buildings, the principal, a barn with its wall rising on the sheltered side, used intensively as home for delicate plants, potting shed, tool shed, and wet day resort for less hardy gardeners. It calls for a profusion of pots, robust eighteen inchers that need a sack barrow to move them and at least a barrowful of compost to fill them, not to mention dedication to water and feed them. They permit otherwise improbable combinations of plants that need totally different soils, not to mention altering their juxtapositions to suit their flowering, fruiting and the changes in the colour of their leaves.

At Low Frith a whole cohort have just been moved into, of course, a courtyard. Any new potted plants are on the small side, but so gleaming in perfect health that you stop to admire them. What is the group word for pelargoniums? Plethora sounds right to describe a score of plants pushing the limits of variety, from polished- to furry-leaved and every shade between white and crimson.

How does a diarist celebrate fifty years of scribbling?  Trad’s first words were in June 1965.  A little party, perhaps. A collection of favourite pieces. There are thousands of words to reread.

Someone asks, ‘How do you keep thinking up things to write about?’ Another asks “Why?” When you’ve done something for fifty years the real question is ‘Why stop?” So I won’t. Not yet. But I’ve been remembering the times when Trad has strayed beyond his usual remit and done some actual gardening. Even garden designing. Even forestry. Sadly, I have no portfolio of blueprints, just memories, a few regrets, and a feeling of satisfaction.

Obviously, I put my own gardens, the four I have owned, at the top of the list. Then came a handful of commissions, or at least advisory roles, mostly in France, most, oddly enough, with some connection to wine. They often start with a casual tour, or view from the terrace, glass in hand. ‘Do you really like that tree hiding the river?’ At Château Latour it was ‘That line of beetroot-coloured trees hiding the machine shed: all they’re doing is drawing attention to it.’

There have been failures. At the long low ‘chartreuse’ of Château Loudenne I proposed a bed of pink roses to match the walls of the chateau. When we started to dig a bed for them the soil turned out to be clay so heavy you couldn’t lift a forkful. So, this was the famous gravel, the secret of the Médoc’s inimitable claret? Trailer-loads of gravel and the entire compost heap dug in made little difference. On the other hand, the lawn sloping gently towards the river made a reasonable cricket pitch. It was fun teaching a river pilot from the Gironde just beyond the vines how to hold a bat. Not to mention using an osage orange as the ball (far too heavy).

At one chateau the French windows of the salon looked straight out at a tall hedge, entirely blocking the river view. It was not to be moved. ‘We don’t want the vineyard workers to watch us having lunch.’

The most satisfying solutions, or just suggestions, were just nudging the owners to appreciate and cultivate something they overlooked or took for granted. Sometimes there were pink carpets of cyclamen hiding in lush, neglected grass. It could be merely a low branch of a cedar stopping you from seeing the river. At Château Lafite a line of weeping willows half hides the chateau from the main road; I proposed and planted the same thing for the back drive at Château Latour. And there were interventions at Château Langoa Barton and Château Landiras.

Most of my French planting, though, was not gardening at all but forestry, at the broken-down farm in the Allier we bought for a song in 1990. Some 200 acres for something like £125,000. It sits at the very centre of the hexagon, as the French call their six-sided country, in a region of ‘bocage’; fields interspersed with oaks where nothing else of profit or interest could be coaxed into growing. Feral sheep, their fleeces shaggy, trailing, brown or black, nibbled brown grass among scraps of black plastic and barbed wire. The farmer, having despoiled the place of most of the best trees, was giving up. I had a longing for land to plant, and these two hundred acres lie on the fringe of France’s most famous oak forest, the Forêt de Tronçais.

Fifteen years later we could look back on planting over a hundred acres of trees; some pine, but mainly oak. And no more barbed wire. We could never have done it (or even got permission to do it) without the help, encouragement and friendship of Alain Macaire, then the département head of the Office National des Forêts. France is a land of generous government grants – and precious memories.