It’s been one smooth sweet flow from a winter more marked by darkness then cold into the most be-flowered spring I can remember. I can only speak for the mild south-east, but there was only a moderate snap of cold in early December, then the bonus of warmth last summer ripening wood and preparing flower buds for the show we are now enjoying. The cherry (double-flower gean) in the street is stretching its rather gawky branches clotted with snowballs almost to my study window (top floor front). The magnolia below is just finishing its performance (purple petals, white on the back; I wish it were all white). Most prized of all, the cercidiphyllum in the front, a great drooping salad of a tree, has stretched far over the pavement to reach the parked cars. We’ve cut a tunnel for the pavement, but people still have to bow their heads as they pass.

The garden behind has now turned green; not yet flowering. All it can propose at present is white viburnum, camellias (pink “Top Hat’ and white ‘Simplex’), the brave little effort of the pink ‘monthly’ rose and a purple wallflower (Erysimum to the educated). But the clematis have begun to clamber, white bergenia looks fresh from the laundry and shoots from the ground are awaiting identification. I’ve never seen a variegated lavender before, but this newcomer in its pot on the wall catches the light and our approving regard. Hydrangeas in their pots pose questions: of their multiple pairs of burgeoning shoots to I prune higher or lower, for smaller or bigger flowers. They and everything else are asking for npk.

Our final gardener at Saling Hall, a Scot (or should I say another Scot as their numbers were conventionally disproportionate) had a favourite saying, repeated in almost every conversation, “We’re getting there’, she used to say. Supply the Scots accent for full effect. Where, though is ‘there’?

Naturally there were projects with a palpable end point. The mowing, for example – except that the finish of one mow usually marked the start of the next. We had too much short grass. I strongly advocate mown paths through long (or longer) grass; the opposition said they were just as much work, ‘what with the raking and that.’ My argument is that they point your feet (or simply your view) just as clearly as a paved or permanent path, with the advantage that you can change your mind.

I went to a seminar at Kew one day on the responsibility of the owners of trees for their safety. It was scary. If anyone walking under any tree is hit and damaged by a falling branch the fault is the tree’s owner’s. Which is why the 14,000 trees at Kew are regularly inspected for faults and potential dangers. If there is opponent the inspector whacks the trunk with a heavy wooden mallet, listening for a hollow sound. More doubt and he resorts to boring into the trunk.

Apparently, an American visitor was knocked over by a cedar branch not as it fell, but bouncing. It sounds improbable, but the gardeners were found responsible. Now, if a tree looks dicey they move the path.

As a lad in Kent I used to stand, gun at the ready, on the margin of a wheat-field while the reaper-and-binder went round in ever-decreasing circles, laying the sheaves in tidy rows and driving all the resident mammals to take refuge in the middle. Eventually the rabbits would make a break for it, sprinting straight into our line of fire.

The name of the field was Cotman’s Ash, a steep slope up from the Pilgrim’s Way. At the top of the hill lived a retired colonel, a veteran of the famous Younghusband expedition to Tibet in 1904. Colonel Hadow taught my brother Brian and me to shoot – Brian more successfully than me. I was a mere ten or eleven. Brian eventually became, among other things, a stalker good enough to be invited to a great Scottish estate to take care of a particularly elusive stag.

The colonel also gave us as presents two historic guns from his collection. One was a beautiful 18th century fowling piece with an immensely long barrel, whose lock, sadly, had long service disappeared. The other was a native Tibetan gun of savage simplicity, essentially an iron pipe attached to a slab of wood for a butt, the butt decorated with brass studs and bits of red felt.

As a soldierly precaution Colonel Hadow took the ramrod from where it lived under the barrel and slid it down to the breech, only to find that the gun was loaded – and evidently had been for half a century. Detaching the barrel from the stock, he took it into his garage-workshop and clamped it to the work bench, aiming it at a pile of sandbags against the wall. Then left in a hurry. There was a loud bang. We went in to find the ball had ricocheted up and stuck in a rafter. Tibetans make good gunpowder.

The sad sequel is that the two antiques were subsequently stolen from the gun cupboard in our cottage, along with a serviceable twelve-bore.

The emphasis at this dark time of year is on the little flowers we bring indoors. Just now it is a respectable cluster on the kitchen table: in one vase, with no water, half a dozen pussy willow twigs keep their fluffy little white catkins unchanged week after week. Add water and they will turn yellow with pollen and green with leaves. Another vase holds Daphne bholua, Sarcococca hookeriana and a pink camellia called Top Hat, the scents of the first two making up for the sadly scentless camellia.

At Christmas we were given a subscription to a wonderful cut-flower service called Bloom & Wild: their first despatch is still here, an arrangement of pale flowers I would not normally see and sadly can’t even name. They arrived through the letterbox, ingeniously inert, apparently in a state of suspended animation. After two days in a vase they have absorbed water and life to become a picture of a rather exotic spring.

The magic of Rousham never fails.  For decades now I’ve called it my favourite English garden. It has slumbered beside the river Cherwell since the 17^th century, no doubt much greener and with bigger trees now than when Colonel Dormer created it, not long after he had fought at the battle of Blenheim, but still the house of the Dormer family and seemingly altered only by time.

We were at Rousham on our way to The Newt in Somerset, a prodigy of garden-making in the grand style, of masonry as well as tillage. Of course the pale stone, the statues and temples were once as bright as butter at Rousham too. I remember the Newt, though, when it was just Hadspen House, the home of the Hobhouse family for almost as long as the Dormers have been at Rousham. It was as mature and tranquil. For a few years it then went through a technicolour phase; tenants made it sparkle with, as I remember, tulips. It was when the Bekkers arrived from the Cape that the chrysalis exploded into a butterfly.

Byron, in his epic he called Donnie Johnnie, describes a pleasure-palace; ‘Wealth had done wonders….’. Daisy Ashford (I hope people still read The Young Visiters) talks of ‘good dodges of a rich nature’.

No good dodges are missing at The Newt. Its base is the parabolic walled garden at a distance from Hadspen House, best seen from its excellent restaurant on stilts. Don’t linger too long over lunch, though; you still have lots to see; the high point being the Roman villa.

A sketch, or sample, of this marvellous reconstruction appeared at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show; enough to start me salivating. The full dress version is almost England’s Pompeii. In modern terms it was probably the manor house of a substantial estate. Certainly its owners lived in style – and in a style it is easy to appreciate, down to the flavours of the food being prepared in the courtyard kitchen. The Bekkers, media moguls in South Africa, I believe, have given us a splendid new visitor attraction. I anticipate an overflowing car park.

 Rain on the garden. Rain on the saltmarsh. Rain forming shining lakes on the lane to the harbour. Four geese in formation clatter overhead. A white egret, looking absurdly exotic, stands in the mud and dips its long beak in the ebbing stream. The mud must be crawling with tiny creatures to feed the hundreds of birds.

The Isle of Wight is wrapped in gauzy mist. The ferry from Lymington to Yarmouth, white, symmetrical like a tiny Taj Mahal, glides to and  fro across the Solent.

Last night the full moon painted a golden path over the water and the massed masts of the dinghies in their enclosure shone like the spears of an ancient army. On the footpath to the water brambles reach out to offer their shining black fruit and grab your clothes.

Keyhaven is the creek in the saltmarshes where Colonel Peter Hawker created the sport of wild-fowling. Sport, as he saw it, though today we would see his daily bags of hundreds of birds as simple  slaughter. He kept a highly readable diary of his exploits, his getting up at four, even in winter, to manoeuvre his gun-punt through the marshes (he and his man in the water, pushing) near enough to a flock of ducks or geese to blast them with his blunderbuss and kill scores at a time.

Hawker had been badly wounded in the thigh in the Peninsula War but lived on to shoot – and play the piano – into his seventies. He had an estate at Longparish on the River Test. He recounts how he travelled, to Scotland for the shooting and Paris for the Opera, where he knew all the musicians and taught piano-playing using a device of his own invention. His inventions included designs for new guns, one of which he presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the 1851 Great Exhibition before offering it to the War Office. As an exhibitor he had to bring his exhibit and queue to get in to the Crystal Palace  every morning. His novel gun then went into service with the army.

His diary also methodically details all his expenditure; the fare to Southampton, from Southampton to Cherbourg, Cherbourg to Rouen, then by train to Paris, not excluding the price of his meals. His house, now known as Hawker’s Cottage, still stands near the Gun Inn in Keyhaven, still a little fishing port, with a fleet of eight or nine boats going out daily round the Needles.

Hawker was a great Victorian. They were tough in those days.

On the high lime trees individual leaves go yellow first. There are more limes in Kensington Gardens than any other trees, planted in alleys round the royal palace, and more trees in Kensington Gardens than in the adjoining (and bigger) Hyde Park.

The turning leaves, horse chestnuts first, then limes, and a gradual browning of the grass as autumn sets in, change the mood of the park. The squirrels seem busier than ever. Chestnuts plop to the floor, at its driest now, inviting more picnic parties. It seems to be mostly brown people, from the sub-continent (or perhaps just Notting Hill) who love to congregate in their whole large families, tablecloths spread on the grass, to spend the afternoon drinking tea and emptying plastic boxes of food, little children spinning off at tangents to kick their coloured balls. Two boots on the grass represent a goal without a goalie.

Dogs in dizzying variety are the main distractions, certainly for me, sitting on a bench in the wide walk past the sculpture of Physical Energy. The massive bronze horseman, riding bareback on a pawing steed, was the masterwork of Britain’s’ most respected sculptor of Edwardian times, G F Watts, created at his studio on the road to Guildford.

Watts has been considered as Britain’s Michelangelo. I couldn’t possibly comment, but the huge sculpture certainly commands attention. There is usually more controversial art to be seen three hundred yards away at the Serpentine Gallery. Together with the dogs, plenty to fill an idle afternoon.

With the temperature in what we used to call the 80s (even for a day or two the 90s) a north-facing garden has been a boon. The French window from the kitchen is open; the garden  flows into the house and vice versa, a big white parasol shades the central table, our neighbour’s walnut offers grateful shade and the constant splash into the little faux-lead tank with its residents Cae and Gwian, goldfish named after our woods in Wales, reminds me of the soothing lines in The Ancient Mariner: ‘The noise of a hidden brook, in the leafy month of June, which to the sleeping woods all night singeth a quiet tune.’ This is the sound that tells the mariner his ordeal on his stricken ship is coming to an end. It percolates soothingly through the open bathroom window while we sleep.

But where have the birds gone? Have our resident robin and the pair of blackbirds joined the rest of our neighbours in the Cotswolds, or Cornwall, leaving the shuttered street silent, the road unencumbered with parked cars? August in London is a city muted – save for the screeching parakeets; a town three quarters asleep. In the rest of the year a long day spent reading carries a shadow of guilt. Not in August.