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.

Are we making the most of what water we have in our gardens? Here is Celia Fiennes, a gentlewoman garden-touring in the 1680’s, describing Wilton House.

‘…the river runns through the garden that easeily conveys by pipes water to all parts. (A) grottoe at the end of the garden…. its garnished with many fine figures of the Goddesss, and about 2 yards off the door is severall pipes in a line that with a sluce spoutts water up to wett the Strangers; in the middle roome is a round table, a large pipe in the midst, on which they put a crown or gun or a branch, and so it spouts the water through the carvings and poynts all round the roome at the Artists pleasure to wet the company; there are figures at each corner of the roome that can weep water on the beholders, and by a straight pipe on the table they force up the water into the hollow carving of the roof like a crown or coronet to appearance, but is hollow within to retaine the water forced into ti in great quantetyes, that disperses in the hollow cavity over the roome and descends in a shower of raine all about the roome; on each side is two little roomes which by the turning their wires the water runnes in the rockes you see and hear it, and also it is so contrived in one room that it makes the melody of Nightingerlls and all sorts of birds which engaged the curiosity of the Strangers to go in to see, but at the entrance off each room, is a line of pipes that appear not till by a sluce moved it washes the spectators, designed for diversion.’

Have we lost our sense of humour?

There’s a moment at the beginning of August when the big bush or little tree of Solanum rantonettii scatters its crown with purple potato flowers. Only little ones – and I’m never sure whether to say purple or blue. It’s a matter of judgement -or maybe eyesight. But a fifteen-foot dome of this colour pretty much takes over the view for six weeks or so.

No such luck with it in Hampshire; it can be too cold even a mere two miles from the sea. But for a London garden with some wall shelter and a fair amount of space I can’t think of a more satisfactory little tree. I tucked it into the south-facing corner by the greenhouse door. Now we have to cut off six-foot shoots to stop them casting the greenhouse into shade.

My obsession with blue has its moment at this time of year, and the solanum has a companion little tree in a pot on what I call the quarterdeck, four steps higher at the far end of the garden (for its total length, think a cricket pitch). I use blue in what a grammarian would call ‘sensu lato’ – as one must in discussing a colour that ranges from summer skies to deep distant shadow. Little acnistus (or iochroma if you prefer) dangles inch-long flaring bells of a deep violet hue. I keep this little standard clipped lollipop style the better to see its bells.

The most obliging blue, particularly eager to oblige, scrambling through the border, is Geranium ‘Rozanne’, celebrated last year as the ‘Plant of the Century’ or some such. With clematis ‘Perle d’Azur’ the blue mood needs lightening. Phlox ‘White Admiral’ is the answer.

Since I first saw the scarlet fairy bells of Fuchsia magellanica years ago in its native Patagonia I have loved this modest beauty. When years later I met its albino version I loved it even more, and have planted it wherever I have a spot in the garden that needs a quick and charming lightweight. Then I came across ‘Hawkshead’, a lovely purer white version. I have a tall plant of ‘Alba’at the far end of this little garden, doing its best to block the steps up to what I think of as the quarterdeck. I regularly have to cut off some of its spreading branches; it rapidly adds more on top. It’s certainly taller than me now, an airy tower of tiny dangling bells on the blush side of white.

The contrast with the pure white of ‘Hawkshead’ is telling. I don’t plant many duplicates; I’m too keen on trying new things, but there is the pleasure of subtle variety here.

In the last few days, down by the Solent, I’ve seen more samphire than plants with RHS approval, but I always associate seaside summer with the combination of hydrangeas, usually in a washy pink, with the scarlet shock of montbretia. They are far from being AGM plants, but in bright light and salty air they make a strong holiday statement. Fuchsias love it here too. The other day in a garden by the Solent I saw a hedge fully seven feet high of the original red-flowered variety, the red not strident but just lending it a glow. It’s a splendidly biddable plant: cut it tight or let it gesticulate, a midsummer joy that keeps going well into autumn.