Phantom phlowers

Trad used to do a Plant of the Month, when we had a big garden and many choices. This the first time I’ve done a Plant of the Year – but really it’s a Plant of Many Years; ten at least.

I love orchids for living in slow motion. Writing about a genus so closely and intensely studied is like treading on egg-shells, but this cymbidium (I believe its name is, or was when I bought it, Rum Jungle) has lived in the same modest plastic pot all this time. You couldn’t get a toothpick in among its curling roots. It lives on water and neglect., most of the year in a shady spot behind the greenhouse, where I top up its saucer when I remember, sometimes with a drop of Growmore in the can. (Could I be drummed out of the RHS for offering such unscientific advice?)

I brought it into the greenhouse in October and into the warmth of the house, by a north-facing window, in late November and gave it a little orchid feed. The flowers have been erupting for four weeks now – and of course stay pristine for weeks. Each flower of this rather ghost-like cultivar has a double red line faintly picked out on its lower lip, presumably to guide insects straight to the action.

My sister sees rescuing near-death orchids as a sacred calling and would scoop a tiny pot with a shrivelled phalaenopsis off a skip in the street for intensive care in her kitchen. Actually there is nothing very intensive about it; only patience and a strict regime. No food, almost no water, domestic temperature and refusal to give up. The joy when a tentative bud appears repays months of nurture.

Chiswick House gardens are haunted at Christmas

The Design Museum, Sir Terence Conran’s baby, has just moved from beside Tower Bridge to our part of town – and we’re delighted. It was quite an operation to rebuild the old Commonwealth Institute for its new purpose. Its eccentric pointy roof (a hyberbolic parabola like Maid Marian’s hat) was the problem; the whole massive weight had to be jacked up and supported on Acrow props while they built new walls below. The result justifies the effort. The huge space inside encompasses a memorable pale-panelled atrium up to the roof, galleries, a museum, offices, a club room and (Conran being Conran) a first-class restaurant.

The word ‘design’ asks as many questions as it answers. In one sense everything we see and touch is designed, in the sense that its maker had an object in view and planned how to achieve it. In practice it is usually applied to what we often call Industrial Design, and the first objects you see are such iconic modern objects as telephones, jeans, bikes, the London Underground logo, a plastic bucket and the inevitable Coca Cola bottle. There is a fascinating exhibition called Designers, Makers, Users, there are recent prize-winning designs…. a whole day’s worth of interest. It all inculcates a sense of visual awareness; you start looking at shadows, textures, proportions, juxtapositions… and enjoying vision more as a result. Is ‘mindfulness’ the same idea?

Does garden design come into it? I hope it will. It is a very different discipline. The surroundings of the Commonwealth Institute were designed by Dame Sylvia Crowe, the doyenne of landscapers at the time. She was employed by the Forestry Commission in the period when they were blanketing uplands with dark rectangles of firs – which of course she did her best to ameliorate. I’m afraid she got the blame for much of what she was trying to avoid. When did a gardener, landscaper or nurseryman last get a knight- or dame-hood? Sir Harold Hillier, perhaps, fifty-odd years ago? They must be some of her trees still round the new museum; perhaps a Crowe retrospective would make a good exhibition. I remember her gratefully: in the 1970s she helped me to put my ideas together for my pretentiously-named book The Principles of Gardening.

Grasses in December sun in the glasshouse borders at Wisley

Its darkness, not lack of interest, that keeps me out of the garden in December. There is plenty to enjoy when you can see it. So how much precious garden space is it worth, I was asking myself, devoting to plants “of winter interest”. If that means their one virtue is winter-flowering, with eleven nondescript months, probably not much. Besides, the roster of all-rounders is pretty limited: you can enjoy Mahonia ‘Charity’ and Viburnum x bodnantense in everyone else’s garden. Camellias, too – at least in this neighbourhood. Not everyone, I know, relishes delayed gratification, but my most absorbed moments just now are spent looking for future promise. It’s the swelling bud that hypnotizes me, more than the picturesque wreckage of last year’s growth.

Having said that, I have just paid a visit to a garden where the ebb and flow of the seasons is on unselfconscious display. Waltham Place near Maidenhead has been an Oppenheim family home for almost a century, but also functions as a laboratory and school for ideas of sustainability and biodynamics that are rarely played out for all to see. The Head of Education told me it is also used as therapy for people suffering from dementia, with encouraging results.

A morning of drizzle and mist dramatized its qualities. Winter here is a much of a celebration as spring – or if that is over-egging it, as much of a statement. It is a picture of plants in their plenitude – and past it. Tall grasses, sere and pale, play a large part in December (as they do at Wisley). The bright squirrel brown of beech hedges seems to give off heat, and the red stems of Siberian dogwood to blaze in the mist. Everywhere there was something that called me over for a closer look; many seedlings, of course, with their green look of promise, even if their fate is to be weeded out later.

Following the phases of the moon is routine here. I was shown two mature hedges of Lonicera nitida, one solid, chunky and full of leaf, the other half-bare, with dying branches and naked twigs. Both, I was told, were trimmed in autumn; the first at the proper phase of the moon for pruning, when the sap is in the roots, the second at the wrong moment, with the sap risen. Was the gardener reprimanded? I am an agnostic in such matters, but I shall look up nervously when I next get out my shears.

I’ve been receiving each issue of The Plantsman, then The New Plantsman, now The Plantsman again, for 38 years. I wish I’d been able to keep them; they encompass a vast amount of good information. Especially recently, it seems to me. This month’s issue is full of news as well as the usual meaty plant-related articles. Not all the news is good: there is a serious new plague of Fuchsia gall mite in the south of England, the dreaded Rhododendron superponticum has now invaded 100,000 hectares of this island, and the little Asian hornet, which attacks bee hives, has arrived (in Gloucestershire).

The main articles are on growing proteas, on the importance of gardening in cities, on hunting ferns in the Pacific northwest, on propagating cyclamen by stem cuttings, on Dahlia species in Mexico that few of us have ever seen, on Acer griseum in the wild (and the best specimens in gardens). All are well-written and well-illustrated. The sort of thing, I thought wistfully, that long ago made The Garden so valuable, but is seemingly deemed too highbrow for modern members.

One article made me particularly wistful: Brent Elliot’s account of the late Valerie Finnis and her husband Sir David Scott. We were lucky enough to know them in the 1970s and 80’s, staying occasional weekends at the Dower House at Boughton in Northants where they gardened together. I learned more from them about gardening and the love of plants than from anyone I have met. Valerie was a photographer, too, and in a class of her own. Her square Rolleiflex pictures, often portraits or still-lifes, were somehow infused with her sympathetic curiosity

Sir David was the model of a ‘parfit gentil knight’. In his middle 90’s he retained his curiosity, his wonderful gentle manners, and his memory. He would pick up on a conversation started weeks before. He spent many of his last winter evenings reading the letters his parents wrote to each other daily in the 1880’s, each still in its envelope with its penny stamp.

Painshill: the prospect from the Turkish Tent

If the Hon. Charles Hamilton was rewarded for his eminent taste with a sojourn in heaven, yesterday he and I were looking at the same scene. Painshill, his Surrey Elysium, was looking more perfect than he can ever have imagined it; trees grown taller in more variety, lawns smooth-shaven, follies secure in gleaming perfection and only his Temple of Bacchus still a building (or rather rebuilding) site. The brilliant low sunlight flooded each monument; Gothic eminence, craggy grotto, five-arch bridge, Chinese bridge, mausoleum, Turkish tent and the naked Sabine struggling in the bronze arms of her naked Roman captor.

It glittered on the lake in crystal reflections, picking out every detail of proud swans and gilded autumn trees. It lit the black platforms of the tallest Lebanon cedar in Britain and the bare vines of his vineyard tipped towards the water like Johannisberg towards the Rhine. When Hamilton last saw it, 250 years ago, the trees were young, the buildings they now shade and embower self-consciously new. Now he must swell with pride, and search anxiously for each new American plant, shipped with such care from Mr Bartram in Philadelphia, to see how it is acclimatising 3,000 miles from home.

His ingenious waterwheel, pumping water to the lake from the river Mole below, slowly turns like the hands of a clock marking the years, drops from its mossy paddles glinting in the sun. A team of gardeners rakes oak leaves into russet piles. Time is on holiday here – which is its habit in heaven.

Kensington's biggest field maple, by the Serpentine

I’ve never really believed Marie Antoinette said ‘Let them eat cake’ or even “What’s wrong with croissants?’ I prefer the story where she looks out of her window with a cry of delight and sends for the gardener who had the pretty idea of scattering yellow leaves on the lawn. That was on the day the staff at Versailles had downed tools.

The last leaves are hanging in the sycamore as I write. Three weeks have seen countless thousands fall. We have filled ten bin bags for the council to take away. It’s no way to run a sustainable garden, I know, but where do I make a compost heap in this tiny space, how much use is sycamore compost, and where would I use it?

Everyone agrees that the south has seen a glorious autumn, a slow glow in calm weather for weeks on end. We haven’t seen frost or strong wind; few trees have excelled as brilliant individuals; instead they have all concurred in gradual transformation through fading green and yellows to a uniform dull gold. One of the most sustained performers, in buttery yellow, has been the humble field maple. Liquidambars, the usual motley stars, have gone quietly; Pyrus ‘Chanticleer’, the pavement pear, is the exception round here, turning brilliant pale orange with touches of red. The magnolia in our front garden, with huge leaves, A4-sized ovals some of them, provoked by a spring haircut, is the last to shed. The plain swept surfaces, when all the leaves are gone, have their own appeal – though Marie Antoinette might not agree.

They tease me by calling it ‘Grandpa’s Shed’, but I can take it. The fact is I love it. I go into my little greenhouse in my little garden and feel liberated. I have a different relationship with the plants in pots, sharing this little roof. They are my dependents; they need me every day. They look up with doggy expressions. And I give their loyalty back.

For one thing plants on a bench are at the ideal level to touch and inspect. A fatigued flower or a less than sprightly leaf is obvious – and your fingers can take care of the problem straight away. You must, of course, conjecture about the roots; glass pots would be revealing; I wonder if anyone uses them – keeping them in some sort of sleeve, of course. They wouldn’t like light.

We’ve just moved the plants I’ve been nurturing for the house in the hope that they’ll do their stuff at Christmas. Our favourite cream-flowered cymbidium has had its summer in the shade and recently six weeks in my shed. Now it’s the centrepiece of our little library table, among piles of books, and the excitement is spotting the flower-spikes as they start to emerge; six so far.

The Veltheimia has served for twelve Christmases now, still in its original glazed pot. Its gloriously glossy and wavy deep-green leaves are an ornament as soon as they appear in September. At the moment it sits under the glass roof of our north-facing verandah, its flower spikes of pale pink bells forming, keeping company with a Sasanqua camellia called ‘Paradise Pearl’ full of promising pink and white buds. Perhaps sasanquas are not quite as showy as most camellias, with smaller, less glossy leaves a little like a phillyrea, but they start flowering in autumn.

Meanwhile in my shed a seven foot standard Fuchsia boliviana that lives outside in summer, dangling scarlet bells, shelters for the winter among various pots I pity, and the Ozzie Hardenbergia violacea clambers up into the roof, preparing (I hope) to turn purple in February.

And the food's not bad either

I was surprised (and perhaps a little alarmed) that they’d noticed, when The Lonely Planet Guide chose North Wales as number four in a list of the world’s top ten regions to visit in 2017 – the only one in Britain, which is of course absurd.

Until then I had supposed I was alone in finding that our mountainous area ticks all the boxes. A large chunk of it is the Snowdonia National Park, stretching from Conway on the north coast to Aberdovey seventy miles to the south, and twenty or thirty miles inland. I’m sure what the Lonely Planet people like is the hiking and biking , the rock-climbing and the vast beaches, although they do describe it as ‘a haunt of in-the-know foodies’ – which will surprise most people. Incidentally, they’re quite right.

I can’t deny that our own little corner, our woods, suspended above the estuary of the River Mawdach, is beautiful. Over the too-silted-up estuary rises the granite wall of Cader Idris; to the left the peaks around the Dinas pass, to the right the sea, Cardigan Bay and from the top, on a very clear day, the Wicklow Hills. Behind lie the Rhinogs, not specially high but dauntingly wild; miles of bog and rocks with no tracks except the Old Harlech Road, scarcely visible on the ground but marked by an 18th century milestone: XI miles.

Our woods have won two gold medals at the Royal Welsh Show, in 2005 and 2016, perhaps for careful forestry, but as much, I suspect, for the pleasure they give the judges. They could hardly be more varied, in trees or topography: rushing streams , little lakes, remnants of old oak woodland in the valley bottoms, lots of beech, some red oak and higher up larch, Douglas fir, and of course the spiky Sitka spruce that will produce timber even on bogs and rocks. Everywhere birch , rowan and the pale green larch seedlings. Gorse, too, of course. I forgive it its barbs when I breathe the honey scent of its flowers. From each of our high points, views to make you catch your breath.

I don’t know how the Lonely Planet found out about it, though.