A good starting point

In their time Haseley Court and Folly Farm have both been among England’s most influential gardens. I visited them both in June with the patrons of The Garden Museum. One is a classic of the Edwardian years of Lutyens and Jekyll, the other a masterpiece fifty years younger. But ‘in their time’, it struck me, gives quite the wrong impression. Their time is now.

Folly Farm in Berkshire has been restored with great pains and immense scholarship, seemingly regardless of cost, by Jonathon and Jennifer Oppenheimer. The house is famous in itself as one of Lutyens’s typical excursions into the Neverland territory he shared with JM Barrie and Randolph Caldecott. I have always loved Lutyens, and believe the secret of his juggling with ideas as modern as his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright and as old as English vernacular materials is really his sense of humour.

He loved catslide roofs, fantastic chimney stacks, huge oriel windows and little dormers in improbable places – almost as though he were illustrating a book for children. In the garden his trademark – or one of them – is ingenious changes of level involving curving, sometimes almost circular steps, beautifully made of mixtures of brickwork and carved stone.

Folly Farm has all these things, originally planted by Gertrude Jekyll, no doubt in her intricate palette of colours. Now Dan Pearson has had a go – and the result is, to my mind, a marvellous match for Lutyens’s whimsical grandeur; decisive, original and harmonious. Small ideas or fiddly colour arrangements would be wrong. Colour schemes are brave enough to embrace massive spaces, and often the plants themselves are supersize, too.

Haseley Court in Warwickshire belongs to a later era, the lean years after World War II. Nancy Lancaster, who made the garden, was the American socialite decorator who gave grand houses permission to be shabby and shabby ones permission to strike grand attitudes.

Her ideas live on, at one end in the Mayfair showrooms of her firm, Colefax & Fowler, still the headquarters of chintz de luxe, at the other in such establishment as the Hotels du Vin, where gaps in the floorboards are justified by expensive soap in the bathroom. Shabby chic signalled aristo confdence; easier to do indoors, you’d think, than out. Somehow just not weeding doesn’t cut it.

Haseley Court became a beacon of good taste not because it was neglected, but because the Lancaster eye used powerful signals of ancestral glories and gardened gaily around them with no apparent inhibitions.

Ancient topiary was a good starting point. Nothing says long tradition like a whole chess set of crisply cut yews. Visiting Haseley with her successors, Desmond and Fiona Heywood, I realised how deep the Lancaster style has sunk into our psyche (or certainly mine). From the walled garden, brimful of what seems random planting around old apple trees, colours from Matisse, to the long canal with green banks under willows, I recognised my own efforts at Saling Hall – or rather what inspired them.

Folly Farm and Haseley Court represent two different approaches, attitudes, indeed cultures. Both have fed into the garden norms and expectations of today – and in turn been refreshed by them.

October is the month to visit New York. The sun is bright; the air is clear and relatively cool – though this year I was too early for the firing-up of fall. September was abnormally warm and dry, like ours. Then some rain; the general picture was still all green.

My favourite room in New York looks down from the 19th floor onto Central Park. The lake glints just below, embosomed in trees. The towers of Manhattan stretch out beyond. The bookcases filling the walls contain a glorious library of books on the history of gardening and landscape. This is the office of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the person who revived the Park from its nadir in the 1970s. Now she is President of the Institute for Landscape Studies.This is where she edits Sitelines, its magazine.

We first met when I was touring radio studios to promote my wine atlas and she was on a parallel course, discussing her first book: The Forests and Wetlands of New York. It was as though she was the first person to notice that all the concrete lies in a spectacular landscape of woods and cliffs, marshes and islands. Look out of the window as your plane lands at JFK. Below you lies Jamaica Bay, a vast wildlife refuge that competes with Essex for its wandering muddy shoreline, home to (they say) 300 species of birds, not to mention horseshoe crabs, terrapin and mosquitos. In the distance are the Manhattan skyscrapers, beyond and around them the Hudson and the East River and Long Island Sound, Staten Island, the cliffs of the Palisades…. a dramatic natural context that city people easily forget.

Central Park is there to remind them. Forty years ago it was neglected, overgrown, filthy and dangerous. Then Betsy was appointed Administrator, the first in the role. She instilled order, found volunteers to clear up, plant up – and give money. She inaugurated the Central Park Conservancy, recruiting the great and good to support the park. Not long ago one Maecenas signed a cheque for a hundred thousand dollars.

So the park is looking good, perhaps as good as it ever looked since Mr Omsted and Mr Vaux set it all in motion in the 1850s. We walked over from Central Park West to the Boathouse on the tree-fringed lake, through the Rambles, a supremely romantic piece of woodland landscaping where paths, some paved, some natural, wind up and down among what seem to be wild woods, though suspiciously floriferous with flourishing native flowers. It was Michaelmas daisy time; their delicate pale flowers scattered under the trees in pools of light. Great whaleback rocks are a leitmotif of Central Park; indeed the dark grey schist, its surface often polished by schoolboys’ trousers, is the necessary bedrock of all Manhattan’s towers.

A gondola from Venice glided by on the lake; under the spreading, just yellowing, elms of the Mall a piper played by the monument to Sir Walter Scott; a faint whiff from the veldt wafts over from the zoo, fountains play among banks of chrysanthemums. It will soon be time for the sweetgums, the maples and the oaks to catch fire. Much as I love Kensington Gardens, there is nowhere on earth like Central Park.

The tussle over The Garden Bridge continues. Those who first mooted it seem to be otherwise engaged. Those who authorized it are probably consulting their lawyers. Meanwhile a growing body of opinion is questioning how an actress, an admirer and a designer got so far in wishing such a crazy scheme on our capital.

I don’t need to tell gardeners how the middle of a major river, exposed to the four winds, is a poor choice of a site to nurture plants., or whether trees can be expected to succeed there. People will have made up their own minds about whether one of London’s grandest views, the great grey tideway with St Paul’s as its crown, would benefit from a window-box in the centre ground. Others will recognize the description of the designer, Thomas Heatherwick, as ‘the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of Toytown’. Certainly passengers on his number 9 bus will have rued the day he was allowed to design it. And this is not even to examine where the money to pay for the bridge is to come from, or who will pay for its maintenance ad infinitum.

London does need more bridges, both upstream and down. The same mayor thought a cable car would do the trick. The need for a gimmick described as a garden bridge remains to be proved.

Not London, surely? Battersea Park is going in for retro-gardening in memory of the Festival of Britain. I'm not sure Russell Page would want his name on this:

It’s the cyclamen, first of all, that convince me in it’s not all over. When everything is winding down they are popping up, in places you never saw them before or have forgotten about them. Suddenly there’s a spatter of white, or of pink, that bears no relation to what grows around it. There’s one in the barren soil under a box hedge, another in a damp corner full of ivy. They are individualists, solo or in congregations; they hold their heads at cheeky angles and their leaves (I speak of C. hederifolium) are painted haphazard. One I have in a clay pan came from Rassell’s Nursery, across Earl’s Court Road, a tuber the size of a Chelsea bun that showed no sign of life for a year, then started signalling energetically from behind the compost sacks under the greenhouse bench.

Perhaps the best colony I know is in the rarely-mown park of Château Langoa-Barton in the Médoc. It gradually paints the long dewy grass pink just when the sweet scent of fermentation starts to fill the air from the cuvier next door.

We are mourning a sudden and puzzling loss just now. One of our favourite plants at Saling Hall was the pale-purple flowering Abutilon vitifolium ‘Veronica Tennant’, an almost instant little tree, growing five feet in a year to 15 feet or so, with grey-felted vine- or maple-leaves and wide-open papery flowers like the most innocent of hollyhocks. True, it’s a short-lived plant, perhaps six or seven years, but in our narrow garden our plan was to grow it against a wall to help screen us from next door. I reasoned I could prune off any forward-facing growth and encourage the sideways branches to form a screen.

V.T. took some finding, and when she arrived, via Rassells, they warned me not to water it. Not even once. I argued that I had seen its parents growing in a Chilean rain forest; odd, I thought, for a plant with such fragile flowers. ‘Not a drop’, said Richard Hood. She,V.T. that is, started slowly in the dry ground below the wall, then after six weeks shot up in rude health to way above my head. Success, I thought, until one morning she was suddenly, obviously. dead. Had I broken the no-water rule? A couple of showers had, but also I fear a cavalier hand with the hose. This was no flood; the soil around seemed quite dry. But Richard was right. I can’t find a specific warning in my reference books, except in Michael Howarth-Booth’s still useful Effective Flowering Shrubs of 1970. He calls A. vitifolium ‘a miff’. What miffs it is evidently water.

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?

Border incident: Miscanthus nepalensis with you-know-who

To Kew to see how the Broad Walk borders – all 2000 feet of them – are coming on towards the end of their first season. Wonderfully is the short answer. It wasn’t the ideal day to go; promenaders were very few; it was 91 old-fashioned degrees in the shade – of which, of course, there was precious little. A parasol-seller would have done good business.

The borders do have a relatively shady end, the one nearest the Palm House and the Victoria Gate. Big trees provide a reason to plant less light-loving plants, from ferns and hellebores and epimediums to lilies and (the stars of the season in so many places) Japanese anemones. The beds are based on eight huge circles, each dedicated to a theme, usually a plant family. In each circle a yew pyramid forms a focal point – and points you to a clever illustrated key to the planting. Grasses are used (but not overused) here and there throughout; the bright gold tassels of Miscanthus nepalensis were one of the highlights.

The Orangery end is as sunny as can be; penstemons and crocosmias were firing it up, while the bed dedicated to the daisy family, the Compositae, was a banquet of heleniums, asters, rudbeckias, heliopsis, helianthemum and all things that have sun in their name. Along the whole thousand foot length colours have been mixed masterfully in long satisfying sweeps. It is plantsmanly, it is painterly; in short it is a triumph

Discuss: Lower your aspirations and achieve a higher success rate. Its logical; baying for the moon has never had a success rate at all. Content is most easily found by starting with low expectations. It’s a good excuse not to frequent three-star restaurants.

I am, I admit, that kind of gardener. Or at least part of me is. I can’t quite bring myself to admire groundsel (except for its example as a profligate survivor) and I don’t weed random seedlings until I’m sure of what they are or might be, I can accept half-hearted flowering in a plant I am fond of. delay dead-heading and leave fading plants standing in the hope of some aesthetic justification for their remains. You won’t find me dropping everything to go and tidy up; you will, on the other hand, find me loitering with secateur s when there’s a deadline at my desk.

Perhaps this is the moment to say that I am pleased (or not displeased) to be harvesting my total crop of eight tomatoes. Tiny ones at that (but red). They have endured a small pot, intermittent watering, a life lived in 80% shade, and an attack of whitefly. So I shall enjoy them as a minor triumph.

The process of gardening is more important than the result – until, that is, you open for the National Gardens Scheme. Who was it who said ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive’? A bonus point for the first to put up their hand. I had to look it up too: it sounds rather ‘Confucius he say’, so I was surprised to see that it is one of my favourite authors, Robert Louis Stevenson. As a youngman he wrote sententious essays, collected together as Virginibus Puerisque. That’s where you’ll find it.

Is it, though? Better than to arrive, I mean. What is a gardening arrival? The moment when the shutter clicks and you have something for your album? The moment you pour yourself a drink and sink into a chair? What will you be thinking about as you take a sip? Whether you can get away without mowing before the weekend.

Even Japanese Zen gardens haven’t arrived. Daily raking is existential for them. The Grand Condé’s chef Vatel killed himself because the fish was late. Gardeners take heart; there is no gardening equivalent.

King's Bench Walk has some of London's finest planes

The lawyers’ gardens of the Inner Temple usually keep a low profile. According to Shakespeare the Wars of the Roses started there in 1455. The RHS held flower shows here in Edwardian days, then a reprise nine years ago. Otherwise they remain a spacious and serene place by the Thames where lawyers go to (I imagine) cogitate, discuss their briefs or have a picnic under the exceptionally tall planes. Until Bazalgette built the Embankment, the Temple Gardens, like the Chelsea Physick Garden , went down to the tide. There must have been lots more gardens along the banks of Westminster and the Strand that originally stretched down to the water, too.

I happened to be walking by the other day, through the Inns of Court, past my father’s old chambers in Kings Bench Walk, when I saw that the garden gate was open. It usually is, I gather, from 12.30 to 3.00. What’s more the head gardener , Andrea Brunsdorfer, was just inside, examining here great herbaceous borders with a critical eye. They are masterful; bold, jolly and original. Original? Who else plants little pines in the front row, then prunes them low to display their tufts among the flowers? The beautiful soft green and blue Pinus parviflora is a more inspiring plant to have at your feet than catmint. But all her choices keep up a chromatic and textural eyeful.

How wonderful, I thought, that London still has places like this (though not many) at its heart. Then I remembered the threat of the ‘garden’ bridge, and its promoters saying the Embankment was rather quiet in this stretch and could do with some tourist activity. I pictured the scene on Westminster Bridge, which you can hardly negotiate for the crowds taking selfies in front of Big Ben. Someone wants to visit this bedlam on the Temple?

There may if course be lawyers who would like a short cut to the National Theatre. I suspect they are outnumbered by those who value the historic tranquillity of their college. I have yet to meet a gardener (though Dan Pearson must be one) who likes the idea, or believes that a good garden can be maintained, in perpetuity, in the most exposed conditions you could devise. You would think the intellect and the influence of a thousand lawyers would be up to quashing the whim of a smiley actress. Why, I wonder, don’t they?