One is out of bounds

The garden of Eden, being we suppose somewhere in the Middle East (Noah, after all, grounded on Mount Ararat) and with a sub-tropical climate (the apple being, let’s say, an orange), made a big thing of water. My imaginary Eden certainly does. No doubt the Creator opened the heavens whenever the gardener thought a nice shower would bring on the beans or the aubergines, but I see the water supply being organised into pools and conduits, with here and there a bubbling spring or a sparkling cascade. The dappled shade is provided by fruit trees, the best authorities say palms, and an arboretum of perpetually-flowering trees of convenient stature.

What’s more, I’ve been there. Last week, in fact. It is in Sicily. We went with an IDS tour to see the rarest trees of the island, and were guided to this paradise between Siracuse and Catania, where the fertile land sloping directly to the Ionian sea has been tragically trashed by heavy industry; the land of the Cyclops is now an oil refinery. But a little inland and a little uphill, with the cone of Mount Etna on the northern horizon, the orange groves that give us blood oranges still spread for miles. Among them lies my Eden, San Giuliano, its guardian angel Rachel Lamb, trained at the Cambridge Botanics and now director of this heavenly place.

The symbolism of the garden is clear – at least to me. The gates open on to a nightmare of ferocious spiny succulents, a cactus confrontation to deter the doubtful. Then comes reassurance; a calm passage of trees in lawns. Then the gate to the gabinetto, the garden of sensual delight, where plots of every desirable plant, for scent, for use, for colour or consumption, are interspersed and nourished by a grid of brightly running rills. At the entrance water gushes in an arc from heaven (or at least an elevated spout), overflowing a big stone basin to feed radiating streams. The streams, some of them tiny, shining ribbons three inches wide, rush or glide like veins and arteries among the lush-growing plants. From time to time a shower of volcanic dust descends to fertilize the soil.

Intimacy is the essence of a gabinetto (the word can mean cupboard, closet, loo, laboratory; almost anywhere private and privileged). This is a series of small rooms within an orchard on the edge of an orange grove. A high stone lookout seat gives you the long Etna view; look the other way and the orchard envelops you. There are little clearings for vegetables and herbs, here a garden of salvias, there an alley of pink grapefruit trees festooned with roses, a snatch of English lawn or a brimming stone watertank. Shade and soothing sound shut out the harsh Mediterranean world. It is easy to understand how Adam forgot that one of the trees was forbidden.

A splash of colour in the Japanese Garden, Holland Park, London

A week of warm weather followed by two of cold has given us the bonus of putting spring on hold. Two weeks of warm would have seen all these flowers (or many of them) fade. As it is, they are still prime. Our richly cherried street – largely the marvellous Prunus avium plena – is wreathed in white. At morning curtain-call, or rather-draw, they almost invade the bedroom – they are tall trees – with the their snowy tentacles .

This is cherry zenith. The early ones still have traces of flower, there are still a few to perform (the bird cherry for one), but this is the moment the Japanese garden in Holland Park – and I hope those elsewhere – flies its brilliant carp streamers. Technicolour representations of carp, that is, made like windsocks to dance in the wind. (The pond is teeming with fat koi in rainbow colours too.) With the garden already brimming with bright colour; not just cherries but early azaleas, the new leaves of maples, irises, the first dogwoods (and the not very Japanese bluebells), the carp are gloriously over-the-top – a great whoopee.

A warm spell now would put a stop to it. But this year the jubilee rolls on. We may be impatient to see the spring; a fast-forward button is what most people want at the end of winter (or right through winter). If buttons are on offer, though, give me a slow-motion one.

Sadly for me, I am a mediocre bird-watcher. I’m not particularly short-sighted; perhaps I lack the power of concentration and the patience to keep looking, to spot movement and focus on it. And then the memory to recall the different liveries of birds and their distinctive songs. Besides I’m getting deaf. When I wear my hearing aid (not all day, every day) I am amazed at the racket around me. A tiny wren shouting can be almost alarming, breaking in on silence.

Perhaps these are the reasons why I love a little book called Deep Country. The author, Neil Ansell, spent five whole years living alone in a farm cottage, isolated far from roads, in the mountains of Wales. Once a week he walked to a shop to buy tea and sugar; the rest of the time he had only the creatures of the country for company. In fact he became one of them. They got used to him: he could watch them without worrying them. Sometimes they seemed to be communicating with him. Certainly he learned so much about the habits and rituals and social life of birds, in particular, that I was

astonished on almost every page. Their patterns of flight, their modes of congregation, their return (or even the next generation’s return) to the same spot every spring – or sometimes to a different spot, and their apparent reasons for moving house. Which birds take fright at which other birds, how they signal alarm, warnings – keep off my patch – or of course the desire to date.

Here is a snatch of his vivid, limpid writing (here, about ravens), ‘The male would come sailing in across the valley, calling repeatedly. He was so big that his arrival seemed to make the hillside shrink around him. He would settle in a tree and the sitting female would fly up to him. And then he would sing to her, a gentle trilling song you would never expect from a member of the crow family, and they would touch beaks tenderly. After that they would launch themselves from the trees and circle together, each flipping over in turn, their calls ringing out across the valley. The pair raised their five young successfully that year. Once they were on the wing, they spread themselves over the hillside trees, calling for food, but soon they began to follow their parents everywhere in a long line, a crocodile in the sky… trying to copy their every move, discovering their domain’.

He enjoys the company of the mammals too: the foxes and badgers, rabbits and pine martens and squirrels, and sheep. But it is what Chaucer called the Parlement of Fowles that draws me in, to a discourse constantly going on around us, from which I am normally excluded.

And then the winding road by St Harmon and Llanidloes and Staylittle, up over high sheep walks and finally over the Mawddwy pass to Cader Idris, the rocky spine of the mountain like a colossal reptile under a brilliant sun. When we reach our woods, the streams are running quietly. Primroses and anemones and violets are fresh under the impossible-to-name green of the larches’ first leaves. Bluebells only hint they are coming with specks of violet blue in their rich green carpet. There is a summer’s work in the forest to plan.

A Banks seedling, as yet unnamed, a cross between Magnolia sargentiana robusta and M. campbellii

Hergest Croft must be the only garden I have known virtually all my garden-conscious life. Originally it was a Rugby School connection: the Banks family (all Rugbeians) have been gardening here on the Welsh border for five generations; we have been friends with three. The gene for botany (or horticultural botany, which is not quite the same thing) is so powerful chez Banks that each generation has enlarged, focussed and documented what is one of the best collections, of woody plants especially, on this island. The rarest plants grow among the biggest, and many of the trees are both.

Herefordshire lies on our route to North Wales. Hergest Croft is bang on the border in the little town of Kington. I know my way round the garden now, across the lawn where a dozen magnolias compete with a vast view, through a belt of huge beeches to the domestic garden, or so I think of it, a sort of walled garden without walls. Long borders of (just now) spring flowers, brilliant with tulips, lead on to beds busy with produce, to greenhouses and fruit trees, all workmanlike and all the more effective because effect is not the aim.

In fact that is the secret of the whole garden, as you walk on across an orchard to the ornamental garden around the family’s former, deeply last-decade-of-Victorian, red-tiled house. If there was a plan to the garden, besides enjoying the views, the old trees in the surrounding parkland, the croquet lawn and tennis court, conservatory and rockery, and the company you can still feel lingering in long frocks and blazers, any formal plan has long gone in the indulgence of a passion for plants.

Magnolias and camellias may be most prominent just now (the Bankses, by the way, grow trees, magnolias in particular, from seed in the congenial spirit of enquiry that leads to many happy results). But your eyes swivel from carpets of long-established narcissi, still betraying eyes adept at blending colours, to a rare Lindera sketching spring in a burst of pale yellow, to the biggest Cercidiphyllum in Britain filling the sky with tiny purplish leaves beside the British champion red fir towering up 150 feet. Hergest Croft is at once spectacular and comfortable, a botanical garden in content, and Eden in spirit.

Viburnum x burkwoodii

I wouldn’t have thought there was room, but our predecessors in this house were clearly as eager as we are to make the most of what space there is. One dodge I would not have thought of was to plant a substantial shrub right against a wall and train it up a trellis as an honorary climber. As a result we have a two-dimensional Viburnum x burkwoodii, a plant I loved at Saling Hall, where an old specimen was ten feet tall and at least as wide.

It is a very presentable evergreen, at least in London, with dark glossy leaves ridged the way viburnums are. In April it becomes a carnation tree; covered with globes of flowers soaking the garden in something so like the carnation scent that anyone would be fooled. If you sniff closer you may detect the faintest hint of elder (they are distantly related), just as a keen nose with enough practice might detect Müller-Thurgau in a wine labelled Riesling.

It has been tied to the trellis progressively for so long that it almost seems to have picked up the idea, and doesn’t in the least mind a summer clematis as a passenger. I stand on a ladder to tie in the high shoots, shortening them a bit if necessary. Inevitably most of the flowers are nearer the top where the sun sometimes shines.

In the front garden they (I assume it was the same owners) planted what is now a tall hedge of a camellia so marvellous that its flowers attract people across the street. I don’t know its name, but it is perfectly regular with slightly pointed petals like the class of dahlias known as ‘decorative’, and guardsman red. Somehow they don’t look quite right emerging from a hedge: the green/red contrast is too spot-on. But I hope our successors in due course will be as appreciative of some of our planting as we are of our predecessors’.

I was pleased to see, in the current number of The Plantsman, that they have put the index of all the numbers since the beginning online. The first was in 1979, so that’s 144 issues; a big fat index, full of good stuff.

The magazine has had a bumpy ride since its modest beginnings. It was dreamt up in the Council Chamber of the RHS, after meetings of the long-defunct Publications Committee. This was four years after the old RHS Journal morphed into The Garden. Membership of the Society was expanding briskly. The old Journal used to have a serious regard for botany, even printing original descriptions of new plants with the learned bits in Latin. That wouldn’t do for the new-look magazine; its mission bringing gardening to the people. Where to put the botany?

I think it was after a meeting in 1978, when we had just dedicated a whole issue to the shiny new topic of Conservation, that David McClintock, one of our learned members, suggested that a new magazine, in addition to The Garden, would appeal to the higher-browed element of the fellows (as we all then were).

There were other eminent botanist-gardeners there, the celebrated Prof Willie Stearn among them. Several nodded. I felt an editorial urge. David and I put our heads together. I think he suggested the title of The Plantsman; the perfect word for someone we struggled to define: a gardener who found fascination in the origin, the science, the morphology of plants as well as their use and beauty.

Unfortunately the RHS, or rather its President, the formidable Lord Aberconway, was not interested. A risky proposition, he or they thought – rightly, as it turned out.

We went ahead. David was a prominent authority on both heathers and bamboos, which anyone will tell you are among the trickiest areas of taxonomy. His scholarship, his generosity and his garden in Kent were famous. With David’s and the Society’s contacts it was not too hard to draw in relevant and authoritative articles from the approved specialists in each field, and on each genus. Elspeth Napier, editor of The Garden, took on the task of editing it in what was, I suppose, her spare time. Before long, Caroline Boisset, who now edits the International Dendrology Society Yearbook, came to her aid.

I found a rash publisher (my own, James Mitchell) to produce it, and by sheer good fortune a four-year sponsor who made it viable, a winery-owner, racing driver and owner of an Oklahoma nursery called Greenleaf. His name was Gil Nickel; his winery Far Niente.

In the first number, I attempted a definition of a plantsman. If eminently educated people (women especially) used to be called ‘bluestockings’, I reasoned that we were out to find greenstockings. Plantsmen and women know who they are. Sadly they are not very numerous, but they communicate, and their capacious brains need nourishment.

There was nothing glamorous about the new publication; in fact it resembled the old RHS Journal in its plain cover. There was one coloured plate; a botanical frontispiece. We published a series of monographs on genera of interest to gardeners, with Arundinaria, I remember, appropriately to David’s bamboo passion, as the first. At one point we approached Kew about a merger or marriage with Curtis’s Botanical Magazine; in hindsight a bit of cheek, I suppose. But it seemed The RBG and the RHS were never destined to link arms.

The Plantsman kept going for 15 years until the RHS changed its mind and formally adopted it. For some reason they restyled it The New Plantsman; its title from 1994 to 2002. I wasn’t privy to the politics, but in 2002 it became The Plantsman again, with Chris Grey-Wilson as editor and colour pictures on every page. Since 2005 Mike Grant has been editor. In 2006 it was named Garden Magazine of theYear.

I can’t take credit for the any of the success of recent years. My part was played when I looked Lord Aberconway in the eye and said ‘Dash it, we’ll go it alone’, thirty seven years ago.

The Katsura next door. The morning view of a neighbour's Cercidiphyllum japonicum Pendulum

‘Surely there can’t be any space in here’ I think as I stand with my trowel and a plant pot, intent on infiltrating yet another favourite into one of our diminutive beds.

I have a mental root map of the garden. A few are all too obvious; the sycamore’s, for example – and it’s no good trying to plant the clematis there, where the trellis needs help to hide the goings-on next door. The Viburnum x burkwoodii has had the wall to itself for twenty years and has its roots akimbo; thick forearms right on the surface. No room to plant a pot, so perhaps I’ll try a climber from seed. Eccremocarpus scaber would help, with its plentiful leaves and little red (or, if I can find the seed, yellow) flowers.

In another spot where you’d think the rose, the chaenomeles and the hydrangea, never mind the sarcococca and the hellebores and ferns next to them have completely filled the soil with roots, my trowel meets hardly any resistance. How come the residents haven’t taken up all the parking space? (They certainly have on the road outside).

So the new columbines (white), brunnera (blue), trollius (‘alabaster’) and rose (Iceberg) I brought home from Rassells’ over the road are safely installed. It suddenly dawned on me as I cleaned my tools that I was wearing rubber gloves to plant them. I’ve never done that before. Am I growing lily-fingered in my old age?

Remember the elm ?

The beginning of April, when the soil is starting to warm up, is the best time for tree-planting. Or planting almost anything in the south of England.

Kensington Gardens is a forest of stakes at the moment as the scores of new lime trees are joined by sweet chestnuts (one of the species most used in the original 18th Century planting) and now – Eureka moment – by elms. Yesterday they planted a row of six splendid specimens, a good 25 feet high, to make a most welcome tall screen between Kensington Palace and the ungainly grey bulk of the Royal Garden Hotel. The mulberry alley already there was always an odd choice to make a screen.

Is this the moment when elms start their comeback to a London that said goodbye to them nearly 40 years ago? The interval has been busy with the search for a variety immune to Dutch Elm Disease. Many of the breeding experiments have involved Ulmus parvifolia, the little Siberian elm, or other Asian species. The Dutch claimed success some years ago with a hybrid called Clone 812 or ‘Nanguen’. After ten years under observation in Paris, in the Bois de Vincennes, it was eventually adopted by the city and renamed ‘Lutèce’ – the French version of Lutetia, the city’s Latin name. If it proves its worth in London, we should call is ‘the Paris elm’ in recognition.

But what a dismal thought that we may be going through a similar exercise in a few years’ time with ashes. A combination of the Chalara fungus we have heard so much about and the Emerald Ash Borer (not so celebrated yet) threatens to finish off our ash trees, just as DED did our elms. So far, outbreaks in this country have been mainly in the East. My fingers are crossed in the hope that the very different conditions of North Wales may not suit either the fungus or the beetle. We have an uncountable number of ashes in the woods – many of them beside streams, where their bark in the damp shade is a beautiful pale orange.

Their principal use with us, I’m afraid, is for firewood. No other wood burns so readily or so steadily; you can light a fire with green ash twigs. ‘Ash wet or ash dry’, as the poem goes, ‘a king may warm his slippers by’

The Paris elms by Kensington Palace are a symbol of hope. They may never achieve the majesty of the old high-waisted, full-skirted Field elms they replace – though they have Field elms, Wych elms, and a Himalayan elm in their ancestry – but they will turn rich yellow in autumn, and hopefully, like the old elms, keep that colour till Christmas.