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.

It comes as a shock to see a cosseted house-plant making a nuisance of itself, rampaging away, smothering other plants, and generally calling for a dose of weed-killer. The sweet little winter-flowering jasmine, J polyanthum, wears an air of nursery innocence with its Mabel Lucy Attwell little girl complexion. No one would suspect what a thug it can become – until they see how it has behaved over the past winter in a London garden.

It has mounted and straddled our neighbour’s wall, climbed the unpruned roses waving five feet above it, smothered the ivy and launched shoots long enough to reach the ground and root on our side. A seedling has appeared on the other side of our garden too. The smell is divine, but the threat is manifest.Flowering began in December and is just past its climax. Admittedly there have only been a few nights of frost, but the idea that this is a tender hothouse thing has become absurd.

On our recent visit to California we saw it seeding prolifically, smothering rose bushes and climbing trees; the prettiest picture, but rather alarming. We read plenty of scary things about climate change, but a jasmine attack is something new.

The desert blooms

I’m writing this in the Getty Museum. Spring is taking about three days here on the coast of Southern California. I prefer our three month version, but it’s certainly exciting to sit under what’s known here as a sycamore and watch its pale velvet leaves expand before your eyes. With a tinge of regret, oddly enough: the silvery bark of the bare tree is so beautiful against the blue sky. I never saw a tree/building combination as effective as this: the sycamores, pruned back to truncheons at the end of each branch, against the white stone of these utterly modern but strangely classical buildings. I’m told that the credit for much of this; the uniformly white stone buildings and the almost obsessive number of trees, goes to the then head of Disney, the late Frank Wells.

We are staying nearby at Malibu in a garden he started 25 years ago on what was steep scrubland a mile from the Pacific. It gives me new respect for resolve, dollars – and cranes. On my previous visit, 25 years ago, I had misgivings about the 15 foot redwoods arriving with 4 foot rootballs to be planted at the improbably close spacing of a coastal redwood forest. In places, the trunks almost touched. It worked. And now they shelter an eye-opening collection of native and exotic plants, a cascade tumbling 200 feet to a lake, a creek that runs after storms, a horse ranch with Arabians, donkeys, Shetland ponies, goats, funny fluffy hens and flower and vegetable gardens, somehow disposed to feel organic parts of this manmade landscape.

The king of the native trees around Los Angeles is always the ‘sycamore’, one of the parents (with the Chennar tree of the Middle East) of the ‘London’ plane. They are paler than our planes, and apt to spread so wide in old age that they rest their white-barked elbows on the ground. The tree collection here runs from cherries and oranges and almonds to the giraffe of the palms, the immensely spindly and elegant Washingtonia. Camellias, magnolias, azaleas, roses, maples… name a desirable tree or shrub from Scotland to the Mediterranean or Hawaii and you’ll probably find it. Bauhinia purpurea or ‘Orchid Tree’, with flowers like an azalea (OK then, orchids), jacaranda, South African erithryna or ‘Coral Tree’ (not much Latin is used around here), covered in scarlet berries. Schinus molle, the drooping feathery Pepper Tree, is a beauty we could perhaps risk trying in the very south of England some day soon.

You need shelter from the sea winds here. That was part of the original purpose of the coast redwoods – and their western face can get singed brown by the salt. The steep hillside they shelter reminds me a little of La Mortola on the Riviera; paths that wind gently down in hairpin bends, bringing you close to all the planting. Everywhere you hear the cadence of the cascade and look round to catch a silvery glimpse.

The vegetable gardening is not humdrum either. The sandy soil is built up into beds here and there, formal and straight or in successive curves, in sun or shade, to grow every vegetable I could think of – except asparagus. Too specialized, says Tom, the head gardener. They grow it better on a farm along the coast.

The farmhouse is ‘Tuscan’, and startlingly realistic, with rooftiles shipped from Tuscany, an olive grove below and lemon terraces above. It could be Siena rather than Hollywood on the other side of the hills. But they have frosts in Tuscany. Here the Pacific is an air-conditioner, sending fog inland when it gets too hot. Or so they tell me.