A shower at Mount Congreve

Back from a week in Ireland. ‘The magnolias are over’ everyone said. Ah, but the rhododendrons are in full cry, every leaf is fresh in the sun, and two of the most audacious gardens I have ever met were gleaming in the sunshine between the showers. Nor were the magnolias over; not by any means.

Mount Congreve is a legend – in the sense that few people used to see it. I tried to visit in the days of its creator, Ambrose Congreve, and failed. He had reached 104 before he died, still gardening, in spirit at least, in 2011. For the moment, his 80 acres of intelligent, intricate and supremely picturesque planting lives on. For how long is a delicate matter, between his trustees and the Irish Government. For the moment, what the garden needs, and richly deserves, is more visitors.

Ambrose Congreve was apparently inspired by Lionel de Rothschild at Exbury to create a woodland garden for the vast variety of rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias. Exbury Gardens are spread over two hundred acres, gently sloping to the Beaulieu River. Mount Congreve has a mere eighty, tumbling down (almost diving off a cliff at one point) to one of Ireland’s biggest rivers, the broad, reed-fringed Suir. a few miles above Waterford.

We are used to magnolias as single specimens, sometimes groups, but rarely a forest. The Congreve way was different. He planted hundreds of seedlings of one particular M campbellii that now form a wood of pale-barked trunks perhaps 60 feet high. His style was decisive: a wall of pieris, a long ramp of one Japanese maple, another wall of an orange azalea, facing one of purple. All the colours are calculated: this is picture-making with plants on a heroic scale, and with breath-catching results. A gardener told me how Ambrose, as he called him (though possibly not to his face), rode his horse round the garden every morning, often before breakfast, then re-emerged in mid-morning, fork in hand, and worked with his gardeners all day. He was, I am told, weatherproof. No bothy for him in a shower; he gardened on.

Thomas Pakenham comes from the same hardy race, with as little restraint in planting. Meetings with Remarkable Trees was the first display of his splendid – indeed unique – tree portraits, twenty years ago. In his company, it must be said, every tree becomes remarkable, intrinsically, scientifically, whimsically, pathologically, and as a source of human stories.

Four hours of walk and talk only skimmed his collection, scattered through parkland, woods and gardens. Tullynally is a great grey Regency Gothic battleship of a house surrounded by beeches and oaks of the biggest size. Among them, then on and out into the countryside, the new collections go, many of them from Pakenham-collected seeds from China or the Himalayas. Reaching eighty seems only to have invigorated him. Half a mile from the house, magnolias form a glade, then camellias, dogwoods, tiny rhododendrons just planted out… without guards. Have rabbits gone the way of snakes in Ireland?

We only scratched the surface of both these great gardens – then went on to Ballymaloe, near Cork, for the utter indulgence of a ‘Litfest’ around the famous cooking school – and gardens. They hadn’t told me about the gardens.

Evening at Ballymaloe

It’s taken me a long time (all my life in fact) to pin down a trait that steers my way of looking at my surroundings – gardens, views, streets, above all buildings. My eyes fly to the oldest. In a park it is the oldest and grandest trees, avenues, fountains, gazebos – the evidence of past intentions. I am a prisoner of history (as indeed we all are) and my sentence demands that I look for its traces wherever I go.

It is most demanding in London, as the City dons and sheds its never-resting coats of scaffolding. The crane count in the past few years must be the highest it has ever been. It’s true that every great city throughout most of its history has been a building site; it’s only later generations that see the finished (for the time being) scheme. The Roman forum was never a pristine panorama of pillars and pediments; there was always scaffolding in the picture as another temple or monument went up or had a face-lift. Athens the same; Paris (imagine the mess when Haussmann was bulldozing his boulevardes) and now London. Exhibitionist towers are the mark of our times and we have lost control of where they go or how tacky they look. And a new threat goes beyond tacky: the threat of a ‘garden’ bridge to block London’s most majestic view, the Thames between Westminster and the City. Who in his right mind would try to grow plants on the most exposed possible site?

So I wander the town with my eyes skinned for relics of its past; easy to find in the quiet residential areas of terraces and squares, harder and harder in commercial streets where old buildings, if they have survived thus far, have their ground floors hacked out to make shops and their facades hidden by the banal fascias proclaiming Boots or Tesco.

The Victorian pub on the corner, the calmly handsome Georgian house-front hiding a solicitor’s office, the pompous Edwardian stone front of the old Town Hall (now a dance hall), a quirky bit of timbered building or even a war memorial, are precious clues about the past. These are the things that give you a sense of place. And they make me sad that all this history happened and I was not there to see it.

What catches the eye? Crocosmias at Bourton House, Gloucestershire

Why is red such a tricky colour in the garden? Use it accidentally (out of a mixed seed packet perhaps) and you throw a random emphasis onto the spot where it lands. It grabs the attention. It is intended to. Red is the colour of danger, of domination – and of painted lips. Use it deliberately and you can dictate where people look, influence their whole reaction to the picture you are painting.

The huntsman’s red coat is one of the oldest tricks in landscape painting. Turner famously infuriated Constable by painting a red buoy in the foreground of his sea painting to upstage his rival’s elaborate and highly-contrived Opening of London Bridge hanging next to it. What’s more, he did it as an after-thought, on varnishing day, as an act of provocation. That’s the power of red.

Why does red do this to your eye? Chromatically speaking, it is so close to green that, dogs tell me, they can’t tell the difference. And yet it appears to us as green’s diametrical opposite. It lies at one end (the longest-wave end) of the spectrum we can see, with the quiet violet at the other end. Are ‘quiet’ and ‘noisy’ valid descriptions of colours?

In a garden, red indicates your policy, if not your philosophy. Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter changed tack completely when he abolished a rose garden with its colours in gentle harmony and brought in cannas and dahlias and everything strident. It amounted to a career move; out of middle-aged respectability and convention and on to the cutting edge.

Myself, I’m leery of it. I’ve never painted a door red – almost alwaysclean but bashful colour we call ‘chateau grey’. Light has a lot to do with it: hard Mediterranean light takes strong colour in its stride; bougainvillea is an example. Plant it in our island’s softer light and it looks like an accident in a paint factory. On the other hand, one can’t have too much of that scarlet pelargonium Roi des Balcons in the window-boxes of the Black Forest or the Tyrol.

In my timid garden, on a ground of as much green as I can manage on walls of yellow-grey London brick, white is a pretty daring colour. Cream to blue, and pink so long as it’s pale, are as emphatic as my delicate sensibilities can entertain. Sometimes I remind myself of Lizzy Bennett’s father, who said something like ‘A small pullet’s egg, lightly boiled, is not unwholesome’. Rather daring, though.

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’.