There were fewer show gardens at Chelsea this year. Some take it as an indication of the country’s financial health; it certainly means fewer sponsors. I believe this will be the final shout of the gloriously oofy South Africans who have created The Newt in Somerset and its stylish relatives. That would be very sad. (Their super Newt cider was welcome refreshment on the way round the show). South Africa was represented only too graphically in the Karoo Succulent garden, a grim reminder of how lucky we are to have our rainfall (measly as it has been so far this year). To call this desert a garden was stretching the term.

Trad’s annual prize, keenly contested as ever, goes to a complete contrast, the Japanese tea garden, cool, leafy, not over-flowery. Exceptional maples provided much of the colour (in shades I have never seen in Acer palmatum before); a modest stream falling over rocks the animation. I could imagine myself sitting with a book all day in its tranquillity. I had to be reminded that this is not precisely the point of Chelsea.

I was baffled, though, to be told that Monty Don’s very pretty, if not exceptional, garden was designed by his dog. It’s an intriguing idea, recently carried to an extreme by someone we know who, having bought a conventional London terrace house, stripped out all the floors and internal walls and hired a ballet dancer to make his way, via ropes and ladders, down to the basement, carrying with him a ball of red wool to record his exact route. The point of it escapes me, but it led to a steel circular stair being installed. A noisy thing.

In my experience dogs are unpredictable, taking the shortest route to whatever attracts their nose. Repton would scarcely have accepted this as a basis for garden design.

Robert Browning (who lived in Kensington for a while in the oddly austere de Vere Gardens, a street without a single tree) felt exiled in Italy. ‘Oh to be in England,’ he sighed, ‘now that April’s here. When the brushwood sheaf round the elm tree bole is in tiny leaf’. Rarely, alas, now. Those great elms have all but disappeared.

Elms apart, this April could have been his model; four weeks stolen from summer with all the adornments of spring. Few streets, it is true, are as lavishly adorned as those round us in Kensington. Wisteria reaches the eaves, cherries blizzard the pavements with petals, and the scent of wisteria, trapped between the houses, is like a warm bath. By the end of the month it is joined, and overwhelmed, by the smell of jasmine (‘smell’, because ‘scent’ is not a powerful enough word. There are moment when I’m tempted to call it a pong.). Jasmine, considered a tender treasure when I started to garden is now rampant, scrambling into the ivy on the walls, hanging in swags with its pretty little pink and white buds, reaching up to invade the Japanese maple next door – behaving, in fact, like Old Man’s Beard, the wild clematis that smothered the hedges where I was brought up on the North Downs. I caught it shinning up the ivy outside my dressing room window. ‘Down, sir’, as the zoo keeper said to the lion which was gobbling poor Jim (whose friends were very good to him).

Maybe it’s less than an obsession, but it’s certainly more than an inclination. Blue, that is. It catches my eye. If there’s a patch of blue, that’s where I look, whether it’s the firmament or a periwinkle. Can it have some physical effect on my brain? It does on my emotions. It holds my attention – partly, perhaps, because I’m half-wondering: is that really blue?

Such a broad wave-band of colours comes close, nudges or suggests blue that I’m cautious about the word. I’m quite certain, though, about one little plant I’ve just met for the first time. Its label says Lithodora diffusa, and the web tells me that we Brits have a name for it. One I’ve never heard: Purple Gromwell.

Perhaps I’ve been steeped in gardening for so long that ‘common’ names sound foreign to me. Latin comes easier. ‘How’s your gromwell coming along this year?’ sounds more like medical sympathy than horticultural enquiry. The answer is ’very nicely’. It crowns its eight-inch pot with a one-inch layer of the truest, bluest blue: tiny star flowers being constantly buzzed by a variety of bees. I’ve just spent five minutes in their company, puzzling out whether a bee visits the same flowers twice, or whether it’s a different bee, or I’ve got the wrong flower.

It’s a good time of year for blue and insects of all sorts are working hard. Forget-me-not and something else boragey but darker blue have sprung up from nowhere. So have bluebells. Violets (borderline blue, it’s true) creep out of the box hedge.  Dare I mention it’s still thriving? Pansies (supposedly ‘winter’) are celebrating the sunshine, anemones will be along soon …..

If only our hydrangeas would play ball.

It’s been one smooth sweet flow from a winter more marked by darkness then cold into the most be-flowered spring I can remember. I can only speak for the mild south-east, but there was only a moderate snap of cold in early December, then the bonus of warmth last summer ripening wood and preparing flower buds for the show we are now enjoying. The cherry (double-flower gean) in the street is stretching its rather gawky branches clotted with snowballs almost to my study window (top floor front). The magnolia below is just finishing its performance (purple petals, white on the back; I wish it were all white). Most prized of all, the cercidiphyllum in the front, a great drooping salad of a tree, has stretched far over the pavement to reach the parked cars. We’ve cut a tunnel for the pavement, but people still have to bow their heads as they pass.

The garden behind has now turned green; not yet flowering. All it can propose at present is white viburnum, camellias (pink “Top Hat’ and white ‘Simplex’), the brave little effort of the pink ‘monthly’ rose and a purple wallflower (Erysimum to the educated). But the clematis have begun to clamber, white bergenia looks fresh from the laundry and shoots from the ground are awaiting identification. I’ve never seen a variegated lavender before, but this newcomer in its pot on the wall catches the light and our approving regard. Hydrangeas in their pots pose questions: of their multiple pairs of burgeoning shoots to I prune higher or lower, for smaller or bigger flowers. They and everything else are asking for npk.

Our final gardener at Saling Hall, a Scot (or should I say another Scot as their numbers were conventionally disproportionate) had a favourite saying, repeated in almost every conversation, “We’re getting there’, she used to say. Supply the Scots accent for full effect. Where, though is ‘there’?

Naturally there were projects with a palpable end point. The mowing, for example – except that the finish of one mow usually marked the start of the next. We had too much short grass. I strongly advocate mown paths through long (or longer) grass; the opposition said they were just as much work, ‘what with the raking and that.’ My argument is that they point your feet (or simply your view) just as clearly as a paved or permanent path, with the advantage that you can change your mind.

I went to a seminar at Kew one day on the responsibility of the owners of trees for their safety. It was scary. If anyone walking under any tree is hit and damaged by a falling branch the fault is the tree’s owner’s. Which is why the 14,000 trees at Kew are regularly inspected for faults and potential dangers. If there is opponent the inspector whacks the trunk with a heavy wooden mallet, listening for a hollow sound. More doubt and he resorts to boring into the trunk.

Apparently, an American visitor was knocked over by a cedar branch not as it fell, but bouncing. It sounds improbable, but the gardeners were found responsible. Now, if a tree looks dicey they move the path.

As a lad in Kent I used to stand, gun at the ready, on the margin of a wheat-field while the reaper-and-binder went round in ever-decreasing circles, laying the sheaves in tidy rows and driving all the resident mammals to take refuge in the middle. Eventually the rabbits would make a break for it, sprinting straight into our line of fire.

The name of the field was Cotman’s Ash, a steep slope up from the Pilgrim’s Way. At the top of the hill lived a retired colonel, a veteran of the famous Younghusband expedition to Tibet in 1904. Colonel Hadow taught my brother Brian and me to shoot – Brian more successfully than me. I was a mere ten or eleven. Brian eventually became, among other things, a stalker good enough to be invited to a great Scottish estate to take care of a particularly elusive stag.

The colonel also gave us as presents two historic guns from his collection. One was a beautiful 18th century fowling piece with an immensely long barrel, whose lock, sadly, had long service disappeared. The other was a native Tibetan gun of savage simplicity, essentially an iron pipe attached to a slab of wood for a butt, the butt decorated with brass studs and bits of red felt.

As a soldierly precaution Colonel Hadow took the ramrod from where it lived under the barrel and slid it down to the breech, only to find that the gun was loaded – and evidently had been for half a century. Detaching the barrel from the stock, he took it into his garage-workshop and clamped it to the work bench, aiming it at a pile of sandbags against the wall. Then left in a hurry. There was a loud bang. We went in to find the ball had ricocheted up and stuck in a rafter. Tibetans make good gunpowder.

The sad sequel is that the two antiques were subsequently stolen from the gun cupboard in our cottage, along with a serviceable twelve-bore.

The emphasis at this dark time of year is on the little flowers we bring indoors. Just now it is a respectable cluster on the kitchen table: in one vase, with no water, half a dozen pussy willow twigs keep their fluffy little white catkins unchanged week after week. Add water and they will turn yellow with pollen and green with leaves. Another vase holds Daphne bholua, Sarcococca hookeriana and a pink camellia called Top Hat, the scents of the first two making up for the sadly scentless camellia.

At Christmas we were given a subscription to a wonderful cut-flower service called Bloom & Wild: their first despatch is still here, an arrangement of pale flowers I would not normally see and sadly can’t even name. They arrived through the letterbox, ingeniously inert, apparently in a state of suspended animation. After two days in a vase they have absorbed water and life to become a picture of a rather exotic spring.

The magic of Rousham never fails.  For decades now I’ve called it my favourite English garden. It has slumbered beside the river Cherwell since the 17^th century, no doubt much greener and with bigger trees now than when Colonel Dormer created it, not long after he had fought at the battle of Blenheim, but still the house of the Dormer family and seemingly altered only by time.

We were at Rousham on our way to The Newt in Somerset, a prodigy of garden-making in the grand style, of masonry as well as tillage. Of course the pale stone, the statues and temples were once as bright as butter at Rousham too. I remember the Newt, though, when it was just Hadspen House, the home of the Hobhouse family for almost as long as the Dormers have been at Rousham. It was as mature and tranquil. For a few years it then went through a technicolour phase; tenants made it sparkle with, as I remember, tulips. It was when the Bekkers arrived from the Cape that the chrysalis exploded into a butterfly.

Byron, in his epic he called Donnie Johnnie, describes a pleasure-palace; ‘Wealth had done wonders….’. Daisy Ashford (I hope people still read The Young Visiters) talks of ‘good dodges of a rich nature’.

No good dodges are missing at The Newt. Its base is the parabolic walled garden at a distance from Hadspen House, best seen from its excellent restaurant on stilts. Don’t linger too long over lunch, though; you still have lots to see; the high point being the Roman villa.

A sketch, or sample, of this marvellous reconstruction appeared at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show; enough to start me salivating. The full dress version is almost England’s Pompeii. In modern terms it was probably the manor house of a substantial estate. Certainly its owners lived in style – and in a style it is easy to appreciate, down to the flavours of the food being prepared in the courtyard kitchen. The Bekkers, media moguls in South Africa, I believe, have given us a splendid new visitor attraction. I anticipate an overflowing car park.