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.

'Phals' off to Beverley Hills

Do you have a pale-flowered orchid hovering nearby, in your bathroom, in your office, in the lobby? If it needs occasional watering, it’s a plant. If it doesn’t, it’s a pseudo-plant. You can also tell the difference by touching it.

The story of phalaenopsis, and its metamorphosis from rarity to banality, was told me in a California greenhouse where rows of identical plants stretched to the horizon in colour batches from white to fire-alarm magenta, green, cream, ginger…. anything but blue. There were monsters and miniatures, dressed by the right so that their identically-curved stems formed tunnels along the benches. At one end a team of Mexicans were potting up hundreds more. They were needed for a party in Beverley Hills.

The secret is, of course, micropropagation of stem cells of hybrids with lots of ploids. (My attention wandered during this part of the tour.) There are dozens of species, from the Himalayas to Australia; between them, it seems, almost anything is possible, and since the 1980s orchid nurseries have been on a roll. But so have whatever you call the nurseries that do fake flowers: the distinction is becoming blurred.

The purist in me sees the multiplication of varieties, and the endless novelties with their twee names, as a sort of betrayal. This is not what gardening is about. I would rather struggle to cultivate a creation of nature in all its simplicity than choose between the latest colour-ways of something man-made. Am I just being po-faced? Or has it nothing to do with gardening?

Buckeye comes indoors, chez Molly Chappellet

Days are warm and nights cold in February in the Napa valley. Wine-growers prefer cold, fearing budbreak too early and tender new shoots in the frosts of March and April. Hence the surprising sight of vineyards unpruned, still with their tangled tophamper, when much of Europe gets started with the new year.

After four years of drought the valley is celebrating a week of heavy rain. Brilliant green grass is a rare sight here; all summer the fields are buff or brown, but now the hills are emerald under the ghost-grey oaks festooned with Spanish moss. The vineyard cover-crop of mustard is celebratory yellow, the almond trees in every yard pale pink (two colours to keep apart if you can). Explosions of mimosa are over; magnolias are well away, and in the hillside grass blue borage, the first orange poppies, blue lupins and the tiny magenta Dodecatheons or shooting stars, primulaceous plants with swept-back petals rather like cyclamen.

But my favourites are the buckeyes, Aesculus californica. They form the lower layer of the forest, under oak, redwood and fir, with the gleaming madrones, the western version of our strawberry trees. Buckeyes break into leaf before almost any tree, salad-green in the bare undergrowth. Cold doesn’t seem to bother them. In early summer their long candles are as elaborately detailed as orchids. By late summer their leaves yellow and fall, leaving their grey tracery, wider than high, dripping with shining teardrop-shaped conkers.

For several years I collected them on Napa hillsides at vintage time and took them home. I planted them but they never germinated. Then one year I scooped some up on the way to the airport. They were in pots the same day and came up as eagerly as horse chestnuts. In fifteen years we were on the third generation.

There is one tree here I would love to plant at home; the luscious pale green and very faintly blushing Cinnamomum camphora that spreads its long branches over many Japanese shrines. It catches your eye in any group of trees, looking edibly tender – which in England, sadly, it is.

Current residents of the Round Pond

It’s something you don’t normally see in a city park, certainly not a Royal one. The grass is left uncut and the trees allowed to seed at random. Oak and sweet chestnuts and hawthorns come up haphazard in the brown grass. It’s a long way from the total control which seems to be the norm in public spaces.

Kensington Gardens, though, is run on unusual lines. The gardens were designed for the Royal family in the first decades of the 18th century, and there seems no good reason to change them now.

I like to picture the Kensington of the early 1700s, a country village with two great houses, Holland House and the rapidly growing Kensington Palace. Gardening was its main industry: the Brompton Park Nursery, roughly where the Albert Hall stands, was the country’s biggest by far (at one time it grew 10 million plants on 50 acres). One of its original founders, George London, recruited Henry Wise as his partner; together they planned and supplied the new gardens at Hampton Court, Blenheim, Castle Howard, Longleat, Chatsworth, Burghley – and Kensington Palace. William and Mary had brought in the Dutch style you still see in the sunk garden at Kensington. Everyone wanted to go Dutch. Wagon after wagon laden with trees and plants splashed along Kensington Road bound for country estates.

In due course Wise was appointed Royal gardener and drew up the scheme for Kensington Gardens in the then prevailing Franco-Dutch style (a bit of Het Loo; a bit of Versailles), with avenues radiating from the palace, or rather from the Round Pond he designed as the centre of a patte d’oie. The areas between the avenues were designated as ‘quarters’, some planted as ‘bosquets’ or shady groves, some as embroidered parterres, some as ‘wilderness’ with winding paths among shrubs and trees, some left as pasture. Altogether, they cover 275 acres. Hyde Park to the east covers 350 acres.

On the eastern boundary of Kensington Gardens you can still see two of the three ‘bastions’, looking like gun emplacements, that faced London, whether in serious or symbolic challenge I’m not sure. The succession from Henry Wise to Charles Bridgeman to William Kent, all of them involved in the gardens, is not very clear. Bridgeman (another gardener’s son) joined the Brompton Park Nursery, was promoted to Royal gardener jointly with Wise, and gets credit for the lake we call the Serpentine, made by damming the river Westbourne. Bridgeman was on the way to the unbuttoned style of Capability Brown, but he still surrounded his ‘quarters’ with hedges.

Bridgeman’s drawing of the gardens in 1733 shows the ‘quarters’ as distinct entities. Those nearer the palace, round the Round Pond (‘The Bason’) were all wiggly paths through shrubberies. North of the Palace (where the Duke of Cambridge now lands his helicopter) there were classic geometrical parterres. To the south, very much the lawns with the tree-alleys you see today. Further east, the main avenues have scarcely changed – except in the species of trees.There were open fields: the Horse Quarter, Colt Quarter, Rye Grass Quarter and Temple Quarter. Between the Round Pond and Kensington Road was the Old Pond Quarter where there was another pond (and there is now a spring).

This is the plan that is being maintained today as faithfully as possible – including the long grass and seedlings. Avenues are the trickiest part. Tree-managers are constantly faced with decisions about whether to replace old trees that fall or die or become unsafe. Should they use the same species (usually yes) or admit that a gradual change-over would be better in the long run? The Broad Walk, for example, was given an inner line of Norway maples (the outer is lime) fifty years ago. People love their early flowers and yellow autumn colour. But the squirrels love their bark and destroy the upper trunk. Squirrel control? Tell that to the tourists.

The maples will, in due course, be replaced – probably with sessile oaks. Originally lime and oak, elm and sweet chestnut were the principal trees. The planes and sadly ailing horse chestnuts are mainly Victorian planting – and thank heaven for the planes; since the elms died (there was more elm in Hyde Park) planes are by far the grandest trees. The grandest are in the main north-south avenue, with the Statue of Physical Energy at its centre, known as the Lancaster Gate Walk. There is an amusing anomaly here. When the Albert Memorial was built, in 1870, it obviously called for an avenue, but the existing one was out of alignment with it. The answer was to ‘splice’ on two new lines of trees to link with the existing ones: hence two converging avenues (and a magnificent cluster of planes) at the Memorial end. No one talks of replacing these trees: if they look tired the gardeners give them a boost, aerate their roots and spread mulch in a wide circle round their trunks.

Limes are now coming to the fore as the dominant species – at least in numbers. Last year, 50-odd new limes were planted; very noticeably in ‘The Great Bow’ round the Round Pond. They are very noticeable on Bridgeman’s plan, too. Plus ça change.