It was the smell that gave me a shock. I took a shortcut through Ravenscourt Park, rounded a corner, and was hit by a midsummer blast of mown grass – the sweetest of all garden smells. The early daffodils lined the path, magnolias were opening their buds, a big mimosa had almost finished flowering, crocuses dotted the lawn and the cherry decorating the path with its fallen petals was not Prunus autumnalis. We have to reclassify Jasminum polyanthum now from pot plant to exceedingly vigorous climber.

This must be the strangest winter London has ever seen. March may blast it all away, of course, but I am more worried about the spring. There won’t be one if it’s all happened already.

Anticipation is so important. Excitement as each bud opens and flowers gradually make their appearance. But what if you are looking forward to a concert and you keep hearing the soloists, with no warning, loosing off in the street, under your window, out of context? In the end, there is no concert; they have all sung their hearts out and have nothing left to give. That’s what I fear. Last year Bonfire Night dragged on for weeks as people let off their fireworks whenever they felt like it. I don’t want to see spring dissipated, limping along week after week.

Every gardener will have his own tale of cock-eyed timing. Roger Taylor of Taylor’s Bulbs tells me that his Lincolnshire daffs started flowering in sync with Cornwall’s – spoiling both their markets. There is hawthorn in leaf in roadside hedgerows. And my own: Pelargonium x ardens, the fiery-red one that sprawls over its neighbours in late summer, has shot straight up three feet like a tree sapling and is flowering in the apex of the greenhouse roof.

Quieter, just as loving: Melbourne Hall by George Elgood 1892

It’s the moment that makes a good photo – far more than the aperture. Does anyone say that Capa’s shot of a Spanish soldier dying needs more focal depth, or the lovers kissing on a Paris street could do with more light?

Which suggests that our camera-phones, or phone-cameras, have a better chance of taking good photos than more sophisticated kit, proper cameras that need adjustment. Their margin of error is astonishing: if you know even the rudiments of photography, you have the ideal weapon to hand.

And what does the perfect moment consist of? A soldier just cut down, a moment of passion in the street are messages about death and love; nothing could be more elemental. In both these famous photos there are no distractions, no other people, no fussy backdrops, chance has isolated the protagonists and made them sculptural.

A plant, a garden or a landscape can seem elemental, too: but what makes it so? Of course the light. A shaft or beam picking out an object, whether from the front, the side or from behind, is the most obvious way of making a point – a picture with, as it were, its caption built in. Conversely, a bright general light with only one object caught unlit could make a different point. Shooting into the source of light, contre jour, can be the best way of characterising certain plants: pale flowers, for example, with their petals glowing, their veins minutely delineated. The sun setting behind flowering grasses….

The artist with his brushes has always had the advantage over the photographer. He doesn’t have to wait for the light to strike. He can store moments in his memory to reproduce, work on, elaborate and combine at leisure. Did Monet grab his palette and rush out into the garden when the sun broke through? Maybe. He was an artist-showman (dare I mention Damian Hirst?) building up a body of garden impressions to create a market primed for his output. Wouldn’t he have loved an iPhone?

The show at the Royal Academy now (I believe there are a dozen Monets) is called Painting the Garden. Is there any room for quieter, smaller, but just as loving garden paintings by British artists? Or even for David Hockney’s all-encompassing woodlands – surely the modern equivalent of Giverny?

Bengal Crimson - in January?

To the Chelsea Physic Garden for their annual snowdrop show. I’m afraid they have been blind-sided by the weather: it has been so mild that they had moved the date forward by two weeks, only for the long-awaited cold to descend just before the new opening date. So no carpets of 10, 000 snowdrops, just the earliest species and a lot of promising little spears. The best part was the sales tent, where a room was ingeniously separated and blacked out for a little theatre of the best varieties lit by ultra-violet light: a pretty conceit.

I was happy to find an old friend for sale, too: Hardenbergia violacea, a little Australian climber that produces its racemes of purple flowers at snowdrop time, and for weeks before and after. It was a principal mid-winter decoration in our old conservatory. I shall have to be quite severe with it in our tiny greenhouse, but it might as well have the roof-space now filled with Jasminum polyanthum, which can’t even keep up with the one flowering fit to bust above the wall outside. I wonder why. Perhaps because it feels undernourished in its 12-inch pot.

The outstanding plant in the C.P.G. yesterday was Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’ in the border by the fern house, a shrub now twelve feet wide and nine high. There is no need to walk over: the scent reaches across the lawn. Is there any plant of recent introduction to beat it? (And who, by the way, is or was Jacqueline?) The Rosa odorata, near the Tangerine Dream café, was even more fully in flower than last year, covered with a hundred little light-crimson butterfly-like blooms and their fragile fresh leaves, pale green flushed red, as though it was May. I still prefer the old name R. spontanea ‘Bengal Crimson’, but I hardly dare say so.

I don’t deny I miss the space we used to have in the country – both in the garden and the house. A desk takes up the same space wherever you are; it’s the books that are the problem.

At Saling Hall we had shelves for an ever-expanding collection, and the part that expanded furthest was the glossy picture books. We covered the period when they morphed from text printed on paper more like card (and often tinted buff) alternating with 16-page colour sections printed on shiny paper stiff with clay. Thames & Hudson seemed to lead in this field. There was a snag: if you kept your books closed and tight together in the huge bookshelves they needed, in a typically cold damp room, it wasn’t long before the clay on the colour pages stuck them together. Instead of a book you had a brick.

Look at the quality of colour we accepted in those days. It was muddy, frequently blurred when the four-colour process didn’t quite click, and none of the colours was true. Still, we thought it better than black and white. There is a quantum leap between 1970s printing and the standard we expect today.

A relentless succession of glossy garden books has never ceased to appear, and I seemed to acquire most of them. And they grew (and still grow) heavier every year. It wasn’t until we moved house and I tried to sell them that I discovered they have no value – at least as “pre-loved” goods. No dealer even wanted to carry them out of the house. It was a pity; they contained wonderful images and many memories. Here in London they are simply un-houseable. Thank goodness, then, for the Internet: it isn’t exactly a substitute for shiny pages, but it can handle memories and, more than that, satisfy all sorts of curiosity.

Years ago Trad used to do periodical weather reports – partly because no one else seemed to; they just grumbled. In Essex in the 1970s I spotted a warming trend. In the ’80s it was the coming Ice Age everyone was talking about. I kept painstaking records of rainfall and temperature in a book in the greenhouse for 41 years without learning very much, let alone being able to plot a pattern.

Rainfall at its meanest was something like 16 inches, in the whole of 1976; I think one year we were blessed with 40. Our coldest winter was 1982/3. A lot of favourite plants were killed; I have fondest memories of an Abelia triflora 12 feet high, graceful as a fountain, its pink flowers divinely perfumed in June.

Like an idiot (and lots of other gardeners) I took this as a sort of divine command, or at least a pretty strong hint, not to try growing them again – and so missed their company unnecessarily for the next 30 years. You find out that a plant is tender when it dies; meanwhile you should enjoy it. It may be a gardener’s pleasure, but it is certainly not a duty, to keep everything alive year after year.

Then we came to London, and now take for granted that cafes have tables on the pavement all year round and most pub drinking is outdoors – things unheard of a generation ago. So yes, it’s got much warmer. Is it global? Is it our fault? Is there anything we can do about it? However sketchy the evidence, vox pop says yes. What would it have said if the predictions of the ’80s had looked likely to come true?

Erica lusitanica; midwinter in the Isabella Plantation

Is Petersham Nurseries the origin of the shabby-chic trend of the turn of this century? Did the Hotels du Vin get there first with their ostentatiously non-matching furniture, wonky tables, odd spoons and gappy floorboards? It is a brilliant way of finding value in what most of us would call old tat. With ‘brown furniture’ (yes, your family’s Chippendale) now a drug on the market you can apparently add value by bashing it up a bit. That in any case is the Petersham look. Add a reassuringly confident price and your bent garden chair is worth more than a new one.

It was the café, then the restaurant, that first brought us, in eager crowds, to the dramatically inaccessible spot between Richmond Park and the Thames. The old greenhouse that shelters the restaurant was symbolically apt for the style of food that Skye Gingell developed there. (Her present billet, in the grandeur of Somerset House, is a little different.) The charm of the nursery (food apart) lies in its tempting array of plants and the knocked-about objects on sale among them.

Perhaps there is a social message hidden in the fact that the entrance, off the road that snakes among gems of Georgian architecture from Richmond to Ham, is only signposted for those leaving Richmond. Coming from Ham it only announces the parish church. If you meet, as you often do, a car wanting to leave, you must back out into the main road to make room. There is no guarantee, moreover, that you will find anywhere to park along the narrow rutted lane. And on a Bank Holiday, not a chance.

We were lemmings. We drove out to Richmond Park to join the queues of cars looking for somewhere to park. Eventually, with a great deal of backing and manoeuvring, waiting for another family to pack up its buggies and leave, we found a space and set off among the children and dogs for the Isabella Plantation – a romantic, slightly mysterious name for a woodland garden isolated in the broad landscape of scattered trees and grazing deer. The Times that morning had a splendid front page photo of two stags locking antlers in this very park. We neither saw nor heard any rutting, though the red deer were very much in evidence.

There is, apparently, no Isabella in the story. I pictured a wimpled Tudor princess: in reality Isabel, they say, is an old name for the sandy fawn colour of the soil. The planted areas of the park are called Plantations. It’s as romantic as that.

The garden, however, is in fine fettle. There is an air of Exbury about its wandering paths and streams, among massed rhododendrons and camellias under sheltering trees. A good deal has been thinned or cleared recently and there is plenty of new planting – all admirably labelled. And all this only seven miles from London. Perhaps next time, soon, in early spring, I shall walk.

Smells of tripe

To Kew on pretty much the shortest day, but in warm sunshine and, mysteriously, most unaccustomed hush. Was Heathrow having a day off? Such planes as I saw were half a mile over to the west, beyond Syon Park, and almost out of hearing. On normal days you can stand on tiptoe and touch their undercarriages.

I was expecting – I suppose all visitors were – some dramatic manifestation of the absurdly warm autumn, now winter, weather. Would there be early daffodils, crocuses, camellias? Surprisingly, no. My perambulation usually follows the same circuit: turn right inside the Victoria Gate, inspect the parade-ground-precise bedding round the Palm House, then through the woodland garden (hellebores galore; little else in play) into the monumental rockery – the rocks looking their best, of course, but virtually only Galanthus atkinsii to show for snowdrops, and a clump of Anemone hortensis looking rather self-conscious. It’s extraordinary how at this time of year the eye hones in on anything with red in its pigmentation. Pink catches it, or purple, but yellow and white just don’t have the signal strength.

It’s the little Davies alpine house, the one with a hump back, that holds mid-winter performers, and even here nothing seems premature. The stars are paper-white narcissi, cyclamen, one or two irises, Primula verticillata from the Near East, and the tiny Lithodora zahnii from Greece, its pale blue flowers hopping with bees. No sign of the dazzling blue Chilean cyanocrocus yet, but my favourite Scilla madeirensis is almost over – at last a sign of the times?

The grass collection is predictably alert, in its shades of buff, but heading for Kew Palace and the river, all seems normally mid-wintery. Perhaps the alder-catkins are longer than normal; hornbeam buds look riskily green, but when I come to the Rhododendron Walk there is little sign of action. I expect camellias to be up and doing: very few (and here in Kensington, Camellia Central, it’s the same). Two rhododendrons uphold the honour of their race: R. pulcherrimum and R. ‘Rosa Mundi’, their pink/white and plain pink flowers in good supply. They prove the point that red pigment has a disproportionate pull on the eye in a picture of green, brown and grey. One can only speculate on why their ‘Caucasian’ (i.e. Anatolian) blood makes them so hasty.

Witch hazels, of course, in the garden by the little temple that surveys the huge restoration project of the Temperate House, are in full flower. I’ve wondered for years what their smell reminds me of. At last I have it: cooking tripe. They catch your eye at a distance as a pale yellow cloud. Otherwise the main eye-catchers are the decorations in the winter funfair that pulls the children (hopefully future botanists) into Kew.

A letter in The Times lists what is in flower in Cornwall: the whole garden, it appears. In London the picture is quite different: confusion reigns. Jasminum polyanthum is flowering high on our east wall but not in the greenhouse, where its buds are not even showing their preliminary purple. Our Camellia ‘Top Hat’, often in flower by Christmas, has only opened two of its pink blooms. In Kensington Gardens I haven’t yet seen a narcissus in flower; just the mechanical patterns of municipal polyanthus and a peep of Iris here and there.

Hermione Quihampton is not the name of a fantasy duchess trailing fags-ends and empties as she devastates the garden. La Q is the former wife of a Anglo-French farmer who became very much part of our life at our old house on the fringes of the Auvergne. Picture her tall enough to be called stately, immensely red-haired, loquacious, brusque and funny, upholding the English way of Open Gardens at her billet in very profonde France. Not every French village has a ‘Best Garden Seen From the Road’ competition. I suspect Hermione is behind it; at any rate she is up there among the laureates.

She initially took over from the often absentee gardener (me) at our old place, planting the parterre with every blue flower she could find, the taller the better. By autumn, the box hedges were submerged in a breaking surf of toppling herbs. She baked cakes, made hedgerow jam and, bit by bit, took over vineyard duties from our less-motivated vigneron. The grapes glowed, their leaves perked up and signs of mildew faded when she bore down on them. A year later she had read the wine-making books and started edging me out of the cellar. I think she loved the saccharometer, the tall glass jar with its bobbing float; the fermenting froth was pretty exciting too – and the wine not bad at all.

Her Open Garden attracts the idle and curious, of course, as they do everywhere. In France, though, the second element, the charitable contribution, is sometimes less well received. Hermione tells me of a group of seven who pitched up full of horticultural anticipation, and then read the sign about the children’s charity. ‘I think they hit the cultural buffer,’ she said when they turned back to their car.