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.

Pembroke Square W8

The tennis court in the square is covered with Christmas trees, some with nylon jackets, ready to deliver, others being appraised for height and spread, colour and smell. Rassell’s, our favourite nursery, just across Earl’s Court Road, owns Pembroke Square and its tennis court and turns it into a Christmas tree bazaar each year. In this shirtsleeves winter, it’s a busy spot.

When was it that Santa took a closer look at the forest and realised he could improve on the standard Christmas tree? Until a few years ago, your British Christmas tree was the Norway spruce, Picea abies – presumably because the British forest was full of them, and the even commoner alternative, the Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis, is so drawing-room-unfriendly, with needles that would penetrate a tank.

We were choosing our tree yesterday and were spoilt for choice, with Douglas fir, Noble fir, Scots pine or Nordmann fir on offer. Abies nordmanniana, or Nordmann fir, wins – although I gather American connoisseurs will pay a premium for Abies fraseri. The poor Norway spruce lost out after a century of service because its needles fall off, as we all know, once the Christmas hearth has got going. Indeed, loosely-attached needles are a problem with almost all spruces. Fir trees are apparently better made.

There are other considerations, though: we all want a slender spire, but some are more densely branched, more or less droopy, softer, shinier or more fragrant. My choice for smell would be Douglas fir, but it looks a tad too relaxed. Pines, with their spaced-out bundles of needles, simply look wrong hung with shiny balls and candles and little angels. Noble fir, Abies nobilis, a noble tree indeed in a forest, is very stiff and blue and tends to have long bare shoots between the whorls of branches. So Nordmanniana, sleek and dark shiny green, with short, soft needles all round each shoot, if not amazingly scented, is the one coming home.

Once upon a time

‘Never Go Back’ was the title of the last poem of one of my heroes, the late Felix Dennis. Not his best poem (the tree ones are best) but good advice. ‘Never go back to the bridges you’ve burned.’

I broke that rule when I went back last week to Saling Hall, our home for 42 years. No one has lived in it since we left; the new owner plans to turn it into a hotel, but nothing has happened. Our former gardener, Aileen, keeps an eye on the house from her cottage in the old stables.

But the garden is another matter. The old pink brick garden walls, dated 1698 and Grade Two listed, have been rebuilt in new bricks (so much for the lichens and toadflax and my laboriously planted wallflowers). There are two splendid new greenhouses. And half the trees in the arboretum have been removed (there were once nearly 1,000 species and varieties of woody plants), and most of the shrubs.

The arboretum was a composition of paths and glades, trees and shrubs, masses and voids with, people said, many moods and secrets. No more. The screens that shielded it from the surrounding roads have gone. Trees I brought from far-off places have gone (though some nursery-grown specimens have been planted). The general look is strong on tidiness.

Could I have clapped a Tree Preservation Order on it all? It never dawned on me that anyone would want to destroy it. And anyway it’s none of my business any more. Felix was right.

A papal cypress

It can be a curse, having a gardener’s eye. It means a critical view of almost anywhere plants grow. Appreciative, too, of course – but sadly that happens less often. A practised gardener’s glance takes in every weed, every sickly plant, colour crime and misplaced tree. It makes no concessions to wayward taste. At best a too-loud scheme could be labelled in a forgiving way as ‘ironic’. A too-quiet one? The kindly explanation is ignorance; the poor things don’t know what possibilities they’ve missed.

We gardeners pounce on every moat, and are blithely unaware of our own beams. We have different levels of tolerance, of course. ‘Er indoors cannot abide a weed. It can block her entire view – until she spots another’. I go the other way, muttering ‘A sweet disorder in the dress…’.

A gardener can never be bored – at least not in daylight. The top of a bus provides endless fodder for critical analysis, from park-maintenance to street furniture (surely legitimate; we are experts on outdoor spaces) and above all front gardens – though side-streets, admittedly, offer richer variety than bus routes.

‘Critical’ is the key word. The one scenario that could lead to boredom is the improbable one of perfection. How frustrating it would be to contemplate a perfect garden. It is the feeling I get when I look at those 17th century prints of great estates, their endless alleys and waterworks impeccably aligned, one half precisely echoing the other in witless symmetry. Happily we know that a close up view would show us gappy hedges, wobbly edges and bedding past its best. We should have our satisfaction.

I only remember one garden where criticism could find no chink in a seamless performance. It was at Castelgandolfo, the papal summer residence in the Alban Hills. The clipped cypresses were finished with nail scissors and I counted, I swear it, nine gardeners sweeping a path with brooms. In unison.

One could always, I suppose, question the economics…

Only a couple of hundred leaves still up there, shaking in the wind as they contemplate the long drop onto the hard paving.

After six weeks of raking them up it will be a relief to see the plain stone surface again. The plain uncluttered ground, whether it is paved or lawn, or indeed water, is the first and most important element in a garden picture, the one that gives your feet, or just your eyes, permission and motive to get out and survey the scene. Painters have always known it; it is the Impressionist cliché, the street or track, or footpath or stream, in the centre of the canvas to give perspective to the rest.

Raking up the leaves has been a daily chore while they lay thick on the ground, as essential as wiping a misty windscreen, and no more interesting. Now that they lie scattered, as distinct individuals, it brings back what, to me, in this miniature domain, is the essential pleasure of gardening: precise interventions to correct what’s wrong.

Envy me if you like. I don’t have to find time and resolve, and the petrol can, to go out and unclutter my foreground with the mower.

I can spend unurgent hours planning to install a new plant or move an old one, deciding between, for example, this clematis and that for a niche that suddenly seems to need one. Spring? Summer? Late Summer? C. Montana? (too big); Perle d’Azur? (first choice, but already on another wall); a later viticella? (I fondly remember a sprawling Alba luxurians at Saling Hall).

Happily, that niche only has an inadequate little cissus in it; it won’t be solid with competing roots. To put a new one on the opposite wall won’t be so easy. A long-established Viburnum x burkwoodii is the main occupant of this stretch, and a valuable one too for its early carnation-smelling flowers and the lustrous healthy-looking evergreenery I tie in to the trellis to screen the neighbours. Planting among woody roots is risky, but a Daphne odora Aureomarginata has got away splendidly beside the viburnum and a rose ‘Bantry Bay’, after a struggle, has fair-sized shoots. I’m determined to install an Abutilon vitifolium close by, too. They are speedy little trees, capable of a yard a year, so we should see a quick result.

That leaves the rose, still to be chosen, near where I know a Cotoneaster horizontalis must do most of its feeding. I shall use my sharp steel spade (a present from Felix Dennis, when we planted his millionth tree together) and be lavish with manure.

Meanwhile daily operations resume, picking fallen leaves out of beds, cutting down spent geraniums, deciding whether to leave a foxglove seedling – am I certain its white? – snipping ivy from around the wall-lights, shifting pots of box, wall flowers, ferns and tulips around their too-small stage.

I’ve scarcely looked up from a sumptuous new book since I came across it in the library. I stood turning the pages for half an hour before I realised I needed a chair, I was so gripped. Its name is A Natural History of English Gardening 1650-1800; its author Mark Laird, Senior Lecturer in the history of landscape architecture at Harvard and consultant on such historical reconstructions as the gardens at Strawberry Hill, Painshill, and Hestercombe.

At first I wasn’t sure what the title meant. Natural History obviously includes the study of plants, including their environment in gardens. A wider view takes in the gardens’ animal inhabitants, too, and the conditions in which they live. So the subject widens out to embrace flora and fauna, gardens, gardeners, their households and families, the philosophies and politics, fashions and crazes that sway them. Take shooting, for example; the master of the house wants low cover for partridges, trees for higher birds. Shooting flying birds came in with lighter flintlock guns in the 18th century; landscape designers had to take this into account. And of course and above all the weather (which for London gardens included filthy air); the 17th century ended with winters that repeatedly froze the Thames. The Italian cypress gave way to the newly-discovered Irish yew.

John Evelyn in the 17th century and Gilbert White in the 18th were natural historians who epitomize the genre. Women play a far greater part than most accounts allow. Some are as prominent as the Queen or as talented as Mary Delany or the German Maria Sybilla Merian, others like the duchesses of Portland and Beaufort were insatiable collectors and botanists, amateur scientists making important contributions to botany. Ducal grandeur must have been overwhelming. Her Grace of Beaufort gardened 15 acres in Chelsea (where Beaufort Street is now) and at Badminton counted sixty avenues .

Mark Laird follows his characters in microscopic detail,and sets them firmly in the life of their times. Who were their friends? What nurserymen did they patronise and befriend? When and how did they travel? The book is richly and beautifully illustrated with botanical paintings and drawings, portraits and topographical engravings – a gallery of references so generously captioned that you can flit back and forth across the subject cross-pollinating ideas. You may be sitting at this for a long time.