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.

We amateurs are not obliged to keep our gardens looking spruce and jolly in the winter. Some of us cut down our borders for tidiness’ sake, some hang on to withered plants and rhapsodise about seedheads and hoar frost, some think bare soil has a beauty of its own. Public gardeners don’t have those options; beds in parks need a winter suit as much as a summer one.

I admit I have seldom thought about the pressure on a public gardener to come up with new schemes to entertain his regular visitors winter after winter – nor the technical know-how required. From seed catalogue to bedding-out and from bedding-out to digging up and chucking out is a whole year’s programme.

My camera couldn't cope with the low light so I borrowed this photo of the drawing room, courtesy of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and the Sambourne family

The Royal Borough of Kensington owns and opens to visitors a terrace house in mint late-Victorian condition – a house related to the Messel family who created the garden at Nymans.

They inherited it from the principal cartoonist of Punch in his day, Edward Linley Sambourne, who succeeded Tenniel as the satirical draughtsman the whole country laughed at every week. The house was his studio, his family home and his pride and joy. He never stopped decorating and furnishing it, in a style so opposed to current ideas that it is now quite difficult to comprehend.

For a start, they seemed indifferent to light. They lived (this is the forty years or so up to the First World War) in perpetual gloom – the gloom of dark papered walls, of ceilings decorated in much the same way, of dark hangings and dark, sometimes jappaned black, furniture. No white paint: green and maroon were favourite colours. To make sure no full daylight got in, the windows were filled with stained or painted glass. Two of the main rooms had glass terrariums projecting out from the window-sills and the landing window was blocked by a water feature; a tank filled with shells and goldfish and a little fountain. Every wall is covered with framed pictures, frame to frame – most of them prints – hard to see even in a bright light, let alone the gas jets that originally lit the house.

Every surface, and lots of little tables augmented the desks and cupboards, mantelpieces, chests of drawers, the grand piano, davenports, canterburys and meubles whose names are lost in time, was an opportunity for an objet – or several. The floors were patterned linoleum or oriental rugs, the chimney-pieces stacked with shelves for more objets. And bear in mind they wore big clothes: crinolines, mantels, frock-coats – and hats. And the family shared the house, the standard London pattern of rooms off a single narrow staircase, with several servants. And every room had a coal fire to be kept stoked by the tweeny who carried the coal scuttles.

It is a fascinating place. Surprisingly there is no garden: just a yard, before the mews where the groom kept Mr Sambourne’s horse. In the afternoons he would hack out to Richmond or Hampstead for exercise. His studio, for most of his life, was just a bay window he added to the back of the house – and glazed with painted glass. On a bright day it probably sparkled, but in foggy London for six months of the year it must have gone from crepuscular to stygian.

The Nymans connection is via the Messels. Sambourne’s daughter married Leonard Messel, the creator of Nymans garden; their daughter Anne married David Armstrong-Jones (and secondly the Earl of Rosse). Her son Anthony married Princess Margaret. Their son David took his great grandfather’s name as his courtesy title until he becomes Earl of Snowdon.

Trad doesn’t usually do this Tatler stuff. But living in a house on the same model as the Sambournes, and discovering it only four streets away, I couldn’t resist conjuring up a vision of home life a hundred years ago. At least they had Nymans and its gardens to escape to.

There hasn’t been a cold night yet to press the leaf-release-button. It must be just the short grey days: something is dislodging them – or are they simply falling from fatigue? I stand in the still air of the garden watching them drift nonchalantly down, lodging momentarily on twigs not their own, resting on a shoot from the hedge, then sifting silently into the piles on the floor. The trees in the park are having a gala autumn, in slow motion, as there has been no frost. Ours sadly are a sycamore and a walnut – so no fireworks.

We need the trees bare before we can start on their biannual short back and sides. At least half the canopy of the 40 foot sycamore has to come off to keep it within reasonable bounds for us and our neighbours. I secretly hope a big west wind will attack it soon so at least some of the leaves land in our neighbours’ gardens. We’ve already filled half a dozen bin bags.The branches, when we cut them, will make a pile the size of a small car – all of which we have to ferry through a house to get to the street. To have no side passage and no back gate is a serious disadvantage – but typical of huggermugger Victorian development. I hate to think what it was like when there was a dunny in the back yard.

This year with luck we can use our neighbour’s house for the portage to the road; it will still be a building site as it has been for over a year. Only another twelve months to go, they assure us.