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.

This is by far the biggest cedar I know in London

Here am I, a Londoner born and bred, a resident for half my life, a committed gardener who fancies he knows something about architecture, a life member of the National Trust – and I had never been to Osterley Park until last Sunday. I had supposed it was just a sad remnant of a great house stranded near Heathrow and bisected by the M4. We arrived to find pure England, left-behind England, unsullied parkland with magnificent trees round a house on a near-ducal scale. Yes, the motorway rules out rural silence, but if you can stomach the aircraft at Kew or Syon they are no worse here.

Osterley is a friendly park open to the neighbours (and there are plenty) all year round. It is a farm with a herd of cows grazing meadows apparently never ploughed, and a real farm shop selling its own produce. And it has a garden becoming a fascinating recreation of 18th century taste. In the borough of Hounslow, twenty minutes from Kensington.

We arrived through an autumn mist that veiled the surroundings. As we walked up the drive, skirting a lake noisy with water birds, the sun pierced the mist, low in the afternoon sky, to outline half a dozen serious cedars of Lebanon, trees that must be contemporary with the massive red-brick house. It was a memorable moment of discovery.

The National Trust can do things so well. You could believe the owners were still in charge – though they left at the end of the Second World War. The 350 acres they gave the Trust is more than the extent of Kew Gardens; enough to feel like real countryside. The Tudor stable block is where you feed and buy your souvenirs, happily free of advertising and bossy notices. The house (with much of its Adam interior intact) shelters you on wet days, and the garden has the unmistakable sense of renewal by imaginative hands. There is a plantsman and a researcher at work here.

You can see it in the ordering of the flower-beds, awkward perhaps to our post-Jekyll eyes, but precisely what Georgian gardeners appreciated; each plant a solo performance. It is clear from the labelling of the beds. The American garden reflects the excitement of newly imported exotics from the American colonies. The walled kitchen garden is a cheerfully productive playground for vegetables and flowers and fruit jumbled together. New tree-planting round the park is original and unexpected – clearly a plantsman’s work. And the mile-long promenade round the great meadow and into the woods must be wonderful in spring with its meadow flowers and bluebells.

The head gardener is Andy Eddy, originally trained at Kew, then at Sissinghurst, and now with a ducal domain of a garden where he can play duke – and duchess. I shall soon be back.

Out of focus, I'm afraid, but my only shot

They came in a goody bag from the RHS at Chelsea in May: five modest corms smaller than walnuts with a name that was new to me: Acidanthera murielae. Late flowering, the packet said. I planted them in a shady bed (there is no choice here) and pretty much forgot about them. In August important-looking irisy leaves popped up. And grew and grew to three feet or so. By mid-September strange flower buds emerged, six or seven to a graceful swan-necked stem, and by the end of the month, six-petalled white stars were opening wide, purple-centred, with a spreading lily-like scent.

Is anything more exciting than meeting a completely strange plant like this: planting it and waiting for a new wonder to appear? The reference books link it to Gladiolus. I can see no resemblance. Acidantheras come, I gather, from Ethiopia, were grown in pots by the Victorians, who called them Abyssinian lilies. They are now firmly in my repertoire.

And when you’ve finished your garden, what then? We tend to dodge this question, saying that a garden is never finished; is a process rather than a place…. there’s always something to do. True if you are a collector, a plantsman, a naturalist or just a passionate observer. Most gardeners, I suppose, start with some sort of plan, or concept, or start to adapt whatever garden they buy or inherit to their idea of what is beautiful or useful. They go on fiddling. It never quite fits their notion, or their notion changes over time. They see something that inspires them or piques their interest, on television, in a magazine or at a flower show. They see a ‘gap’ and make the mistake of filling it: does it call for an urn, or a shrub with strident variegation? In the process, they lose track of their original concept, realise that football takes precedence over potatoes, or netball over roses. They eventually grow stiff with age, give up digging and read up on alpines.

The answer to the question ‘what is your garden for?’ eventually emerges. It is to fill part of your life not covered by work, or satisfied by news – or even by your family. Does it have a spiritual dimension? Poetic or artistic might be a fitter word. What it does do is make you pay attention to the routines of nature – which is surely an excellent purpose in itself

Most of the exhibitors are sheltered by ancestral trees; some shivered by the château

To Chantilly, just northeast of Paris, for the first autumn edition of the Journées des Plantes de Courson. The Château de Courson, southwest of Paris, was the birthplace, 30 years ago, of France’s answer to the Chelsea Flower Show, the key event in the country’s gardening year. Its begetters are a brilliantly creative couple. Patrice and Hélène Fustier, who conceived it as a day for keen gardeners to meet to discuss and exchange plants. In those days, gardening was very much a minority interest in France, with of course fashionably anglophile overtones. I remember, at the Coursons of the ’80s, the startling sight of Range Rovers and green wellies – rare sights around Paris in those days.

The Fustiers invited British judges for competitions (Roy Lancaster has starred at every one.) Specialist nurseries (then rare birds in France) joined in with enthusiasm. Soon the stable yard overflowed into the park and plants of all kinds congregated like party guests among the old oaks; there should have been a Renoir or a Matisse to paint the scene.

This year the Journées des Plantes had a spectacular upgrade. The Château de Chantilly is properly described as ‘princier‘ – princely – rising in faux-Renaissance grandeur among vast lawns and immense moats beside the Newmarket of France, the country’s greatest racecourse and most grandiose stables. The château is also France’s second greatest museum of masterpieces, after the Louvre, thanks to the collectios of the Duc d’Aumale, son of the last king of France.

Chantilly has conference hotels, restaurants and above all the space that Courson could not provide. And the translation, all seem to agree, is a triumph. Patrice and Hélène Fustier continue to preside, with the help of Prince Amyn Aga Khan, and the setting, under and among a grove of ancient oaks and beeches, beside the enormous moat, makes a wonderful frame for the plants.

Sadly the weather last week did not cooperate. A cold spell that saw snow in Belgium and Germany reached an icy finger towards Paris. On the first day it was 7°C and drizzling. Yet somehow the dim misty light made the warm colours of autumn fruit and foliage glow with inner fire.

Relaxed. It’s the one thing that everyone wants to, and thinks they should, be; a zero-sum positive: your face, your clothes, your body-language, your vocabulary, your house, garden and writing-style must be, or aim to be, or appear to be, relaxed.

Every magazine and paper says so, and reports admiringly on anyone who carries it off. Why is it the thing to be? Is it because modern life leaves so little time and space for relaxation?

‘Relaxed’ seems to have the field to itself. What is an admirable, acceptable, fashionable, alternative? No one is admired for being tense, or formal, or uptight. Correct? It sounds as though you’re trying too hard. Of clothes, ‘chic’ perhaps gets away from it, with ‘shabby’ as a possible qualifier.

The sub-text of ‘relaxed’ is that you’re in charge – if only of yourself. You have mastered the situation. You know the rules well enough to ignore them. Rules? Sports have them, but does the rest of life? There are laws and being relaxed about them can get you three points on your licence. But for most of us, white wine before red is as far as etiquette goes. Cheese before pud? We should be relaxed about that; though oddly it is one thing that gets serious society, dining-out society, uptight.

All this is prelude to a gardening question. What is the admiring epithet to use about a gardener whose garden is, shall we say, relaxed? Perhaps in his day ‘Capability’ Brown was considered relaxed. Surely doing away with straight lines, ‘jumping the fence’ and so forth, was relaxing. ‘Damn braces, bless relaxes”, wrote William Blake. Did he never edge his lawns?