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?

Top: A hydrangea at Exbury (I wish I knew its name)

What would I do with them if I took a tenth of the photographs that have tempted me in this last week of five-star weather? I haven’t wasted it indoors. I managed a visit to Exbury on a day as clear as a jewel, the air still and just that crisp side of balmy that makes you (or rather me) feel one glass of champagne to the good. Exbury is always known as a spring garden; the glory of its azaleas and rhododendrons seems to eclipse its other aspects.

Now, with autumn ready to pounce and fires kindling in the maples and liquidambars the occasional rhododendron eccentrically in flower is rather like a black tie at a lunch party. But the harlequin hydrangeas, the pale plumes of the grasses, the colchicums and nerines lead you from glade to glade, and you have time for the infinite variety of the trees; an arboretum framed in monumental oaks.

The New Forest is a gallery of pictures in any season. Glimpses through the trees on the Brockenhurst train make me long to record them. I realised, though, as we raced through Hampshire, the pleasures of the passing landscape, prospects composing and recomposing, crops and copses, swelling downs or dark mantles of woods racing by, are far less visible than they used to be. Railway companies used to clear the saplings from beside the tracks: now long curtains of dull sycamores screen off the scenery.

I spent the weekend of the Garden Literary Festival, the third organised by The Garden Museum, at Hatfield House, the great garden, in the classical sense, that I know and love best. The sky was that ineffable blue; a faint breeze just made the reflection of the great pink house in the lake more liquid, the ancient trees in the Wilderness seemed more massive than ever and the fountains sparkled and crashed in the grand box parterre below the South front.

The delegates at the Festival moved from lecture to lecture, from Banqueting House to Marble Hall, strolling at leisure through parterres on a princely scale like the figures in Repton’s Red Books, almost dwarfed by their surroundings.

The North front has a new adornment: one of Angela Conner’s dramatic water sculptures (and I should guess her biggest yet). It rises maybe twenty feet in the centre of a circular lawn like two great curving, gleaming horns, splashing water slides that would tempt any toddler, framing a golden globe. Of course I photographed it.

Right: The new Angela Conner sculpture at Hatfield House

I wonder how many gardeners think about the style of their gardens. There are certainly a few historical restorations or reproductions or pastiches, but don’t most of us do what pleases us with our patch, without trying to put it in a stylistic box? If we employ a designer we say (or sometimes fail to say) that it’s in his or her style – rather than, say, the style of Jekyll, or Oudolf, or Gardenesque, or even Italian.

I am reading ‘Gardens in the Modern Landscape’ by Christopher Tunnard, an architect and landscape designer of the 1930s and ’40s who created a certain stir with his opinions and his designs for such modernist architects as Serge Chermayeff. He and his contemporaries were unlucky in that their attempt at revolution coincided with the Second World War. There was little business for them. They influenced the look of the Festival of Britain in 1952, but even that officially-sanctioned style found few takers.

You can see shades of it in Battersea Park, where the Festival gardens are being restored. You can even detect it in some of Russell Page’s designs. Its fundamental rigidity, though, its over-strict self-discipline, is foreign to our native gardening instincts. We are eclectic. If there is a plant we fancy, we find a place for it. We put a table and chairs where we want our drinks, and hang the designer.Tunnard’s book follows the history of English gardening since the Landscape Movement of the 18th Century, and doesn’t like most of it. He picks on Joseph Addison for a start. Addison wrote “gardens are works of art, therefore they rise in value according to the degree of their resemblance to nature”. That was certainly the way painting or sculpture was judged in those days – or in fact until Picasso put two fingers up to nature. It is worth reading Tunnard on the resulting confusion, leading to the Victorians and ‘their glorious, gaudy botch’.

2016 is apparently ‘the year of Capability Brown’. We are all to celebrate ‘the creation of the English landscape as we know it’. Landscape, perhaps; garden, no.

HoraceWalpole (I’m reading his letters on my Kindle: endless gossipy fun and backstairs history) said he loved gloom. Or rather the contrast between gloom and brilliance. He decorated his villa at Strawberry Hill accordingly. The entrance hall and stairs are gloomy grey (in the height of today’s fashion), leading up to the excessive bling of his Gallery lined with scarlet cloth and vaulted and decorated with white and gold.

Walpole might have loved the gallerias on the road down to Tuscany; blinding sunlight alternating with inspissated gloom. (A splendid word, no? Sam Johnson used it, and Milton in Paradise Lost, where I always thought it meant occasionally relieved with glimmers of light. But no: it means ‘thickening’).

He, Walpole that is, would presumably have loved the past few weeks. The garden has scarcely dried out; then comes a day of clear blue sky. The paving has remained fashionably dark grey and the plants green, their leaves luxuriating and their flowers not bothering to open. There have been a few indifferent to the weather. Clematis viticella is cheerfully red at the top of the wall, white phlox at the bottom, a hairy zonal pelargonium I don’t like but which still flowers in deep pink anyway. Surprisingly Salvia patens soldiers on, its intense blue extremely effective in the shade. Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ is struggling, agapanthus is slow but steady, Solanum jasminoides album outrageous. Luckily our neighbours seem to accept its invasion.

A lovely surprise: Acidanthera (five bulbs in a goody bag from the RHS at Chelsea) has opened eight spectacular white and purple and sweet-smelling stars high among its gladiolus leaves. And wonder of wonders; Meyer’s Lemon, now 30 years in its pot, on the north-facing verandah where no direct sunlight has reached it in three years, has ripened a dozen perfect lemons and is starting to flower again.

Perhaps less surprising, but worth recording: in the shady greenhouse Gardeners Delight, the sweetest of all tomatoes, is delivering a fair crop of its little scarlet fruit.

Pinus halepensis dominates the scratchy scrub

La rentrée is the French term for it: the back to school end of summer when French roads are jammed with cars leaving the beaches and mountains. There is no notion of dawdling, of spinning out the last few days, even if only to avoid the nose-to-tail roads. The sense of a sudden descent from holiday nirvana to dull routine, with a year to wait before the next escape, is deep in the French psyche. And funnily enough the last Saturday in August often sees the weather change in sympathy.

Suddenly you are aware that the sun is too low in the sky. Driving west at teatime is irksome. The dark closes in before you are ready for it. Suddenly the cry goes up ‘J’ai froid, chéri. Mon châle’. And leaves detach themselves one by one from the plane trees and rattle to the ground.

This year the grape harvest is early, healthy and plentiful, a smiling vintage promising lots of good ripe wine from coast to coast. Winter was mild, spring early, the summer hot and dry with enough rain in August to swell the berries. Picking grapes is always hard work, but there has been a party atmosphere in the upmarket vineyards where they still pick by hand; in the rest the towering yellow picking machines have been roaring all day long.

We are in La Provence Verte, the Provence north of the A8, of high ridges and deep limestone clefts where vines occupy enclaves of flat land hemmed in by forest. The dominant tree, and the one that gives the woods their startling greenness even at the end of a hot summer, is the Aleppo pine, its name taken from the now-tragic Syrian city (although it is a native all round the western Mediterranean). Drought doesn’t bother this surprisingly delicate-looking tree with long slender needles, two to a bunch, of something between apple and lime green. They are graceful and soft to the touch and form an airy canopy on trunks that are often sinuous. Round habitations they are joined by the dark verticals of cypress and a few evergreen oaks.

I’m never sure whether the ground flora is properly called garrigue or maquis; I think it depends on whether the soil is acid or alkaline. This is limestone, and relatively fertile to judge by the thickness of the scrub, the height of some of the trees and the number of seedlings. Where it thins out and bare patches appear I’m told we can put it down to allelopathy (related, perhaps, to allergy); the effect plants can have of inhibiting their rivals for space or nutrients through their roots, their volatile components (there are plenty here, with resinous leaves in hot sun) or by what happens when their leaves decompose on the ground. I’d heard of juglone, the unfriendly substance produced by black walnuts; and eucalyptus often seems to poison the soil around, but didn’t know the same was true of so many components of maquis (or garrigue). The effect, in any case, is the scratchy scattering of scented plants that includes the prickly little kermes oak, juniper, cistus, mastic (aka lentiscus), thyme, lavender and masses of rosemary.

The more I go back to our woods in Wales, the more I regret the need for conifers. Above all for Sitka spruce. Nothing creates useful strong timber so fast: joists, rafters, floor boards… Nothing else will make sour boggy land productive. And yet its black, prickly presence (don’t try to touch a shoot – even a young one) makes our forests grim, forbidding places. Back in the 1960s the Forestry Commission actually tried to kill off our lovely mature oak woodland by underplanting the oak with spruce. As they grew (sometimes as much as five feet a year), they starved the oaks of light. Their lower branches died. Their tops sometimes survived, struggling upwards among the dark spears of the Sitka.

But the native flora below, the oxalis, mosses and ferns, wild raspberry, bilberry, feathery grasses, sometimes bluebells, that signify ancient oak woodland was gradually eliminated, replaced by a brown needle carpet with the occasional fern.

We have been able to salvage several remnants of the old woodland by felling and removing the conifers, but they are a pitiable sight. We plant new broadleaves, oak and beech, among the scrawny old trees, hoping our piety will be rewarded. Conifers are so fertile, though, that their self-sown offspring outgrow our new plantations – and weeding them out is a painful process. Larches I don’t mind (and in fact I love the pale, fragile-looking saplings; being deciduous they are less of a challenge to broadleaves). Sitka, Douglas fir, the useless lodgepole pine, the handsome but economically hopeless western hemlock and the worse-than-useless Lawson cypress are just pests.

The other perennial pest is bracken. It seems much more invasive since foot and mouth disease drastically reduced the number of livestock on the land. It covers stretches of hill that were grass with heather and bilberries with its dull blanket. It has always been a problem here in Snowdonia. Farmers’ letters and diaries of two hundred years ago complain of the August drudgery of cutting and gathering it – at least it made good bedding – under the hot sun. They didn’t know as they breathed its dust and spores that they are carcinogenic. The one herbicide that kills it is difficult to obtain and difficult to apply. And yet the hills are beautiful. I climb them to look out into the wind and the clouds towards Ireland and feel grateful to be alive.

It’s three weeks now since we spotted the box caterpillar (or rather its trail of destruction) in the garden, We’ve sprayed the affected bushes three times – and the funny thing is we haven’t yet seen either a caterpillar, a larva or a moth. Their traces are here all right; threadbare patches in the box with telltale tiny webs. The worst is the lower half of a pyramid which is heavily shaded in a wall corner. Could its position have something to do with it?

Meanwhile news comes in from friend after friend in London; serious infestations. The moth must be a fast flyer – it seems to land everywhere. I continue to spray – specially inside the plants. I wear rubber gloves and tease the branches apart to spray the inner branches. Encouragingly there seem to be quite a lot of new leaves sprouting nearer the trunk. If the pest has taken a break for the winter I’d love to know where it’s hiding.

STOP PRESS: A gardener in Provence has been fighting the caterpillar with pheromone moth traps (yellow, sticky) and regular spraying.