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.

Things are not looking too good in the garden just now. There’s a scaffolding tower blocking the outside staircase down from the ground floor, five feet of our Victorian garden wall has been demolished, the trellis with our laboriously trained trachelospermum has been removed and everything is covered in a thick layer of dust, The noise of drilling and hammering starts at eight and goes on till six; the noise of pumping water up from the basement depths goes on all night.

The roses and agapanthus, the geraniums and anemones, the fuchsias and salvias, the lemons and oleander, the clematis and solanum, the kirengeshoma, the thalictrums and my pretty ferns are all pretty in vain. Nobody’s looking. We don’t even open the door – except to dash to the shrouded greenhouse in hope of a ripe tomato (I picked my first Gardener’s Delight yesterday).

What’s it all about? This is London life in the wake of the Party Wall Act 1996. It’s your property; you can do what you like on it and the neighbours can just grin and bear it.

To do them justice the twenty Bulgarian workmen who assemble every morning at seven in our neighbour’s garden are a cheerful crowd and seem to work as fast and as tidily as they can. What they would do without a pretty big garden as their assembly point, canteen and depot I can’t imagine; there certainly isn’t room in the street.But the rage for basements is out of control. In the next street one terrace house is in a basement sandwich with hoardings up on both sides and lorries queuing to cart off their neighbours’ rubble. The Council? They are hamstrung, they say, by the Party Wall Act. They can’t disallow ‘development’ – or even police it. Not enough enforcement staff…. there are plenty of excuses.

We’ve visited a couple of basement developments. One consisted of eight featureless rooms, all painted this season’s grey, dubbed ‘Media Room’, ‘Gym’, ‘Office’, ‘Bedroom’, ‘Wet Room’, ‘Meditation Area’. Upstairs was a perfectly nice Victorian house – until they took our all the cornices, mouldings and everything that gave it character – and of course painted it all grey. Gardening? The developers opposite used a crane to heave four mature Italian cypresses right over the house to plant then in the diminutive back garden. They died, unwatered, within six weeks. And what happens underground in a power cut?

It’s all justified, it seems, by the price of any space in London. Add 1,000 square feet, even underground, and you’ll be in pocket for more than twice what it costs. Your neighbours can lump it; that’s what the Act says.

Thalictrum delavayii at Saling Hall

Thalictrum delavayii is my plant of the summer. I planted it last year at the top of the steps leading up from the kitchen door; so far there is only one main shoot, now nearly seven feet high, like an impossibly delicate tree with lilac leaves, each leaf a flower like a tiny nodding clematis. The cloud of flowers is at eye level as I reach the top step, and from the kitchen window it is as important as the trees beyond, a lilac filter for the view of the rest of the garden.

‘delavayi’ betrays its origin, the mountains of south west China, where Father Jean-Marie Delavay went to convert the heathen and became one of the most industrious plant collectors, with 1500 new species in his bag. ‘Meadow rue’ is the English name for the family; the finely divided leaves, in this case palely glaucous and scarcely significant in the picture, explain the name. The monster hybrd ‘Elin’ proves that bigger is not necessarily better, and the double one, ‘Hewitt’s Double’, that two is not necessarily a higher value than one. Of all the perennials I grow in our perpetual shade this is the most striking and rewarding.

I reported from the Hanbury Garden at La Mortola in February last year that I had seen a nasty new threat to box plants. Little did I think that only a year later it would have arrived – right here, in our garden and our neighbours’.

It’s called Cydalima perspectalis. In Italy they call it Piralide del Bosso. So far it’s only Box Caterpillar here. The caterpillars are green, yellow and black, up to 4 cm long, and the moth brown and white. But it’s the larvae, from yellow eggs laid on the underside of the leaf, that do most of the damage. They protect themselves with something like a fine miniature spider’s web while they’re at it. They eat whole box leaves or leave the skeleton; in any case defoliating the plant and ruining its appearance for – how long? In some cases there are signs of new leaves growing out, but one must presume that the damage is debilitating and could end in dead box.

At first it’s not easy to spot. There are often little brown patches after trimming a hedge. But look closely: the little webs are not hard to see. It spreads quickly; there’s no time to waste when you see it. Look at the RHS website; it’s not particularly encouraging.

There's just room for a little lawn

It was déjà vu all over again when I turned into Roy and Sue’s drive in Chandler’s Ford, in a leafy suburb just south of Winchester. I’ve seen so many pictures and heard so many stories. What feels familiar, though, on looking closer turns out to be almost subversively alternative. You know the genus but you never saw this species before. It happens again and again.

Roy is genial, passionate (we all know that from television) and loquacious. ‘Isn’t that a ….?’ you start. ‘Yes, I collected it with (half a dozen well-known collectors may feature here; very often Mikinori Ogisu, his Japanese chum) on Emei-shan’. (I’ve learnt that China’s holy mountains are honorically labelled ‘Shan’. Mount Fuji, come to that, is called Fuji-san; are they related? Gongga-shan, alias Minya Konka, seems to be Roy’s favourite peak.) ‘….It was growing with Abies delavayii, and a daphne, and a lily I’d never seen before, before breakfast one day outsde a village in Sichuan. I’m not mad on rice at breakfast. We’d just seen an extaordinary mahonia with coppery leaves….…’ Perhaps I parody, but Roy’s reminiscences are worth as long as you’ve got.

His selective eye has been focused on woody plants (and not only woody ones) since he worked at Hillier’s Nurseries nearly fifty years ago, I could never have written my own tree book without Hillier’s Manual – and didn’t even realise at the time that this astonishing compilation was newly hatched, the work of Sir Harold Hillier and Roy together. But I owe him for far more than mere knowledge.

He has a thing about mahonias – and things, for that matter, about a hundred other genera as well. I came away from his garden with ‘Roy’s Choice’, a selection of the cross made in the Savill Gardens in John Bond’s days between two Lancaster collections, M. gracillipes and M. confusa. The first has dangling flowers with red sepals and hard, armoured, almost scary leaves, the second an altogether softer look, far more and narrower leaflets and more conventional flowers. The 2013 Chelsea Plant of the Year, Mahonia ‘Soft Caress’ seems to be a variant of a subspecies.

I would never dare plant things as close together as Roy does. He packs a whole botanical garden into a typical suburban one. It looks busy, of course, but still in the way Loudon called ‘gardenesque’. One trick is persuading shrubs to climb the house walls, encouraging them with supports, then clothing them with a climber or two – underplanted with two or three other rareties. The monster honeysuckle, Lonicera hildebrandiana, has shot up and needs hacking back from a bedroom window.

I should know the Cotswolds better. My two lifelong favourite gardens, Rousham and Hidcote, are there, or at least en route. But I am always confused by the tourist-board names. This on the Wold, That on the Water, One on the Hill and Another in the Marsh. High-hedged lanes wander dementedly between clusters of cottages, all buff stone, many thatched, all painted in Farrow & Ball colours. One gets lost.

This excursion started at our favourite pub, the King’s Head at Bledington, with few clear objects, turning aside when a church tower, an intriguing signpost or a Garden Open sign hove into view. Sezincote and its Indian gardens were shut, as we learnt at the gate, but at Bourton the Hill we found Bourton House garden open. I had missed its election as HHS/Christies Garden of the Year in 2007 and was caught unawares by its quality, its mastery of palettes and idioms, from some of the coolest to quite the hottest borders I have seen, from severity in topiary to a box parterre like a nest of serpents, from placid pastoral to hothouse exotic. Does a bird of such bright plumage in the calm of the Cotswolds conform to the rule that gardens should reflect and interpret their surroundings?

Another chance encounter was Minster Lovell. The name on the signpost was somehow familiar, but at first the sign seemed a wrong steer; the lane led only to an isolated church – if a fine one. Behind the church, though, was a revelation: the pale ruined towers of a medieval mansion on the green riverbank of the Windrush. How rare it is to find an important monument these days uncluttered by signs and gift-shops, not a teapot in sight. This is the mansion the Coke family left behind to establish themselves in Norfolk at Holkham. It is not a violated abbey, just a great house left without a roof. Why?

English Heritage deserves a prize for its sign, a brief history of the house with Opening Times: “Any Reasonable Time”. Nowadays such a non-prescriptive notice is a rare sight.