Over Robinson's wall

Why have I neglected Gravetye Manor for so long? We used to be regular visitors to William Robinson’s old garden, enjoying its renaissance as a hotel with an owner, Peter Herbert, who very much got the point and restored the essentials of the garden round the splendid Elizabethan house. His thirty-odd year reign there settled Gravetye as the base of choice for exploring the most densely-gardened corner of England, with a dozen notable gardens within easy reach. And his care for the table was equally rewarding.

A new owner with deep pockets, Jeremy Hosking, has since given the hotel and the garden another uplift; renaissance is the word being used again. Five years ago he tempted Tom Coward from Great Dixter, where he was working with Fergus Garrett, to take over and complete the restoration . What would Wiliam Robinson have done with modern plant s and methods (if with rather less than his army of gardeners)? Wandering in this extraordinary place one can glean some idea.

This is a heady spring to visit any garden in the south of England. Nothing has interrupted the budding and blossoming since the new

year. Each morning at home we draw the curtains to see long branches of blossom on the double white cherry in the street, our pink magnolia in the front garden, and the sumptuous sight of our neighbour’s weeping cercidiphyllum, a cascade of circular leaves of fresh lawn-grass green hiding the street. I laze in bed for five minutes counting the planes pass through the blossom as they line up for Heathrow.Gravetye in mid-April was inebriating. In the parterre west of the house the sharp sunlight focussed each flower and lit the tulips like gemstones, a cacophony of laughing colours . The peculiarity of Gravetye is that the whole garden seems to face south. It lies, drinking in the sun, above a wildflower meadow sloping south-west down to a lake. Always on the lookout for plants flourishing in shade I drew a blank.

The Robinson style is all about detail; plants ingeniously mixed to harmonize, flowers chosen to complement one another and give the impression that The Creator had had a particularly good day, unaided by man. They didn’t use the term plantsmanship in those days, but this (rather than collecting rarities) is the true meaning of the word.

The magnum opus of the moment is bringing the walled kitchen garden back to life and productivity. It lies up the hill a hundred yards from the rest on the edge of the forest of 1,000 acres that Robinson planted or assembled. Perhaps there are other circular ones; I don’t know. Many certainly have curving walls to the north to trap the heat. But this is like an elaborate enamel brooch, the centre striped with different vegetables and the circumference ringed with soft fruit and wall-trained trees,

Tom Coward has written in Country Life about the logistics of gardener and chef working in tandem. Whether it always goes perfectly to plan or not, it is part of the romantic horticultural dream that Gravetye represents.

My occasional correspondent in Japan can react with charming enthusiasm to things I write. She frequently provides me with facts I would never find without her. She also, quite unwittingly, gives me the feeling that we in the west are all novices at the game. The Japanese have been enlightened, demanding, hugely ambitious and intensely focused gardeners for twice or three times as long as we Europeans. They were developing techniques and collecting and breeding plants and refining their taste, while we still thought a Hortus Conclusus was a pretty nifty bit of avant-garde thinking.

Take the flowering cherry. We date our appreciation of these springtime wonders back just over a century. They even have the reputation here (with some justification) of being short-lived; just instant décor.

The whole deal is different in Japan. The population puts on its Sunday suit to greet them, picnics on the grass (lots of sake) and gives them National Monument status. My pen-friend sent me this postcard of a weeping cherry that Engelbert Kaempfer might have seen on his visit to Odawara in 1691.

This was in reaction to my story about the Californian James Light, his glasshouse and his orchards where Silicon Valley now stands. Her great grandfather had a plum orchard on the very spot. Japanese gardeners are still relatively common in California today. He installed his family on San Francisco Bay early in the last century. He had to retreat back to his family in Japan in the 1930s when Wall Street crashed. Then came the war and he never returned.

Scrubbed clean

I was quite keen on the mossy look at first. In a largely paved garden a hint of green on and between the paving stones softened their harshness. It seemed to show that nature was accepting the intrusion. Someone, it seemed, had slipped a green filter over my specs. I rather liked the effect.

But then the green started spreading. It tinted the floor, the brick walls, the base of the greenhouse, and in due course the teak table and chairs. Seeds germinated between the slabs. I like violas and hellebores and foxgloves and campanulas – especially C. persicifolia – but I don’t want to tread on them. Without a modicum of spit and polish a town garden can start to look scruffy. So we accepted the offer of a clean-up with a high pressure hose. The green sluiced away was replaced with shades of ‘natural’. Now we hope the scrubbed-clean look won’t last too long.

What did I think of artificial grass, someone asked me the other evening – tentatively, almost shamefacedly, I sensed – as though suggesting something indecent, or expecting a put-down. Why on earth not? A little patch of lawn in London is usually a sad thing. A mower is clumsy in a small space. And as soon as the football comes out you have a patch of mud.

We are almost wholly paved, so it doesn’t arise, but our daughter over in Fulham is investigating a carpet lawn for her children to roll around on. The website she sent me to comes up with a surprising range; the poshest called Mayfair (New for 2015!), then presumably in descending order of poshness, Kensington, Chelsea Super Soft, Wentworth, Holland Park, Belgravia and Knightsbridge. The ‘turf’ is laid on a porous ‘shockpad’ to make it springy underfoot. All you do, apparently, is brush it now and then. Should we, come to think of it, start thinking green in a more positive sense?

Would you hurry to buy a book from the East Bay Municipal Utilities District? That’s what I thought. I don’t know about EBMUD’s other publications, but their Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates is the best on this timely topic I’ve yet seen. It weighs about 4 lbs, but its design, organization, illustrations, photography, printing and above all its style of writing are as clear, useful and attractive as they could be. The author/editor is Nora Harlow, the excellent phtographer Saxon Holt.

Its subject is the San Francisco Bay area. Obviously many of the plants it lists would be tender in most of Britain. But its principles and the imaginative solutions it describes could be applied anywhere. People with Mediterranean gardens should grab a copy. Definitely my book of the year so far.

Beaulieu-sur-Mer

We have been planning and nurturing our son-in-law’s and daughter’s garden by the sea (the Mediterranean one) for ten years now. The dream is now a fact, but I still have to pinch myself to believe that we conjured into being these terraces, this tunnel of vines, these whispering cascades, the pool, the olives and cypresses and curtains of green and blue rosemary covering the stone walls, this bounty of lemons, the irises, the agapanthus, the jasmine whose clustered flower-buds are clots of Imperial purple peeped through with white, its scent hanging heavy all around.

Above all, though (and not conjured by us) the view to Cap Ferrat across the bay hundreds of feet below. I get up in the night to gaze at it under the moon.

Just along the coast at Menton is the garden that Lawrence Johnston, the creator of Hidcote, was planting at the same time in the 1920s and ‘30s. He gave Hidcote to the National Trust in 1948 and moved here, continuing to embellish his Menton hillside almost up to his death in 1958. Last year in April I found a sad notice at the gate, ‘Fermé a` cause des intempéries’, the French word for the weather the BBC calls ‘atrocious’. Big trees, some of them extremely rare, were brought down in the gales. But gales are sometimes blessings in disguise: no one feels authorized to thin out historic overplanting when the specimens are important originals. A decision made by fate can be a relief, and certainly this year the garden is in better shape, with more space and light in some overcrowded parts.

Like Hidcote, Le Serre de la Madone was made from scratch on farmland – in this case up a steep valley at right angles to the coast, not for the sea view. The two gardens seem to have little in common. La Madone is essentially a series of twenty hillside terraces, some quite narrow paths, linked by wide-spaced flights of steps and hairpin bends at each end. There are plateaux at the top and near the bottom for pools, conservatories and a little box-edged formality, but the essence is the south-west-facing slope as a sheltered home for Johnston’s exotic finds, planted in what now seems a random medley with the native flora. Half the flowers you will recognize from English gardens; Hidcote for example. Half leave you (or rather me) struggling to pronounce their multi-syllabic labels, or to trace the origin of sweet exotic scents. On the lower terraces I stopped and pondered a marvelous perfume until I realized that little cream and yellow freesias had naturalized on a whole bank among irises and acanthus, and teucrium and rosemary.

I tried to imagine Johnston and his famous little pack of dogs wandering on the hill to decide where some rarity collected in China or South or East Africa was to go. I’m sure he had the pot in one hand and his spade in the other. As a bachelor with twenty three servants he didn’t lack help, yet he is remembered as an ascetic and even a loner. He can have had little idea of how big some of his trees were to grow. Hidcote is considered, calm; a masterpiece in entrances and enclosures, masses and voids, that set the garden room fashion many of us still follow. La Madone is more a gallery of curiosities, long left to their own devices, now being carefully restored and replenished by an evidently inspired new and local gardener-botanist, Claude Antoniazzi.

It is still early in the season. Ceanothus and the spires of echiums are blue, a wide slope by the villa is a sea of orange-red chasmanthe from South Africa, spidery little flowers on iris underpinnings, but not much is yet in flower, and a great deal not yet in leaf. Spring on the Riviera is no match for a northern spring, the breaking of an iron grip, the restoration of green to a bare landscape. It is another phase in a cycle of benevolence, now gently under way.

The picture that has changed most, perhaps, is in town on the market stalls, now piled high with every plant that’s good to eat. Beautiful little yellow potatoes, mounds of dewy spinach, tomatoes from miniature to deep-grooved monsters, bunches of little turnips, white tinged purple, onions of all sizes, red and white, beans like green matchsticks, cucumbers and courgettes, carrots scrubbed and gleaming, white garlic and chicory and mushrooms, beetroots in leafy bunches, six kinds of lettuce, mesclun, rocket, herbs, artichokes, aubergines and avocados, asparagus from the Durance just up the road. Everything proudly labeled ‘France’. No kale. France rightly eschews curly Scottish cabbage as cattle fodder.

Spontanea? odorata?

Home from a preview of spring in California: hillsides blue with lupins, orange with poppies – and, unusually, green with grass. They won’t be green for long. The west coast is three years into drought. Almost no rain so far this year, and precious little in the snow pack in the mountains. Spring is too early, too warm – and wonderful. Magnolias are going over already, but against the rich green of redwoods the dogwoods are lighting up, daily more dashing and elegant in their balletic poses, branch-tips up.

California has been my second spiritual home since I was a mere seventeen. I came in a gap year, and twice I have been within a toucher of moving in, dazzled by the brilliance of light, the fecundity of nature, the sense of space and freedom. But each time I felt the pull of Europe. I realise the privilege of living so close to France, Italy, Germany…the world’s most sophisticated capitals, the sources of our vast and complex culture. It would feel like living at the far end of a long corridor; much too long. I go crazy with delight in a redwood forest with a whale-watching beach at the foot of the hill. I love the quirky beauty of San Francisco, the windy Bay, the flying fog, the pastiche Victorian architecture…and the stories. But then it’s time to come home.

Molly Chappellet (I have written about her many times) is my great gardening pal. Her husband Donn started the first estate winery of California’s new age in 1969, on a dramatically beautiful hillside above the Napa Valley, looking down over Lake Hennessy and onwards to Mount St Helena. The winery building, in a copse of oaks, is a rust brown three-sided pyramid (there must be a term for the shape), and still the best modern building in the wine country. Molly has gardened the boulder-strewn hill for forty years with a unique eye for the near and the far. Detailed planting underfoot, as it were, leads on, through many-ton volcanic boulders she moves, it seems, lie croquet balls, to the vast landscape below and beyond. She has the help of oak trees ninety feet across and the hypnotic inevitability of vine-rows sweeping round the slopes.

This year Molly took us to Quarryhills in the next valley over towards the ocean, the equally viticultural Sonoma. Bill Mc Namara, who is in charge, travels to China and other wild points east regularly, or at least frequently, with Charlie Howick, creator of the extraordinary arboretum of wild-collected species on the North Sea coast at Howick in Northumberland. Their haul is prodigious: Quarryhills is its Californian counterpart: 25 acres of trees and shrubs whose precise genes are new to America – and certainly to me. They cover a steep dry hillside of winding paths and arresting vistas. Most are natives of much damper places. By irrigating them Bill controls their growth and avoids promiscuous miscenegation.

A surprise at the entrance: huge plants of Rosa chinensis Spontanea, pink, white and red; the same rose we saw flowering in the Chelsea Physick Garden in February, going by the name of R odorata. The Chinese name might be more reliable….

The Conservatory of Flowers

James Lick never saw his conservatory. He ordered it at the age of seventy five; when he died, aged eighty, it was still packed in crates, waiting for a site in what is now called Silicon Valley, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay.

Lick was a Gold Rush millionaire – not from digging gold, but from building pianos and investing his profits in land. He learnt his carpentry from his father in Pennsylvania, took his piano business to Argentina, then Chile, then Peru, then Mexico, and in 1848 finally arrived in San Francisco (carrying 600 lbs of chocolate) on the very eve of the Gold Rush. Chocolate sold well, pianos were called for, and Lick’s land went up in value. He built houses in San Francisco, planted orchards in San Jose, bought ranches in Los Angeles and the Sierras and owned the biggest flour mill west of the Mississippi, and soon the grandest hotel in San Francisco.

He built the biggest refracting telescope of its time for the new University of California – and commissioned the conservatory that now stands in Golden Gate Park, a masterpiece of carpentry in redwood inspired by the Palm House at Kew.

Golden Gate Park stretches from the heart of the city westwards to the ocean on what was originally sand dunes. Its inspiration was New York’s Central Park, with winding drives among 1,000 acres of woodland and meadows. Belts of Monterey cypress and pine protect it from the wind with remarkable success. At its heart is the Botanical Garden, initiated by the inevitable Scotsman, John McLaren from the Edinburgh Botanics. Planting grasses to stabilize the sand, he said, reminded him of the Firth of Forth.

Lick’s conservatory found a home in the park. The crates were auctioned, bought by the railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and given to the city. If only Lick could see it now, a gleaming white presence, arrestingly elegant, filled with flourishing plants. High-altitude orchids are its principal collection: 700 species out of 1,000 known, displayed among palms, tropical crop plants, aquatics and carnivorous nasties around gleaming ponds under the glistening white roof. There is a lightness of touch here, a vegetative cheerfulness which is perfectly apt for the most beautiful city in America.

I was talking last month about shrubs for shady places. There are some families the Creator evidently worked on with gardeners specifically in mind. The dogwoods were one; Eden must have been full of them. Lighting up shady places and the downtime of the gardening year (not that one pictures Eden having much downtime) is their great family gift. Winter gardens rely on them as much as on hellebores and heathers.

The most glamorous dogwood in fact takes things a bit too far – at least for any garden of mine. The Catwalk Tree would be a good name for C. controversa variegata: if it could speak it would say ‘ Ta dah’! Where do you put such an eye-catcher: a creamy wedding cake that says ‘Clear the room for my pirouette’ and needs at least twenty feet square to perform in? The one I planted at Saling Hall, after years of hesitation, was kept in bounds by the muntjac, rather to my relief. They chewed off its extremities until I had to give quietus to the poor bedraggled thing.

Far more elegant and better mannered is its cousin, C. alternifolia argentea. It is a smaller plant, and less deliberate in its branching pattern. The tier-potential is there but you have to tease it out, year after year, with your secateurs. The leaves are smaller, on red stalks, mottled with white instead of cream and charmingly twisted. Given the space it can hold the stage, but it doesn’t bawl for attention. Cornus mas, our Cornelian cherry, and its Japanese equivalent, C. officinalis, are discreetly charming, too, claiming the limelight only for their precocious yellow flowers and autumn leaves. The star of this division is ‘Elegantissima’, the white-variegated version of C. mas. It’s slow: it took fifteen years to become considerable at Saling Hall, admittedly in deep shade, but then its October show of brilliant red fruit among the delicate pale leaves was worth the wait.

I came to the ‘flowering’ dogwoods rather late in life, wrongly believing they only really worked in America. It was the Chinese dogwood, C. kousa chinensis, that opened my eyes; a pair of small trees flanking a woodland path at Saling. Neighbours came round in early June to discuss the relative merits of the one with its creamy sepals opened flat and the one where they stood up to attention. Their leaves turned different colours in autumn too, yet as far as I know they were both K.c.c. Many dogwoods, American ones especially, outgun them in size and colour of flowers. Those of Cornus 30-8 ‘Venus’, a cross between C. kousa and C. nuttallii from California, are startling enough to shatter the peace of any woodland glade.

For our London garden, though, there is no playing with such grandiose ideas. The all-purpose Cormus we have here is the modest no-flowers-to- speak-of C. sibirica ‘Elegantissima’. In winter its stems glow a warm red in the light of a lamp I focus on it. In summer its white variegation is perfect in a sunless corner. There are brighter-coloured stems: ‘Midwinter fire’ is an eye-catcher, and I’ve always liked the yellow ‘Flaviramea’. But the leaves are the clincher. In a tight dark corner a true dual-purpose plant like this beats all the aristos of the family.