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.

Can you think of a sillier place for a garden than the middle of the Thames? Well, yes; perhaps the middle of the Channel. And that’s only horticultural speaking. Airports, Boris, by all means, but if you have a yen for putting things in mid-Thames, why on earth a garden? What need or question does this project answer – except the murmured ‘Will you?’ of a famous actress?

The Garden Bridge project could not have been proposed by a gardener. A long narrow strip of garden perpetually exposed to all the winds, with a limited depth of soil, and the need for constant irrigation, has little prospect of happy plants. Of tall and flourishing trees, I suggest, none.

Being planned as a popular spectacle the planting would have to be colourful – which inevitably means exotic. The computer-made prospectus shows something not unlike the Chelsea Flower Show crossed with a right of way: which wouldn’t work at Chelsea. But is it a right of way? Apparently not – which puts its status as a useful bridge in doubt.

What is its purpose? To add to the tourist attractions that make, for example, Bridge Street at Parliament Square a squalid jam of people and pushchairs and cameras. Picture the steps up to the Garden Bridge lined with hotdog and postcard stands. Picture the squads of Chinese tourists we must apparently encourage if London is to prosper. And shudder.

The bridge is proposed to join the Temple to the South Bank. The Temple is the only serene space on the embankment (ironically the site of the RHS Great Spring Show before the First World War). The South Bank is already a tourist circus. In a successful city, presumably, serene spaces are just unmarketed opportunities.

What is worst, though, is the impact of the bridge on London’s greatest view, the one Wordsworth celebrated: the great grey tideway itself. Nothing is more elemental and nothing more urban than the Thames passing between its embankments and foreshores and under the monumental bridges between Westminster and Tower Bridge, and the ceaseless water traffic using it. To interrupt it with a line of greenery would be like putting window boxes on St Paul’s.

Meanwhile the budget of Kew Gardens has been cut so deep that fifty botanists have been ‘let go’. If there are millions to spend on gardening the actress and the mayor must not be allowed to waste it.

I was going to try not to mention it, but the goings-on next door are hard to ignore – and getting harder. At the moment the drilling about three feet from my head threatens to upset my syntax. And no one can fail to notice the scaffolding to the top of our neighbour’s house and high above it, clad in white sheeting with the words London Basement repeated six times; one for each deck. ‘Is this the highest you’ve ever dug?’ someone asked.

Basements of course, are all the rage. A pocket calculator will tell you that with property at £x per square foot and the cost of digging and building at half x or less, the opportunity of adding a thousand square feet or so is worth considering. And there is no legal obligation to consider the neighbours. Decent people do, of course, but the law says the ground under your house is yours; by all means become a mole. A recent regulation says that, in this borough at least, you can only dig under half your garden (it used to be 85%). But a hole is a hole, and the diggers and the concrete mixers, the big white box on the pavement, the lorries, the noise and the dirt are a fact of life. So is the looming risk of cracks in the party wall or worse. What happens if power cuts become endemic is an unasked question. A corner candle shop? Our neighbours, though, have an immediate problem. Removing the plaster from their flank wall (it’s the last house in the terrace) revealed serious cracks. The whole wall, says the Council, must be demolished; effectively only a massive Virginia creeper is holding it together. That means the roof has to go – and the back wall, it seems, too. Its lusty wisteria, checked in its climbing only by the height of the chimneys, has already had the chop. We will be living next to a void, with only the stuccoed façade as a neighbour.

The scaffolding is just as imposing from the garden. You don’t see it from our windows, but looking back from the greenhouse end I try to persuade myself that in a moment of whimsy I commissioned a pagoda. Meanwhile the neighbours’ garden is like an unnaturally house-proud mining camp. On fine days the miners sit around, speaking a language not distant, to my ears, from Russian, outside their gemütlich little dacha. Why should they care that under their feet, under the flooring they installed, a terrible menace is advancing across the garden towards ours?

How do you extricate phyllostachys from the roots of a mature walnut? We may become experts when the miners move on.

It can get pretty tense when there’s a slot to plant in a tiny garden like this – or rather, when some bolshy radical, impatient for change, says there is. There’s immediately a lobby in defence of the plant to be, as it were, supplanted. “It looks fine, I like it where it is”. There are, though, no grounds for an appeal to variety: it’s a box bush. One of quite a number.

“I’ll put it in a good big pot”. (There are quite a number of these, too). “Don’t you think we need a bit of action there; a plant that performs – even flowers?” “Well, I like the green; it’s soothing”.

The real problem is that there’s no obvious candidate – or at least one that isn’t a thumping cliché around here. Does it matter that everyone else grows it? After all, the park is full of planes, and Tuscany of cypresses.

I see a cliché as a wasted opportunity. The pleasure of our little space is close-up observation of something that isn’t going on all around us. So unusual, even rare, is good. And something that will thrive in rooty competition in almost constant shade.

I’m thinking shrubby; something that will earn its space, with its back to the west-facing, plant-covered wall, with a jumble of herbaceous stuff in front. The neighbour’s walnut takes most of the afternoon sun. I look in the shrubs-for-shade lists. Of course most of them are evergreen. And no thank you, I don’t want Forsythia: or anything early – or anything yellow. In this garden roses belong on the walls (and indeed way above them). London is not rhodoland – though it is the epicentre of camellias. I have mulled over Japanese maples, but their spread would preclude planting close to them (and we have a beauty, a Saling seedling) in a pot. Viburnum? The best is V. burkwoodii, which we already have trained up a wall. Bodnantense? Our neighbours have a huge one (which we love). V. tinus stinks. V. opulus “Compactum” is possible: not thrilling, but pretty in autumn with turning leaves and shiny berries.

Callicarpa bodinieri is a possibility. Would it flower and produce its alarmingly- coloured berries in the shade? One to put on the short list. Would a deutzia perform? How about Dichroa febrifuga, a dark-blue-flowered hydrangeish thing we saw in New Zealand? It would be lovely to have, but it comes (if you can find it) with scary health warnngs. Holodiscus discolor: there’s an idea. Something that ornaments Douglas fir forests on Puget Sound doesn’t sound very urban, and certainly doesn’t have conventional petalled flowers. But its tall arching stems and its little oaky leaves (one of its past names was quercifolia) would look graceful, and its long buff tassel flowers, like a spirea, are exceptionally elegant, turn brown and ornament the winter too. To be considered. Cornus: now there’s a family….

To be resumed.

Perhaps not everyone knows that the grand iron gates in Piccadilly are the entrance not only to the Royal Academy (Sir J Reynolds in bronze, brush poised, makes this pretty clear) but also to the botanists’ Valhalla, the Linnean Society. Valhalla seems appropriate for an institution with a Swedish patron saint.

I was there this week for meetings of the International Dendrology Society in the august Council chamber. On the walls and the staircase hang portraits of every canonized botanist, The Old Lions and many plant collectors, from Linnaeus on – with a particularly colourful one of the late Professor Willy Stearn cheering up the Council chamber. From the windows on one side you look down on the Royal Academy, from the other you survey Whitehall down to Westminster Abbey. It could go to to a mere gardener’s head.

The IDS holds its annual Winter Lecture here. This year it was Tony Kirkham’s turn. His subject: 250 years of Kew Gardens and gardeners, from Princess Augusta and poor Fred, Prince of Wales, down the long avenue of celebrated names: Bute, Banks. Hookers sr and jr, Thistleton-Dyer (Tony’s favourite, though a martinet. He wore a dashing uniform), Dallimore, WJ Bean….and Kirkham. Tony has been capo of the arboretum since 2002, totally immersed and most eloquent about his charges.The progress of Kew from a minor royal garden with a mere 5 acres of arboretum to its 300 acre splendour today makes a good story – especially since half a dozen of the original trees planted in the 1760s are still there, feted as ‘the Old Lions’ and propped and botoxed-up as necessary.

The most wonky, now lying on its side, is the original Pagoda Tree, recently relabelled Styphnolobium japonicum, though Sophora japonica to you and me. What an indignity, handing it a 5-syllable genus at its time of life. What tin ears botanists sometimes have – or in this case the Viennese publication that got in first with a name in 1830. Surely the label should at least acknowledge the name it bore for most of its existence here. There could be an acronym, FKA (formerly known as) or even TYAM (to you and me). The other Old Lions, considerably less mangy than the first, are the oriental plane, the original ginkgo, the huge Zelkova from the Caucasus and the Robinia or False Acacia, named for Jean Robin, director of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris (who presumably got in first).

Princess Augusta might be nonplussed to find some of her old trees growing where they do. Shifting them around has long been a practice at Kew. When the Duke of Argyll, another acquisitive dendrologist, died, his nephew Lord Bute took a gigantic horse-drawn wagon and helped himself (or rather Kew) to the best trees on Argyll’s Richmond estate – including the robinia.

Galanthus mobilia

To the Chelsea Physic Garden on the first of its two Snowdrop Weekends. Nippy at 4’C with a north wind. A marvellous coup de théatre on the way in: snowdrops as mobiles hanging from trees in little balls of moss; snowdrops as a rug round the cold feet of Sir John Soane in marble, and snowdrops in drifts along a newly-created path winding through the trees down by the Embankment.

The CPG keeps getting better – and even apparently bigger, as more little gardens and gardens-within-gardens and different horticultural incidents enliven its space. It’s hard to believe that so much can happen within its four acres, including a considerable arboretum of seriously senior trees. Somehow there always seems to be another unexplored or undeveloped patch to be transformed.

Nothing could be more inspirational for an urban gardener – or any gardener with very limited space. Here is the evidence that you can pack it all in, divide your space again and again, shift the focus from one style or environment to another.

Rockery, economic plantery, perfumery, pond, bog garden, woodland garden, order beds, fernery, Antipodean collection… they merge or contrast (more of the former in winter; the latter in summer) to make a magical garden walk, absorbing hours – even on a nippy January afternoon, when galanthophiles have their moment of glory.

I love snowdrops – but that doesn’t make me a galanthophile. On the long table in the sales tent (same temperature as the garden, minus the wind-chill) patient volunteers with frozen feet were guiding us through the differences between the precious named cultivars. Most people ask about the big ones, largely selections of Galanthus elwesii with taller or shorter flower stalks, bluer or greener or broader leaves, and heaven-knows-what variations of exquisite detail in their flowers – at £25 a plant. I’m afraid I asked the obvious question: what about the undifferentiated species? ‘Yes, we had quite a few, but a French woman took the lot this morning’. They have their heads screwed on, the French.

For all the winter chill, the most eye-catching plant in the garden was, of all things, a rose; a handsome mound, seven feet high and wide, of fresh green with reddish emerging shoots and tender leaves. It carried forty or fifty pale scarlet flowers looking none (or only slightly) the worse for the frost. Rosa mutabilis? I wondered. Then I thought of ours, hunkered down and almost bare. Surely a relation? ‘Rosa odorata’, said a cold-footed volunteer. ‘We used to say Rosa chinensis Bengal Crimson, but we’re not allowed to any more.’