It’s what I do on dark January afternoons; retreat a century and half to the world of frock-coats and crinolines, the world of JC Loudon, John Lindley, Joseph Paxton and William Jackson Hooker, the years when gardening was just finding its scientific feet.

My time-machine is The Gardener’s Magazine. I am deep in the issues of 175 years ago. John Lindley, secretary of the Horticultural Society, has just published his Theory of Horticulture, described by its reviewer as ‘as useful and indispensable to the gardener as the compass is to the mariner’. Lindley began by explaining in plain terms how plants work, in ‘a short guide to the horticultural application of vegetable physiology’. Such a thing, it seems, did not exist; gardening was learnt only by tradition and experience. “If I had met with such a book as this twenty years ago I would not have so many grey hairs in my head now”.

Paxton had just built the Great Stove at Chatsworth, the prototype for the Crystal Palace. Loudon enthuses about what the new Penny Post would contribute to gardening, making the distribution of seeds and cuttings possible as it had never been before. The nobility, and even commonplace millionaires, were investing in more and more ambitious gardens, nurserymen were flourishing and plant hunters ranging further than ever. And yet, in January 1840, the government announced it was closing down the royal gardens at Kew. All the plants were offered to the Horticultural Society – at a price. The Society declined; they were offered gratis to anyone who would take them away. And the greenhouses were to be demolished.

Strange, I think, that Paxton’s boss, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, with his house at Chiswick, just between Kew and the Horticultural Society’s Chiswick garden, didn’t put two and two together. The job of saving Kew was achieved largely by John Lindley and his friends, lobbying the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. His friend William Jackson Hooker became the first director of the new establishment.

I close my magazine and pick up the newspaper. What do I read? Kew’s budget has been cut again. The world’s most important botanical garden is to be cut down to size. They have already laid off fifty scientists. They may have to be closed to the public out of season. And London is to have a new public garden – on a windswept bridge, of all places, crossing the Thames from the Temple to the South Bank. At a cost of £175 million. Putting two and two together still seems to be too difficult.

How much more room for progress is there in photographing gardens? Books like The English Country House Garden, out at Christmas, by George Plumptre with photographs by Marcus Harpur, seem to have perfected the dream scenario of consummate skill and taste in design and execution – first in gardening, then in photography. They create a never-never land of perfect flowers, perfect viewpoints on perfect designs in perfect weather. Rough winds come nowhere near.

Harpur is the inheritor of a strong tradition, son of Jerry Harpur, whose books encompass for more than the usual round of English gardens. He may have been the first to show us great gardens from all over the world. I once bumped into him in a lakeside garden high in the Andes.

His unglamorous roots were in Essex, following in turn in the steps of Harry Smith, whose garden picture library was the first resource of magazine editors in the 1960s and ’70s. In due course the archive was taken over by Anthony Huxley and Dick Robinson, the photographer who gave his own garden at Hyde Hall to the RHS.

Hyde Hall was a horse whose mouth needed careful scrutiny. The Robinsons’ garden was a triumph of hope over experience, an isolated hillock in the driest part of England, windswept, with no proper access, its views featureless except for pylons. It is unrecognisable today, after decades of RHS investment, but it was a bold move to take a stake in a part of England as unlike leafy Surrey as could be. Essex was not without its garden history: Ellen Wilmott of Warley Place, Beth Chatto at Elmstead Market, Audley End, the Gibberd Garden, Rivers nursery, Pemberton’s roses…. and dreams – the role of photography.

Where does garden photography go next? Technical perfection is in the bag. We would laugh, today, at the grimy images of only thirty years ago. Beyond the purely descriptive, perhaps? The Garden Museum is putting on a show of pictures by Rachel Warne called Faded Glory. proving the visual strength of neglected or abandoned gardens. (My favourite of all the photographs in my own book, The Principles of Gardening, was the opening page; Kenneth Scowen’s shot of an abandoned Edwardian Garden fountain in winter, overgrown (but just to the right degree) with long grass and thistles and old man’s beard.)

But the museum director, Christopher Woodward, has form when it comes to ruins. His own book, In Ruins (Chatto 2001), is a masterly evocation of what they say to us. Far more, perhaps, than straight edges and weedless borders. ‘When we contemplate ruins’, says Woodward, ‘we contemplate our own future’

I was surprised by my own excitement in the garden this morning. I’ve discovered over the years that it isn’t only plants that notice the days being a couple of minutes longer. It stirs human blood, too. Especially on a day of brilliant blue sky.

But the excitement came from a sudden rush of memory of all the things I’ve planted in the last year and shall enjoy in the coming one. Bulbs, of course, but mostly plants that have just ticked over as they are taking root and will really make their entrance in the months to come.

The previous year’s planting (our first) was quick to make a difference. My screening trellis on the end wall is a tangle of solanum, clematis, rose, jasmine and eccremocarpus. There is a big spring job waiting for me here, mostly in taming the marvellous white solanum. I have even warned people myself that this plant is a colonizer. 18 months in the ground here, in an almost undiggable corner under the sycamore, has given it a wingspan of something like 30 feet in our garden and our neighbour’s. Just now I noticed that a stray tentacle is still flowering (it’s freezing hard) in a potted standard of another solanaceous thing, Ipomea (or Acnistus) australe. Few shrubs have the honour of a pot here, but the blue bells of Ipomea have seduced me. (There is a shrub 12 feet across in the Chelsea Physick Garden).

The plants that haven’t yet really performed are a couple of climbing roses and the viticella clematises I look to to colour our trellises late in summer. It always seems a pity to do as the books say and chop them down just as they get a good purchase among the other climbers. One of the clematis (the potentially sumptuous C alba luxurians) and two roses have everything to prove. I discovered them totally suppressed, in a sort of coma, overwhelmed with ivy and hydrangeas.

One rose, fed and watered for a year now, still hasn’t flowered (though its reddish leaves look familiar). Of course the longer it takes the keener I am to know what it is and decide which way to point my thumb. Another one only took a few months to declare itself – and Iceberg can never be unwelcome.

There is anticipation all around: small brainwaves that haven’t yet crested. I planted a Daily Telegraph collection of three pulmonarias; they should be quick to show their colours (white and blue). Last year’s discovery, Salvia vitifolia, is snug under a compost duvet (for as long as I can keep the local cats away). A fox visits our unguarded front garden. If one scrambles over the trellis into the back one I shall not be happy. Nor can I understand why we tolerate these disgusting animals in cities at all.

I hung silver balls in our big front magnolia for Christmas. I see no reason to take them down before the velvet buds open and surround them with purple petals.

The last of the fallen leaves have gone in the bin. I spent this morning cutting down, raking and brushing up, tying in, shifting pots into winter quarters and generally battening down for winter. By lunchtime I could hardly recognise the place: plain surfaces where clutter had been accumulating all autumn.

Who said ‘A plain place near the eye gives it a kind of liberty it loves?’ Repton, I was going to say – only this time it was the less-quoted William Shenstone. In any case it’s true: the foreground of a view, or the part of the garden you first step into, should be open, tidy, free from obstructions.

But what does ‘should’ mean? Says Shenstone? Are there really any first principles of garden design – or for that matter any design – that determine its success or failure from the start?

I suspect most people would put tidiness high on the list. Or ‘order’, to give it a more lofty name. Palpable regularity is, after all, the basis of the French, Italian, Dutch…. anything but English (or oriental) garden design. Order for its own sake, though, can be less than satisfying: trite, even. Your mind (or mine, at least) looks for something more: an agenda. The easiest gardens to design are those with a clear function in mind. An orchard, a potager, an arboretum or a herb garden…anything with a recognisable label gives the design a starting point, a raison d’être beyond the mere decorating of space.

And here, in a little London yard? Perhaps I’m lucky not to have too much space to decorate. I might define this as an outdoor room for growing plants. Whatever I call it, it certainly looks better when it’s tidy.

Bean went live yesterday. Or to put it more precisely the online version of Bean’s Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles became available on your computer. Botanists, and especially dendrologists, have been saying simply ‘Bean’ for precisely 100 years; since William Jackson Bean (was he ‘Bill’ to his friends?) brought out his book with its eight-word title.

As Head of the Arboretum at Kew (and hence Tony Kirkham’s predecessor) he was well placed to list and describe his subjects, in a judicious blend of botany and sylvicultural experience. By the 1970s his work was in its 8th edition, expanded from two volumes to five as new trees were discovered or invented, botanists wrangled, cultural knowledge piled up and noteworthy specimens multiplied. It became clear that in the digital age no one was going to revise such an encyclopaedia in the time-honoured way involving mountains of paper in correspondence and proofs. If the work was to survive and be revisable it must be online.

The original publisher was John Murray (whose other authors included Austen, Byron, Conan Doyle, Charles Darwin and Sir Walter Scott). Sadly the Murray family sold the firm (still at its original home, 50 Albemarle Street) to Hodder Headline, which is now a subsidiary of Hachette – though still run by its founder, Tim Hely-Hutchinson). Tim H-H is also my publisher. I asked him if he saw any prospect of reviving Bean, and got the answer I expected.

Would he then, I asked, consider giving the rights to The International Dendrology Society (the I.D.S.) as a charitable body which could and would put the work online pro bono publico, and hopefully in due course keep it revised and up to date.

The answer was yes. Two years of concentrated work later the result is on your desk. I’m not going to roll the credits here, but two of the stars are John Grimshaw (whose guiding hand is visible in the lack of blunders in my own Trees) and Bill Hemsley, whose ingenious digits enable me to revise my Pocket Wine Book every year with no paper at all. Trees, by the way, to give it a shameless plug, is reprinted and back in the shops for Christmas. Please don’t compare it with Bean.

I have some generous readers. Just how generous I discovered a few years ago when I said that if anyone wanted to give me a Christmas present I would like a donation towards saving the gardens at Crarae. The National Trust for Scotland promptly received, among many others, an anonymous gift of well over £100,000. The target of £1,5 million was reached well before the April deadline.

For Christmas this year I’d like a donation to The Garden Museum. It is on the last lap of fund-raising for its essential and exciting development plan, which will establish Britain’s first garden design and manuscript archive at Lambeth, where my namesake Tradescant started England’s first museum, his ‘cabinet of curiosities’ – which in due course became the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

On the initiative of the director, Christopher Woodward, the Ashmolean is lending a chunk of the original Trad collection back to Lambeth. Christopher gamely did a sponsored swim from Oxford to London (eight punishing days in the Thames) to raise funds for it. The appeal is getting a matching Lottery Grant of £3.5 million, but £170,000 more has to be found by January. Please send my present to The Garden Museum.

They have just finished putting their overcoats on the trees in the Kyoto Garden. No tree in London ever needed to be dressed up for protection in winter, but in Japan it’s part of gardening ritual. Symbolically marking the seasons, picnicking under cherry blossom and marvelling at autumn maples, is something the Japanese do at table too. The ultimate Kaiseki banquet, a succession of tiny exquisite dishes, paints a picture of the garden and farm and seashore in each season in choreographed ingredients – served, traditionally, by girls in kimonos shuffling on their knees.

The tree-coats are made of barley-straw gathered into little skirts and jackets round trunks and lower branches, They complement the bamboo props and struts that provide – or pretend to provide – support to outstretched limbs.

What are practical measures in Japan, where heavy snow is normal, becomes pure affectation in this country. Yet how charming ritual can be. What can our country offer in this way? Stripes on the lawn?

I walk round the Kyoto Garden almost every day when I’m in London, loving its utter detachment from the world around. No wonder it is popular; I try to go early or late in the day, yet have never had it entirely to myself. At weekends there are sometimes queues to cross the stone bridge by the cascade; Kensington’s generous quota of exotic languages seems particularly well represented. But people-pressure is not unknown in Japan; a file of school children in uniform, following a flag, usually blocks every iconic garden view.

Indeed rumour has it that there are plans to double the size of ‘our’ garden to accommodate its fans. What frustrates the designer, I’m told (he visits every year or so from Japan) is not being able to grow proper moss in London. The stuff that turns my stonework green in winter doesn’t count. He’s even considering settling for Soleirolia soleirolii, or Mind-your-own-business, as a substitute.

I love just looking, eyes engaged, mind coasting. With a glass of wine, of course.

I never expected, when we moved from the country, to spend the same amount of time late at night sitting in tranquillity gazing into the garden. My chair is in a mere alcove compared with its country place, the garden not a cricket pitch long, but the sense of the day wound down is not so different. There is a bit more traffic to be heard and the sky is lit by electricity rather than stars, but my eyes find a parallel satisfaction in their urban surroundings – particularly, I now realise, in winter. Light and shade are less important; everything is dimly lit. But trees are distinctly gesticulating creatures, not just solid looming masses. Silhouettes and their details all have equal status. I can read plants and buildings better, undistracted by light.

I’ve always enjoyed the paintings of Keith Vaughan at the Royal Academy; a model sitting, usually bare, in the cool north light of his studio with its calculated clutter, big windows and the predictable patina of Victorian London outside. The early Victorian years remembered a Georgian rhythm of wall and window, a nice proportion of dark glass and white glazing bars. This is what I see, with the pale gable of my greenhouse (alias ‘grandpa’s shed’) outlined against the dark walls.

I was thinking of painting a Red Cross on the greenhouse door, but its role is really not so much A&E as R&R. Plants come in for respite and intimate attentions. As winter comes on I’m tempted to mitigate the falling temperature to keep the green in their cheeks: a false move; they must suffer the seasons too. Forty old-fashioned degrees (what’s that in Celsius? About 5′?) keeps the frost out. It also keeps the fan going and the air circulating. ‘Buoyant’ is the term I love.

I kept a tomato vine until the other day for the smell of its leaves. Now Fuchsia boliviana takes up almost all the wall space, with a few scarlet flowers up in the roof. Salvia x van houttei, cyclamen and an indefatigable primula are the other bright spots while we wait for bulbs and a veteran cymbidium we should have pensioned off when we moved house.