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.

Kew Gardens was only lightly populated early one morning last summer when I set off on a habitual circuit: turn right after the Victoria Gate, past the Palm House, through the rock garden, then left to follow the perimeter path to the rhododendron dell and on through the oak collection. The route takes you past the front of Kew Palace (a big name, I always think, for a fairly modest brick house, painted a powerful red, with rather awkward Dutch gables. A ‘palace’ only in being a former royal residence).

That morning there were two young women in long skirts and straw hats standing by the front door. ‘Won’t you walk in, sir?’ said one of them, to my surprise. I turned. Their clothes were a little more than quaint – but their welcome was warm. Walk in I did, to find the house newly decorated and furnished to evoke its most royal era, when it was home to King George III, Queen Charlotte and their fifteen children. The poor king, though, was in seclusion, suffering from porphyria. His physicians had forbidden him his knife and fork, fearing violence. It was an unhappy household.

Light has returned, though, in the house as it has been restored. The palace is celebrating the king’s recovery. The royal knife and fork are back on the table and the original kitchen, marvellously surviving in its original state in the next building, is preparing his favourite dinner: partridge with celery in a cream sauce.

It is a brilliant restoration, master-minded, I understand, by Dr. Lucy Worsley, the TV history presenter who is now curator of the five Historic Royal Palaces. The Queen has lent back to Kew the furniture that was there in Queen Charlotte’s day; the decorations, carpets and curtains are exactly reproduced. The royal silver teapot is beside her chair. The cramped conditions of a big family in a small house are very evident: two unmarried princesses had attic bedrooms like maids. And ghostly voices recall moments in the house’s history; very poignantly the Prince of Wales comforting his mother, dying in her bedroom.

It is a giant step beyond Son et Lumière, this intimate evocation of history. It adds a quite unexpected dimension to a visit to Kew. Perhaps one day we shall be able to follow the great directors, William Aiton and the Hookers, directing the planting of their trees.

I might have designed our little garden to be as big a contrast as possible with our neighbours’. I see them both from my study window on the top floor: ours is all paving, steps and geometry: next door, beyond a wall smothered with roses (never pruned, they sway six feet above it), with climbing hydrangeas, ivy and jasmine (J. polyanthum, already in flower in this mad weather).

Our neighbours seem to take the view that pruning is cruelty: long-matured shrubs of all kinds lean out from the walls to fill the long narrow space. Viburnum bodnantense is now keeping the jasmine company, pink with pink. What is slightly surreal is the immaculate lawn growing in this deep shade; a green carpet immaculately hoovered every week. From above, the result is utterly charming; a sort of country-rectory effect in 1,000 square feet. It makes our structured space, cramming in my greenhouse, wall beds, box hedges, a dozen big pots and three changes of level, look like a lot of effort. Which of course it is, and what we want.

I wrote last week about, among other things, the koi carp in Holland Park. My faithful Japanese correspondent loves giving me little supplementary briefings (and I love getting them). She says all ‘brocaded’ koi, the exquisitely coloured ones, are descended from a mutant common carp in the mountain village of Yamakoshi in Niigata prefecture. Carp was their source of protein in snowbound winters. Here by the Sea of Japan the average annual snowfall is 100 inches. Niigata, on the north coast of Honshu, grows more rice and brews more sake than any other of Japan’s 47 prefectures. It drinks more, too.

The staff gave Sir Clough this creature for his 90th birthday

The gardens at Portmeirion don’t usually get as much attention as the whole fantastic (a proper use of the wood) ‘village’. Christopher Hussey described the spirit of the place in Country Life as ‘ebullience, gaiety and joyous freakishness’. Its creator, Clough Williams-Ellis, who died in 1978 aged 95, carried his boyhood dream to its successful conclusion, seeing it solidly established as a resort like no other; a baroque pastel sketch of a village on the Italian Riviera, a mock Portofino with powerful Welsh characteristics on one of the loveliest and most sheltered spots on the coast. His guest-list in the ‘30s included most of the A-list of the day, from Bertrand Russell and G.B.Shaw to the inevitable Edward and Wallis.

We went last weekend and found the garden that encompasses the whole village in fine fettle. The whole estate has been gardened, off and on, for perhaps a hundred years, perhaps more. The typical Welsh coast woodlands, largely of oak, are full of the tender species only the west coast can grow, the legacy of a rhododendron fanatic called George Caton Haigh who inherited what is now the extremely comfortable hotel in the 1890s.

Sir Clough claimed or admitted that even he got lost in these exotic woods, that stretch out among granite crags and outcrops along the coast, their endless serpentine paths often blocked by massive plants. There are rhododendrons forty feet high, many of them ultra-rare: the maddeni varieties among them.

In and around the village, though, the gardens are more kempt than I have seen them for years. October is filled with hydrangeas, of course, in long tumbling hedges down the roads and along the seashore. Standard H. paniculatas are grandly formal in the central square among roses still in flower. Elsewhere the gardeners take full advantage of steep beds and crannies among the towering black rocks. Everywhere beds and rocky slopes show signs of interesting new planting, and the mulching is prodigious.

Lilies by Waitrose

There was a head-spinning moment last night (still balmy in November) when I opened the French windows from my tiny library to the verandah. I was caught between the sultry smell of lilies and the sharp scent of lemon-blossom. They mingled in the doorway, a whole Arabian Nights of exotic perfume, forcing fantasies into my brain. What, by the way, are the über-lilies that Waitrose sells these days? They last two weeks in water, twice as long as usual, and open their pale pink cartwheels of flowers six inches wide.

But the whole season has been surreal. Shirt-sleeves on a November night: what do plants make of it? My camera is full of anomalies: yellow bearded irises go rather well with the startling violet berries of a Callicarpa; not a combination you’d see in a flower show, I suspect. The only thing to do in the garden, while watching the slow-motion decay of salvias and verbenas, geraniums and anemones, is raking leaves. With no frosty nights, and very little wind, they are hanging on, crisp and brown, on our tall sycamore. When one breaks loose it falls importantly, self-consciously it seems, choosing a spot to catch in a branch or hit the paving with a smack.

November seems a long time to wait for a ripe tomato, but in the half-light of our greenhouse they have only just reached their proper sweetness. Gardener’s Delight is the only one I shall give room to next year. Pelargoniums stopped flowering a month ago: Salvia van Houttei is now the bright attraction, reaching long lax scarlet-tipped branches into the roof.

It has been the longest growing season in living memory. My diary records a ‘spring walk’ on January 25th, and practically no overcoat weather since. The gardening press is full of advice about wrapping tender plants for the winter, even pruning clematis, when everything is still in full cry. What advice should it give for balmy days in November?

Fergus Garnett in The Garden enumerates the tulips that, he says, live to flower another year. Tulip blight apart, I have found that many do, if not with the vigour of their first go round. My favourite ‘White Triumphator’ has played its part as a ghostly fringe for maybe ten years, thinning a bit but still striking. It was more challenged by bluebells in a mixed planting around the lovely golden Acer shirasawanum, dwindling by degrees as the bluebells thickened. But it was still flowering five years after planting. Perhaps lily-flowered tulips are good repeaters: Fergus praises the slim orange ‘Ballerina’; yellow ‘West Point’ has also gone on here for years and years. And the pale pink (with yellow inside) stoloniferous Tulipa saxatilis that my college dean, John Raven, collected in Crete forty years ago, comes up every April in a gradually-widening patch. His daughter Sarah must have caught the bug from her father.

The problem Fergus doesn’t mention is that bulbs in borders end up speared on your fork. He advises replenishing scatters or clumps with fresh bulbs; but how do you find the present incumbents? I remember that the ‘China Pink’ is among the euphorbias that make one of spring’s freshest exclamations. Then each exploratory prod with the fork provokes a squeal from another skewered tulip. ‘Tis a puzzlement.

It’s a letter I had dreaded coming: a statutory Plant Health Notice: our larches have caught Phytophthora ramorum and have to come down.

Larches are a major element in our Snowdonian woods, and after the oaks and beeches our favourite trees. Many acres were planted fifty years ago and are, in theory, ready for felling. Larches, though, if they are thinned to a wide spacing, so that their graceful high branches form only a thin canopy, grow on with quiet deliberation for a century, making more and more of their marvellous durable timber. With spruce there is a quite brief window where their trunks are the size the sawmill needs. Leave them longer and the butt gets middle-age spread; a huge log is too big for the mill and goes to waste.

Much of the larch was interplanted with beech from the start. Others I underplanted with Douglas fir as we thinned them over the years. But larches are also some of the most fertile trees; their seedlings are everywhere; pretty pale children of the forest. And we have continued to plant larch, mostly in a mixture with spruce and fir, often with pine and oak, over twenty years.

All of this is under threat. The plant health order says the diseased trees must be destroyed. Their needles are carrying Phytophthora spores. They carry on the wind or in drops of water; they remain on the ground after the lovely golden leaf-fall; the source of infection must go.

Our first question: which trees? They were spotted from a forestry helicopter, looking sick, then confirmed as infected by a pathologist on the ground. He didn’t mark them, though, so we can’t do the logical thing: fell their neighbours within a generous radius. The order says the whole forest compartment must go. That’s almost 25 acres: as though the trees know which compartment they are in. Indeed if the helicopter had taken a different route it might be another parcel.

They can either be felled or poisoned with chemicals. Either is allowed. Logic tells me that felling them and carrying them out of the woods almost guarantees spreading the disease, whereas using herbicides and leaving their carcasses standing at least attempts to contain the spores – even if it costs the (already reduced) value of the timber. Felling all the larches would also damage their neighbours, beech or Douglas and all the beautiful mixed population grown up over the years. As for eliminating the several successive generations of young larch: it would mean a scorched-earth operation.

The authorities don’t know what to do either. Last weekend we spent in the woods, watching the fleeting sunshine light one patch of golden needles, then another, across the hillsides.