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.

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.