My name is Sundevilla

Sundevilla? – what’s that? It was the bedding plant of choice all over South West France this summer, in tubs and beds, pots and planters, in sun or shade – everywhere. It’s not surprisng; this variety/cross/I’m not sure what of Mandevilla is a glorious sight; a bright shining scarlet, profuse and irresistibly cheerful. Where it’s listed it is sometimes described as Mandevilla ‘Sundeville Red’, sometimes as a Dipladenia. Being of that bloodline it makes a good tight clump in year one, then in year two puts out its climbing shoots. If you don’t want a climber you take cuttings and start again.

I gather there may be a Sundaville Hotel in Miami Beach. Sun..de.. Ville…. who knows? Whatever the story, we may be getting sick of it in a year or two.

Silvery significance; hellfire colours; a stroll in Holland Park

Home to London after almost three weeks in France with very little change in the weather. A wet and stormy August had most wine-growers worried; then September restored their spirits with thirty days of sunshine. Bordeaux had most of its Merlot picked by the time October’s rain arrived; the later-ripening Cabernets were more touch and go. But after a disastrous harvest in 2013 the omens are pretty good. Perhaps, as one grower said with a smile, it will be the sort of vintage the English like.

Little change in the garden at home. The roses are all but over; R. mutabilis and Alister Stella Grey are the last, but pretty half-hearted; they have all lacked light and heat. The brightest thing in the garden is the almost embarrassingly prolific white Solanum laxum (or jasminoides). Common it may be, but its clusters of little five-petalled flowers have a way of reflecting the light that makes them the last sparkle in a darkling garden. Nerines have the same sort of crystalline reflective surface. The potato vine, to give it its sadly banal name, is one of those plants you must ponder before planting. It leaps in chaotic profusion up or along anything it can reach. In one year here it is almost thirty feet long; a day’s work to prune back, if anything else on the trellis is to get a look in next year.

One lovely surprise: a monster cyclamen tuber I bought at Rassell’s Nursery over a year ago has sprung into life. The great brown lump just fits into an eight-inch pan with half an inch to spare. Last autumn nothing happened. Had I planted it upside down? Left to its silent devices in a corner, rained on in due season, it has just sprouted a dozen perky flowers. I can’t wait for its crinkly canopy of leaves.

Holland Park, up the road, is in that quiet period of transition from early to full-on autumn. The pampas grass has a strange silvery significance beside a cherry with its leaves in the droop position turning pale orange. Mahonia x ‘Charity’ sticks up its opening yellow racemes with startling rigidity. The water in the Japanese pond has gone vodka-clear; the carp in their hellfire colours have become dramatic players in the peaceful scene.

Fifteen or 20 years ago I offered readers a prize for the funniest roundabout in France – or rather a photo of it. I had lots of entries. It was the time when the rondpoint was a fairly new way of dealing with a crossroads, and local authorities seized on it as a means of self-expression or advertising. Most involved gardening of some kind, some in a flower-show sort of spirit, some so garish that no lights could compete, some ambitiously advertising local industry – a vineyard or a jet fighter – and many intentionally or unintentionally very funny.

Now it’s gone beyond a joke. The old pleasures of motoring in France are threatened by such aggressive road-building that you can only approach most towns along miles of by-passes, through thickets of road-signs, along narrow lanes of tarmac between overbearing kerbs and bollards, over speed-humps steep enough to shake your head off. ‘Toutes Directions’ is the unhelpful universal signpost. If you can find ‘Centre Ville’ in the forest of instructions it leads you into a maze from which you despair of escaping. If you ever come across the historic market place its buildings are obliterated by more bossy signs and chaotically parked cars. There is no escape.

Worst of all, smaller and smaller towns are boosting their self-importance by aping big ones, installing rondpoints and hiding their ‘Ville Fleurie **’ boards with signs to their ‘Zones d’Activités’ (while activité ebbs from their ancient hearts). Hamlets aspiring to be villages are joining the game. My current prize-winner is a one-horse village in the Médoc we now call Arcins-Les-Quatre-Ralentisseurs. There is one speed-hump to greet you at each end of the short street and two outside the tiny mairie. You laugh so that you may not cry.

I must have been dozing to have missed my own fortieth birthday – or rather Trad’s. It happened in June: forty years since the first number of the Journal of the RHS reborn as The Garden.

I was in charge of the mag then, and looking for an editorial leader column. I decided to write it myself, but quasi-anonymously. I used the nom de plume of Tradescant because it seemed to be a name uniquely associated with gardening, without any current claimants. Icouldn’t find a soul answering to it in England or anywhere else.

I’m still at it. It grew into a habit I was (and am) loathe to shake off. There is an odd comfort in slipping into a persona which is oneself, but not quite. I put on Trad’s old tweed jacket, cuffs fraying and elbows patched, and record his current thoughts or preoccupations. Often they coincide with my own.

For many years we worked together in an ambitious garden of twelve country acres. We have gardened together in France, in Hampshire and Wales, and now have a thousand square feet of Kensington as our headquarters. We have the constant stimulus of visiting gardens and nurseries, of conversations and the library; there is never a lack of matter for gossip and reflection. Will Trad make it to fifty? Will he make it to forty one? We shall see.

The best performer: Fuchsia boliviana

An overnight storm had left the grass cool and green underfoot, but the heat of the low sun was oppressive. I followed the shadows of the trees until I got to the Round Pond; in the open, skirting the pond, the double glare of sky and reflection was dazzling, my face burning. Autumn has only begun in the horse chestnuts; the rest of Kensington and its gardens are still enjoying summer.

There is anticipation in our little garden now, but not much action. A second or third crop of roses is half-hearted, however welcome. The Central and South American salvias should be striking up now with their paintbox colours; I fear they miss the sunshine under our walls and trees. S. uliginosa is too tall and floppy; much as I love its tiny Cambridge-blue flowers, they hardly justify such a leggy plant. S. vitifolia, from Mexico, looks fine with its pale furry-soft leaves; its branching flowerspikes are just giving glimpses of its sapphire blue. And as for our tomatoes, whatever the temperature in its greenhouse, they need more sunlight. They are still only reluctantly beginning to ripen. With Gardener’s Delight doing best. I shan’t bother with the yellow varieties again; they turn soft before (if ever) turning sweet. In fact the real bonus is the smell of the beautiful leaves, now scrambling high into the roof.

Curiosity is a curse in a gardener. You can never be tidy if you are curious. I always want to know what will happen next. Will a faded flower set seed? Can I grow the seed? How tall will this climber grow? What is that seedling in the paving? (I’ll have to leave it till I see its flowers). If your whole garden is a mass of mini-experiments it will never merit a photograph.

Successes and failures? At the end of a long summer there must be conclusions to be drawn. Tomatoes and salvias apart, almost everything could do with more light, too. Hydrangeas have done well, geraniums, phlox, Japanese anemones, campanulas, Thalictrum delavayii, the inevitable Verbena bonariensis all earn their keep.

The best performer, though, by far, is the redoubtable Fuchsia bohiviana. We brought it as a standard in a mere 8-inch pot from Saling Hall. It has grown to four times the size, added four feet to its span and recently three feet to its height, flowering vividly with its scarlet tassels of narrow bells all summer. Its fruit ripens, too, red berries turning black and (tolerably) edible. It propagates easily by either seed or cuttings. I shall have to chop off whole branches to squeeze it into the greenhouse for the winter – although I wonder if a plant this lusty wouldn’t survive if I just stuck it under the verandah.

That's Cap Ferrat across the bay

A new garden diversion: spotting a muster of mega-yachts in the harbour below; the bay of Beaulieu-sur-Mer. They must be assembling for the Monaco boat show next week: Madame Gu, a bright blue boat, sharp-pointed like a dart 325 feet long, RM Elegant, the very opposite of her name, Luna (377 feet, built for Roman Abramovitch), more like a huge tug whose massive aft deck apparently conceals a submarine, and the 155 feet Blush (does the owner?)

They lend a new meaning to the word “eye-catcher” as they glide into the bay and deploy their little navies of tenders and water-toys. Meanwhile the tiny flotilla of children’s instruction dinghies is a bright flight of butterflies by the pink villa on Cap Ferrat still known as David Niven’s.

I have written before about our son-in-law’s Riviera garden. It has grown faster than I believed possible when I oversaw its design only six years ago. The vines forming a tunnel on the top terrace are heavy with grapes. The cypresses diligently clipped by Lucien and Pascale, the devoted part-time gardeners, are perfect green rockets, the orange and lemon trees thick with fruit, the cascading rosemary totally covering the stone walls, the oak-leaved hydrangeas sturdy bushes eight feet high and the agapanthus that fills the box-edged beds as thick as weeds standing upright in a stream. A persimmon tree we moved five times has its first tight globes of fruit. The climbing roses cover the pergola round the pool, and the palest blue Salvia uliginosa mixed with perovskia and deep pink Japanese anemones stands higher than my head. Iceberg (there is no better rose for a hot climate) has flowered and been cut back four times this year.

The secret is water. The micro climate here below the cliffs known as la Petite Afrique is absurdly benign. Warmth, sunshine and daily irrigation by driplines produces almost magical growth – as boar and badgers are well aware. Fencing them out is a challenge. Did Adam and Eve have this problem in their garden? We are not told. Is there a serpent? Only the crabgrass, the only grass that will grow here. Its snaking white shoots creep evilly into beds, through the stones of walls, anywhere they can reach. Now, if we could exorcise them…

Where Tradescant snipped and dug: the East Garden at Hatfield House

Horticulturists are now on a par with accountants and surveyors, loss-adjusters and legal executives. It seems an odd ambition for a gardener, but the Institute of Horticulture received its Royal Charter yesterday in the wonderfully apt setting of Hatfield House.

John Tradescant must have known the Marble Hall where his employer’s successor, the Marchioness of Salisbury, unveiled the charter with its red Royal Seal. His own successors, the country’s senior gardeners, packed the hall in their scores. Then they went out to see one of England’s grandest and loveliest gardens in its late-summer glory.

I have known Hatfield well since the sixth Marquis and marchioness started a garden festival there in the 1980s. Things were deliciously informal in those days. The atmosphere was village fête with a bigger marquee. At the first festival, Lady Salisbury invited some friends to judge the exhibits, innocently unaware that the well-established RHS rules apply wherever gardeners compete.

I was among the amateur judges who spent hours over the vases and vegetables, dithering between golds for this and commendations for that. Our announcement of the winners, though, was met with a baffled silence. A delegation came to tell us that we’d got it all wrong. You don’t judge horticultural shows by personal preferences, by taste or by any yardstick except the rulebook. The agonizing was unnecessary: winners can be measured. And I have never been asked to judge anything since. No charter for me, I fear.

How the garden glowed yesterday, though, in the near-autumnal light. I have seen the topiary in the East Garden, the vast elaborate parterre below the terrace of the house, grow from new plants in the ’80s to solid maturity. Each of the eight big central beds is divided in four by a heraldic-looking star of yew, and the central alley leads between towering yew cylinders. There is room in the beds for tall roses, for huge tree peonies just taking on autumn colours, and for every late-season flower in the medley of warm colours that grows more meddled as autumn draws on. Here, I thought, is the quintessential English country house garden in all its nostalgic splendour, only 20 minutes from King’s Cross.

I’ll spare you all the noisy and dusty details, but our next-door neighbours’ house is being demolished, or most of it. Its Victorian elegance (if that’s not too strong word for the plasterwork and joinery of the 1840s), is going on the skip, to be replaced by the stark spaces of today’s fashion. Only the front and side walls are staying – and while they’ve got the roof off, why not dig a basement as well?

Noise and dust we can live with; worse is the worry that we’ll all fall into the hole, or if not actually fall, see scary cracks in our wall. Just over the road another end-of- terrace house like our neighbours’ moved enough to split its neighbour down the middle. Admittedly they had dug a two-storey basement to fit in a 14-metre swimming pool. (Will the whole house smell of chlorine?)

All this is, of course, ‘permitted development’. The government’s Party Wall Act doesn’t take account of the flimsiness of 19th century spec building. Builders use the cheapest materials they can get away with. Our previous London house, in Islington, was dated to October or November 1838; the evidence being that Baltic deal was used for the internal walls, then plastered over. Apparently there was a glut of deal in London docks that autumn.

If it weren’t for the walnut tree that shades our back garden there might be a basement under the next door garden as well. The law, though, is more protective of trees than of neighbours’ sensibilities. Wisteria is not a tree, says the law, so the massive one on the back wall – about to be demolished – has already gone on the skip. Developers have some mad ideas. Having rebuilt a house opposite (my goodness, what a Media Room they built) they hired a crane to lift five 25-foot cypresses over the roof into the back garden. Unfortunately the crane hit three parked cars, and they forgot to water the cypresses. Another crane, maybe, to lift the brown carcasses out again? And what will the Council say about removing big trees?