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.

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.