Rozanne is happy anywhere

There have been just enough hot sunny days to remind me how much I prefer the shade to sitting, or walking, or doing almost anything in the sun. Shade, that is, with sun round the edges; pools of shade, as under trees, for example. Perhaps I am like a camera film that renders the shady foreground well enough., but can’t handle the light beyond. The image burns out.

The garden is close to monochrome at present, or rather we have so many flowers in the hard-to-name purpley-bluey-lavender-violet range that it looks as though I’ve done it on purpose. They take their cue, it seems, from The Geranium of the Millenium – for surely Rozanne has earned that title. You see her everywhere, as you did Verbena bonariensis a year or two ago – and still do in this garden. Come to that their colours are both in the same part of the spectrum.

So are the little viola that spent the winter in a pot indoors and gamely flowers on in her summer quarters, Campanula persicifolia, a catananche I’ve taken up with, Tulbaghia violacea, which I’m told is rather charmingly known as Society Garlic, and the best of all summer clematis, Perle d’Azur. The newer and smaller Prince Charles is a relatively feeble version of the same colour.

I can’t be held responsible for the roses that flourish high above the wall on our neighbour’s side. They make sure no colour scheme of ours will survive. But do I mind? No, I’m not a schemer at heart, and their Wars of the Roses red and white is a splendid statement. Then on our side there’s Iceberg, Gloire de Dijon, Alister Stella Gray – all our old favourites – and Bantry Bay (perhaps a mistake; pink looks like a compromise).

What astonishes me is how much water everything wants. Above all, of course, the pots. When we go to Wales for two weeks I shall rely entirely on a newly-acquired Aqua-Pod dripper system. The landlord of the corner pub nourishes a lurid display with it. But then he doesn’t take a fortnight off in Wales.

Tilia petiolaris, the weeping silver lime, in flower at Kew

To Kew yesterday for a linden-bath. That was the sensation as I walked in through the Victoria Gate. Straight ahead stands a big common lime, taller than a church and as wide as two, covered with its pale drooping flowers – and pumping out essence of mid-summer.

Turn left past the little temple and a huge weeping silver lime, Tilia petiolaris, is spreading its skirts in front of you, embalming the air. Then they come thick and fast, one species after another, a whole wood of limes, from a squatly spreading small-leaved one, Tilia cordata, like a green and yellow cushion, to soaring T. petiolaris, surely some of Kew’s tallest trees. It is a curious fact about this splendid species (or is it a cultivar?) that it habitually divides into two, or often three, major trunks about twenty feet from the ground. They grow vertically with mighty vigour to make a majestic tower, their leaf-stalks (the petioles of petiolaris) twisting to show the silver-white undersides of the leaves. At this moment its cascading flowers are just opening and beginning to shower down their scent. More limes stand ready for their later flowering, with the fringe-leafed T. henryana from China coming last.

I headed towards the river from this honey-scented zone, skirting the sickly smell of the sweet chestnuts, to visit the Mediterranean area with its perfectly authentic-looking olive grove in a patch of rock-strewn garrigue and the cork oak forest next to it. A huge cork oak lies prone amid citrus and seedling pines next to a signboard exerting us to protect this threatened habitat. Threatened, among other things, by the spread of screw-capped wine bottles and consequent decline in demand for corks.

I’m not sure about this. The demand for wine-corks has grown exponentially in the past thirty or forty years, since wine became the popular drink it is today. In the past a relatively small proportion was given the dignity of a cork and capsule. Cork had many other uses, from buoyancy aids to insulation to high heels, but any increase in oak-acreage due to wine must be pretty recent. It’s not screw caps we should blame, but substitutes for its other uses. Let’s have more cork-tiled floors – and thank goodness we’re seeing the decline of the corkscrew.

Trachelospermum jasminoides

Christopher Bailes, the about-to-retire curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden, reckons his plants are between four to six weeks ahead of schedule this summer. Who knows how much of the advance is due to the mild spring after a mild wet winter, and how much to the famously privileged site, surrounded by buildings on the banks of the Thames? The garden has, after all, England’s biggest and oldest olive tree, a serious cork oak and scores of plants considered tender everywhere else.

Hoheria sexstylosa grows here to substantial tree size, palm trees include Jubaea and Washingtonia, the proper working tobacco plant, Nicotiana tabacum, has become a shrub, now in full pink flower. There is a fruiting grapefruit tree and an avocado…no, this is no ordinary London garden. Yet walking there through Chelsea I realise what a hothouse London in general has become. The plant of the moment, to the point of monotony, is Trachelospermum jasminoides , scrambling up walls, dangling from trees, often in its variegated form, a pale presence in expensive front gardens it seems almost everywhere.

No wonder. It is decorative, vigorous and now apparently reliably hardy. It casts a sweet but not obvious jasminoid smell about it. It only needs a little help from a trellis to reach ten feet or more. The cream-variegated form is less vigorous and maybe less hardy, but given a bit of care can be smart as paint.

What else do we know from its family, the Apocynaceae? Periwinkle is perhaps best-known. Also mandevilla and nerium, the common oleander. A trachelospermum in periwinkle blue (or in oleander pink) would be popular.

An easy trio that works beautifully in London, scrambling along a fence, hiding the neighbours and giving us all pretty colours over the summer. Clematis ‘Perle d’Azur’, Solanum jasminoides ‘Alba’ and Eccremocarpus scaber ‘Tresco Gold’.

The solanum is a big commitment; a powerful plant that wanders everywhere. The clematis is no wimp, either, but flowers as reliably as any of it kind. The eccremocarpus is on a smaller scale, flimsy-looking but well able to keep up for a year or two. Then some hard pruning is needed.

Whether the last is truly ‘Tresco Gold’ I’m not sure; I grew it from seed from an old plant in another garden.

Gardening has its heydays, and this is one of them. Do you remember how pessimistic we were about it in the 1970s? Perhaps not, but Trad was there, editorialising in The Garden about the lack of gardeners and the money to pay them, and the desperate need to conserve what little was left of our gardening heritage. Worried groups were forming to protect gardens and plants (the NCCPG was Graham Thomas’s idea), and to rekindle the very notion of garden history. 1978 was when we published the first Conservation Issue of the RHS Journal. How much has changed.

These were my thoughts in two gardens I visited recently, thanks to the Garden Museum and its super-charged director, Christopher Woodward. The first is a mere ten years old, and still a bit of a secret, but already gives Dorset a rival to anything in the country-house tradition, So timeless are its enclosures, its alleys and its 17th century style Wilderness that I half expected to meet Sir Francis Bacon stooping to sniff the roses. The Flowery Mead is the hardest idiom to perfect. To achieve it in perfection you must master meadows and marry them to the world of roses and peonies. You must starve the grass and bring in a banquet of wildflowers…. It was reassuring to know that there was a human agency in all this; someone drove a lorry with half the haycrop of Great Dixter to Dorset and spread it in the incipient mead.

The second modern Eden was at Petworth House, where Caroline Egremont has reimagined the appropriately vast walled gardens of one of England’s palaces. It was the setting for the museum’s second Garden Literary Festival. The first, at Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith’s garden near St Alban’s last year, was blessed with perfect June days – and so was the second. The pretty little marquees were called on only for shade from the sun of the longest day.

When you enter a garden through an orchard of apple trees smothered in roses that give them a second flowering, to follow long alleys of roses blending with clematis, to discover a dozen garden rooms of extraordinary variety, the ‘70s might never have happened. Gardeners have all the skills again. Everything seems possible. You marvel that anyone’s sense of scale and colour and texture can keep you keyed up, breathless for more. I’m afraid you can even start to take for granted the craftsmanship that realizes such ambitious plans. It all seems to be a dream. And the deer are gathering for the sunset over the lake. And 200 years ago Turner was here, painting this precise scene…. Yes, you can be carried away.

The talk that inspired me most, among a dozen teasing out the tangled themes of gardening and writers, and painters and their gardens, was Tom Stuart-Smith’s revelations of how a great designer plans his work. The interaction of place and personality (clients can be indecisive – or cussed), finding a graphic link between them that anchors the site, the values of contrast, concentration, contradiction. counterpoint, complexity, concealment… all sound very abstract. In this mesmerizing half-hour they seemed the necessary keys of creation. Gardening has brought out genius again, as it did when Kent and Brown and Repton were driving ideas.

Sir Roy Strong entertained the Hay Festival with an account (characteristically dramatised) of how radically he has remade his Hereford garden, The Laskett, since his wife and gardening partner, Julia Trevelyan Oman, died in 2003. Their original plantings of the 1970s succeeded splendidly in creating a formal garden in a hurry. It celebrated their joint achievements and affections with disarming enthusiasm in a series of theatrical set pieces. The Strongs planted with gusto, not quite at the nine-inch spacing of my friend Dottie Ratcliff, but looking for dramatic effects – which they achieved in record time. This was before the full menace of the now-notorious Leyland cypress was well known.

We were faced with some of the same dilemmas at Saling Hall (where I remember Roy saying, as we sat under an apple tree after supper, one evening in 1972, ‘You know, Hugh, I think you’re on to something with this gardening lark’). But wewere far less bold. It was a predecessor’s cypresses (Lawson in those days, before Leylands) that we cut down. We never got round to many necessary radical revisions of our own planting plans – even when in one case they manifestly failed. The alley of Irish Junipers that at one point was our pride and joy died bit by bit of phytophthora. It’s subtle colour and texture was simply irreplaceable, so the walled garden lost its spine. Our policy on the rest was make do and mend, knowing that nature would take its toll unpredictably, and reacting ad hoc when a tree blew down or honey fungus claimed another victim. Visitors’ eyes were, I’m sure, less forgiving than our own.

What gardener does have a Plan B – Roy Strong apart?

I suppose the best thing to do with my greenhouse in summer would be to empty it and close it down. The only plants that would benefit from it now are the tomatoes; everything else would be just as happy outdoors until autumn. I’m far from convinced that the irrigated plunge bed I’ve continued is up to its job while I’m away – which of course I shouldn’t be. It depends on a leaky pipe buried in sand on a very thin layer of drainage: a delicate balance that certainly couldn’t handle a heat wave through glass – even with the shading at its maximum.

My main concern is my not-quite-rooted cuttings (and indeed my rooted ones). They’ll go in the shade outside (there’s lots of that) with a sprinkler once a day – like the rest of the garden. It still comes as a shock how much irrigation a London garden needs. We have at least twenty little rotating plastic sprinklers branched off a pipe around the walls. Each one covers a radius of two to three feet. It is near the walls, of course, that most water is needed, where the roots of the many and various climbers are concentrated. When we’re away for more than a day or two all the pots have to be clustered together with their own sprinkler (some with saucers; some without). You can tell I’m not convinced it’s all going to work. There will be casualities.

Plants could be almost as demanding as pets if you let them. Freedom and gardening are not natural partners.

Gentiana verna at 2,000 metres. Blue is the hardest colour to reproduce, but this is not far off the truth.

Why is there no one in the Alps in June? It’s the time when the cattle make their lumbering way up to the high pastures, their heavy bells clanking. The snow is lying in disjointed drifts where the sun is slow to touch it. Everywhere else is a tapestry of the most jewel-like of flowers, embroidering the lush new verdure of the middle slopes or piercing the brown grass above the tree line, where mats of rhododendron and juniper are stirring in their winter sleep.

First come tiny ivory crocuses and the fretted furry leaves of the pulsatillas, Anemone sulfurea, soon followed by its wide, candid, creamy flowers. Gentians are already flowering: the deep violet trumpets of G. clusii and the brilliant sapphire stars of G. verna. There are violets with big flat faces, a little pink thlaspi in the middle of a stream, small purple orchids, soldanellas with pale violet fringes, lavender-coloured centaurea, primulas very like cowslips, shiny yellow globes of trollius, starry arabis, harebells, pale thrift, miniature alchemillas, many spurges and the rich blue heads of a rampion, Phytheuma orbiculare, which I took for a very special clover in the long grass – and which I now learn is an emblem of Sussex.

All these on a single ramble in the Val d’Anniviers in search of what is said to he the most splendid old larch in the Alps. Alpines are not my natural territory. I expect all my plant names have been superseded long ago; my authority is Correvon’s beautiful Alpine Flora of 1911 and its art deco botanical paintings by Philippe Robert.

We found the larches, cohabiting with equally tall and craggy Arolla pines, perhaps twelve feet round and sixty or seventy high, punished by blizzards but waking fresh in the chilly sunshine. The tender first larch leaves springing from old fissured brown wood are as touching and inspirational as the most exquisite of the emerging flowers.

Not a soul about, apart from some mountain bikers on terrifying trails. The hotels are nearly all shut; the skiing is over, the summer holidays still to come. Yet in the weeks between the flowers appearing and the cows eating them (or have the cows the perspecuity to steer around their favourites to leave them to seed?) the sun is bright, the air still cool enough for long walks, the Alps are at their best.