Holland Park (on a dull day)

I didn’t know, when we left our garden after 40 years in March last year, how much or how little I would miss it. Now I do, to my surprise: very little. I am far busier than I expected in our new little patch. What I didn’t expect, though, is quite how much pleasure I would get from other people’s. Perhaps ambitious gardeners (or those with big gardens) get too self-centred. Perhaps not only ambitious ones. I fear I used to tick off plants or other features in other people’s gardens if I either had them already or wished I did. No more.

I am avid for the front gardens I pass, nosey about back gardens and besotted with the two gardens I visit most often: Holland Park and Exbury.

Holland Park is easy: barely ten minutes walk up the road. “Park” barely does justice to an estate in the heart of London that includes formal gardens on the grand scale, one of England’s biggest and best Japanese gardens, a fine camellia collection, an arboretum with woodland walks, a summer opera house, a sports field for football and cricket and tennis, an outdoor gym, an ecology centre, and a substantial wild area, now full of bluebells, where trees can fall and be left to rot (and no doubt foxes multiply).

Holland Park’s tulips (40,000 were planted for this season) are rightly famous. Their colours gradually evolve from March to May, starting pale and pretty and intensifying to the gayest Joseph’s coat you can imagine. Every day sees a subtle shift in the palette.

As it does at Exbury, but on a scale no one can take in without repeated visits. This is now the third and fourth generation of the de Rothschild family to nurture their 200 acres on the Beaulieu River, where it flows into the Solent. In their maturity they are, I’m afraid, awesome. Every walk is a discovery and leaves my head full of questions. How I wish I knew rhododendrons better – but camellias, too, and magnolias, and all the exotic wonders the Rothschilds have collected.

My trick is to consult the website the day before I go. John Anderson, the head gardener, posts the plants not to be missed on his Noticeboard. Hardly a substitute for knowledge, I know – but a real help in acquiring some.

The drone of a lawnmower blends withe the burbling of a diesel on the harbour. The smell of mown grass mingles with the marine smell of mud and seaweed .I have temporary charge of a different kind of garden; a walled yard only fifty yards from the sea, where frost is unlikely but the wind is a constant presence. The walls give it more shelter than its neighbours, but the air is rarely as still as it is today. Indeed the pines and macrocarpas and holm oaks planted to shelter the seaside houses are in a sorry state: last winter’s gales burnt them a depressing brown. Some of the macrocarpas should be put out of their misery.

Most of the garden is paved, with slight changes of level giving raised beds. The planting is mostly low-growing, and today, with masses of aubrieta, pink and pale mauve, with iberis and a clump of lithospermum (lithodora if you prefer) starting its sharp sapphire stars, with forget me nots and a tiny pale pink geranium, it is almost convincing as a natural seaside happening. In a wall corner a choisya is entirely covered with its white flowers. Bluebells and borage have invaded a taller side border yet to flower. I have trained the long shoots of a rose, Madame Alfred Carrière, along the whole length of one side. A little wooden pergola will be nearly crushed by the end of summer under campsis, clematis, honeysuckle and a pink everlasting pea.

Last summer, with a meddlesome itch to add what the trade calls ‘accents’, I added a few plants of Verbena bonariensis and the silveriest of elaeagnus, a little multi-stemmed tree from Cedric Morris’s Suffolk garden. I remember how his walled garden had few vertical features. Irises of course – and this one little tree. Benton End was a much-travelled garden: Morris was always giving his plants away. His legacy lives on in glory at Beth Chatto’s. And much more modestly down here on the Solent.

I shall bungle the quote, I know, but Sir Kenneth Clark once wrote that there were two things all humanity is keen on. One is love; the other is a good view. He could easily have expanded his list, with pizza, a soft pillow, a crafty goal, a foot-tapping beat; but only love and a view made the cut. He was saying there is something pretty Pavlovian about views.

I agree. On family car journeys we used to laugh as the children chorused ‘Look at that view’ every time we came to the top of a hill. Little Kitty would have none of it and hid her eyes.

These are panoramas; views commanding broad sweeps of lower ground; Kent from the top of Wrotham hill for example, or The Isle of Dogs from Greenwich Observatory (the view K. Clark used as the coda to his Civilization; he was distressed by the first towers of Canary Wharf.) View-classification is clear on this point; the narrow focussed view, along, for instance, an avenue or a forest ride, is a vista. They both, it seems, give pretty universal pleasure – except to Kitty. But why?

I stumbled on an exhibition just now at The Royal Geographical Society which makes it all clear. Image, Instinct and Imagination: Landscape as Sign Language is the work of the nonagenarian geographer Jay Appleton and the photographer Simon Warner. They propound the theory of Prospect-Refuge, a system of thinking Appleton first proposed in his book The Experience of Landscape – and has since expanded in poems that are a cross between Hillaire Belloc and Milton’s Allegro.

A Prospect is a primitive need; to survey the surroundings to look for threats and opportunities. A Refuge is its counterpoint; a place to hide or shelter from dangers or bad weather. Our pleasure in landscapes can be traced back to these two instincts or urges – to which Appleton adds Hazards: water and fire, for example, from which we recoil.

The exhibition analyses a series of striking landscape photographs, explaining their appeal on an instinctive level – which transposes, with no wrench at all, to our appreciation of gardens. Now I understand why I have dreams of looking down from a wooded height onto a coastal scene – a bay stretching away in the sunlight. Branches frame the view. When I found myself in that precise situation, looking out over Cardigan Bay from the woods we now own above Caer Deon, out came my cheque book. Can there be no stronger proof that Appleton hits the nail on the head

Wisteria, knot, vinery and Tudor gate at Fulham Palace

When I recently listed some of the old country houses that still dot the course of the Thames to the west of London I forgot Fulham Palace. Locals know it well, down on the riverside by Putney Bridge and a good place to watch the start of the Boat Race. Garden historians are aware of it as the seat of the 17th century Bishop of London, Henry Compton, who steered his missionary priests in the New World towards unknown plants and introduced them into cultivation in his palace garden. All British colonies were under the spiritual oversight of the bishop; he benignly extended it to the vegetable world, too, with such memorable results as the first magnolia to be grown here, M. virginiana, the black walnut and Robinia pseudoacacia.

The manor of Fulham has an ecclesiastical history going back at least 1,300 years. I remember my mother talking about the palace and the then bishop, Winnington Ingram, without enthusiasm. Her parents used to take her as a child from Hampstead where they lived to tea with the bishop. The stuffy swaying carriage smelling of leather (grandpa still kept horses) had a predictable result. The bishop’s influence in Hampstead is still visible in the names of Winnington Road, Ingram Avenue, and indeed Bishop’s Avenue.

Sadly the grandeur of a palace and its gardens was too much for the shrinking Church of England. In 1973 the last bishop left and the estate was allowed to slip into decline. Thirty years of dithering seem to have followed: hence the obscurity. But now a renaissance is under way. The Fulham Palace Trust has secured the essential lottery grant and the plan is beginning to form. The palace is open to the public, and delightfully welcoming. At present there is a little exhibition about its history, and particularly that of its garden (the immediate spur for my visit).

It is not very clear what if any of the gardens survives from Bishop Compton’s time: sadly none of his original trees. Most of it is clearly 18th or19th century, including the garden walls and the splendid row of planes along the river walk. (It is hard to believe they were only planted in 1895: they are some of London sturdiest. They would support – and indeed deserve – some splendid tree-houses. A competition?) The moat (apparently England’s longest, once enclosing 36 acres) and the early Tudor garden gateway are the oldest things to be seen.

There is an excellent tearoom in the old drawing room, with French windows onto the lawn, and the walled garden is in active restoration with a fine knot, a restored vinery and – in a competitive field – one of London’s finest wisterias. Promising beds of vegetables manned by volunteers indicate a bright future, too.

To the Butchers’ Hall in Smithfield for the Spring Court lunch of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners. (The gardeners, it seems, have never had a hall of their own – nor even, disappointingly, a garden).

Not all of the medieval livery companies, though, have stayed close to their origins. The Almoners, Broderers, Cordwainers, Fanmakers, Furriers, Tallow Chandlers….. some sounding almost impossibly removed from modern life, have each found a related or equivalent and usually charitable role (coach makers, for example, in aerospace). The gardeners have had no need: they still do what it says on the tin.

At this crowded and celebratory lunch (with, I’m happy to say, lovely flowers and excellent veg) their Royal Master, the Earl of Wessex – royal masters of livery companies are far from common – presented awards to two most worthy married couples. Jody and Clare Scheckter, (he is better known in Formula One racing) for their organic farming on an industrial scale at Laverstoke in Hampshire, and Patrice and Hélène Fustier, the owners of the Château de Courson and its twice-yearly Journées des Plantes.

Courson is celebrating its 34th year. It started, I well remember, as a gardeners’ gathering on a domestic scale in the park of their 17th century château, 25 miles south of Paris down the autoroute that leads to Órléans. Simple stands went up on the grass, village fête style. Nurseries crowded pots of plants on the cobbles in the stable yard, many of them plants no one knew were available in France. In one corner of the stables a dealer displayed priceless old botany books in their rich leather bindings. Roy Lancaster was a guest to judge a competition.

It all seemed like a spontaneous celebration of the gardening passion we all thought France had lost. And since that time, sure enough, the green wellies and Range Rovers that became routine at Courson have carried the message all over the Hexagon (as France calls its mainland mass). In the ’80s the British were smug enough to think gardening ended at the Channel. The explosion of interest and skill that is so evident since must be credited, to a high degree, to the Fustiers, to Courson – and indeed its friendly neighbour the Château de St Jean de Beauregard, which now puts on a glorious harvest festival of a show each autumn.

Chelsea has a challenger in May, and both the October Shows far oushine the RHS’s dwindling autumn effort.

I think I’ve written before about our friend Dottie Ratcliff, whose practice in her serial tiny gardens is to leave nine inches between plants. Some of her fruit trees admittedly look a bit pinched, but they still bear good crops. The total effect is (shall we say?) bountiful.

I am modifying her plan. Nine inches is a bit tight for most shrubs, even in this little garden. On the other hand 4 1/2 inches seems about right for smaller herbaceous things. I’ve just put Iris sibirica ‘Flight of Butterflies’ nine inches from Verbena bonariensis with Geranium ‘Rozanne’ in between. When you see it in plan (as you do when you’re looking down on the bed you are planting) it looks much too crowded. But it’s the elevation rather than the plan that matters: the airspace the plants fill, rather than the space in the ground.

By interspersing your high-rise plants with lower ones you will see their profiles from top to bottom. Some, it is true, have little elegance near the ground, but irises, for example, and Japanese anemones, and the lanky V. bonariensis, and the trim-figured Campanula persicifolia, and foxgloves, and thalictrums and aquilegias and …and…. are at their best seen rising from other plants that creep or loll. Certainly the greedier roots will win, but plenty of food and water will keep them all happy for a season or two.

There is also the problem of shade, as one plant shades another – which is more acute in a garden like ours which is already deprived of light. I seek reassurance in the comfortable figure of Margery Fish, whose Gardening in the Shade is still beside my bed. The shade she talks about is largely from trees, of course, rather than London terraces and walls. (We have both varieties). Her plant lists, though, are up-lifting. Besides such obvious candidates as hellebores and pulmonarias she invites us to grow aquilegias, heucherellas, tellima grandiflora, practically any campanula, thalictrums, most geraniums, Japanese anemones, viola cornuta, daylilies, peonies, aconites, monardas, lobelias and phlox, which she says is ‘really happier in shade’. For grey leaves artemisias, she says, do well. Phlomis samia is well-known as a shade plant…. and on it goes. Her list, as you see, seems to include most perennials. The word to look for in her eloquent writing is ‘light’. Mrs Fish scatters it around to qualify ‘shade’ to a degree that might make a more timid soul than me nervous.

Notwithstanding, I shall try as many as I can fit in – and, of course, report on progress.

Whether last night’s frost, the first of the spring, did for the magnolias at Kew I don’t yet know, but I’m glad I went to see them last week. A sense of urgency, the feeling that the sunnier the weather, the greater the danger that the flowers will be clobbered, is what makes them so poignant. To expose so much bare flesh so early in the year is provocative.

The trees around are still wintry bare, buds swelling perhaps, or catkins, or showing a few tentative little leaves. Magnolias get their kit off. The star of the show last week was Magnolia kobus var. borealis, as its label describes it. If the label department were to keep up with shifting taxonomic opinion on every plant it could be a costly business. The status of kobus as a species, the legitimacy of the name (one botanist pointed out that the Japanese name is Kobushi), its relationship with M. stellata, M. salicifolia and M. x loebneri have all been disputed – and not always in the friendly spirit you would hope it would inspire.

Nor is it clear, at least to me, how the form labelled var. borealis fits in – except in being big and incredibly beautiful. Does it come from further north, as ‘borealis’ implies? There will be someone at Kew who knows. There might even be someone who remembers planting it and waiting, maybe twenty years, for it to flower.

I only hope the flowers weren’t fried by the frost last night.

I should have been ready for planting time, with all my plans laid and drawn up, plants ordered and a serene sense of purpose reigning in the garden. Then suddenly it’s here, a good month early, everything springing into growth, Rassells nursery over the road a jewel box of newly-arrived temptations. Plans? I’m borrowing their barrow to ferry over far more plants than I can reasonably fit in.

I’ve strained my back crouching in our restricted spaces, shoe-horning campanulas among anemones among veronicastrums among geraniums. Verbenas, too. Oh, and of course white foxgloves. I pounce on what looks like a clear space only to remember that’s where a hosta lies buried. Magnolia petals rain down on me as I dig (in this temperature the flowers won’t last long).

It’s the usual question: what shrub will grow in a droughty two-foot space at the foot of a sizable sycamore, tolerate its sooty drip, perfume the spring, flower in summer and flare up in autumn? I know the answer; accepting it is another matter, though.

What is surprising as I plant is how few roots I find. Surely the roses, hydrangeas, ivies, pileostegias, clematis, cotoneaster and the rest of the dense hamper on the walls forage far and wide for moisture. Often, within feet of a substantial climber, I find quite open and available soil. I quietly hope all the roots are next door.