A brochure worth a medal

“A younger look” we were promised in the show gardens at Chelsea this year. How we would recognise it I’m not sure. The look that struck me was a distinct taste for (indeed a heavy dependence on) the lightweight charmers of spring. Perhaps less (though not much less) use of white foxgloves, but complete abandonment, in some cases, to such wildlings as sweet rocket, buttercups, ferns, campion, alchemilla mollis, vetch, verbascums, various feathery umbelliferae. and almost universally Iris sibirica. The flowers were lightweight, but the supporting trees, it seemed to me, heavier and more numerous than ever. There was no questioning the charm of such stylized meadows, but where have the mainstream garden plants, the long-term stalwarts of the border, bred over centuries to be unlike wildlings as possible, disappeared to?

The answer in some cases is the marquee, where the specialists display their thoroughbreds. It was worth braving the throng for Hillier’s stand alone. Never was the Monument more monumental than in this bravura performance of tall trees, exceptional shrubs and witty variations on a dozen different colour schemes; Hillier’s 69th Gold Medal in a row. Trad’s own coveted Annual Medal ended up, after much debate, with Rickard’s bosky display of ferns, from trees down to microscopic beauties. The idea dawned, then and there, of turning the always-shady end of our garden into a fernery.

Perhaps not for display of plants, but certainly for its imagination and conceptual unity, Trad rated Alan Titchmarch’s Britain in Bloom garden as high as any. He managed to encapsulate, on a cramped triangle of a site, the British landscape from the highlands to the Scilly Isles (or was it Yorkshire to the Isle of Wight, Alan’s own trajectory?) A brook tinkling over a mossy stone wall flowed almost believably down to the sea, a beach and beach hut and the plants of summer sunshine. A tour de force.

And equally memorable, but moving too, was No Man’s Land, a First World War memorial in plants, designed by Charlotte Rowe for ABF, The Soldiers Charity. The descriptive booklet, with flower paintings by Irene Laschi, deserved a medal for the best piece of print offered to visitors – possibly ever.

Rhododendron augustinii at Cae Gwian, planted 15 years ago. The dim light is part of the point. So is sunlight

Just home from our first visit to the Welsh woods since the near-hurricane on Valentine’s Day. The funny thing is that trees never fall in predictable ways. There seems no reason in the mess of often criss-crossed trunks. I like the French forester’s term for it, ‘chablis’ – perhaps because it makes me think of a cool beaded glass of something on the green side of gold.

You’d expect most of the damage to be on the windward edge. Often it is scooped out of the middle of a plantation. Worse than the loss of trees is the muddy chaos where the harvesting machines have to shuffle to and fro bringing the timber out to the roads where lorries from the mills collect it (in 25 ton loads, not greatly appreciated by motorists on the narrow winding roads.) Happily there is a demand for the massive spruce logs,16 feet long. House-building must be picking up.

It rained all the weekend. But whoever said there is no such thing as bad weather; only the wrong clothes, had a point. Slipperiness is the main problem: you feel constantly in danger of falling over. Also rain on your camera lens – because curiously. I have an urge to take photos in the low light. Colours are saturated and the lack of shadows gives a different value to what you see.

Best of all were our blue rhododendrons, hovering over the bluebells under the pale green of beech and larch in fresh leaf. In the rain their purply blue took on a savage intensity, while in the distance they were insubstantial wraiths.

It was a poor weekend for the National Gardens Scheme. We were almost the only visitors in a garden in Dolgellau that deserves crowds. Craig y Finnon is the garden of a fine Victorian house restored by its plantsman owners, Jon and Shàn Leas. There is exquisite precision in their gardening, whether formal in box hedges or spreading among massive rocks where azaleas and alpines cohabit under splendid old trees with moss and ferns. Royal ferns sow themselves in the rocks and send up shoots like bishops’ crosiers. The black slate drive was filled with pink flowers falling with the rain from arching rhododendrons. It was a moving visit, seeming to encapsulate a century and a half of skill and devotion to the perfect plants for a dramatic site.

The existence of Hillier’s nurseries has always been a given in my gardening life. Of course I realised, when I began to collect trees in the early 1970s, that we were incredibly lucky to have a single source for almost any tree or shrub we had heard of. And what’s more a reliable one, whose plants actually corresponded to their labels. At one time I was ordering and receiving thirty or forty at a time, sometimes with apologetic little notes saying I might have to wait a year or two. They were so healthy, in the main, that one didn’t stop to think of the miracle of logistics involved, getting them together from several separate Hampshire fields. A story went that one customer telegramed ‘Plants arrived safely. Presume roots follow’ – but that must have been some other nursery.

Now I am thrilled to find that the Hillier history has just been published. Discussions about a possible writer had been going on for several years. In the event they have found the ideal person – in the bosom of the family. Jean Hillier is Sir Harold’s daughter-in-law, married to his younger son Robert. She has produced as attractive a family company history as I have ever seen, gleaned from archives going back beyond the date of founding, 1864, and packed with family lore, records of rare plants, ingenious propagators, the constant hunt for more nursery land and above all the extraordinary personality of the third Hillier inheritor, Harold, surely the greatest and most driven plantsman of the 20th century.I was starting work on my first tree book in 1972, luckily for me at the very moment when Hillier’s Manual appeared. Is there a gardener who hasn’t handled this astonishing production? Does any other craft or trade have a catalogue/bible like this? It is effectively Harold Hillier’s life’s work between covers, put there, largely, by an extraordinary young man, Roy Lancaster. My original dog-eared copy, bought the year we moved into Saling Hall, sits where it always has, within reach of my desk – now with its current, more grown-up successor smartly bound by its side.

Jean Hillier weaves many of the threads of a century and a half of garden history into a story that kept me engrossed over a whole weekend. The climax, in one sense, comes when Harold’s dream of a complete arboretum open to the public comes true. In 1977 Hampshire County Council, after some persuasion, accepts the ownership, and the responsibility. It is a time I remember vividly: negotiations were iffy. I had the idea (this is not in the book) of introducing another great Hampshireman, John Arlott, into the discussion. Arlott was of course the voice of cricket, with a vast audience for his Hampshire bur. He was also mad about wine, a keen collector and the wine correspondent of The Guardian. He lived at Alresford. I asked him over lunch one day if he was keen on trees. ‘Love ’em ‘ he said. A few weeks later we went to lunch together to Jermyns. He and Harold found they had more in common than you might think. I don’t know what John said to whom at the county council, but it can have done no harm.

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.