Some veterans persist

Each year we try to time a visit to our Welsh woods to see the bluebells in their glory – hopefully in concert with the blue rhododendron augustinii we have infiltrated among the beeches. Last weekend was almost the bluebell climax; they still had a little way to go. The rhododendrons, on the other hand, seem to be better at time-keeping: they were perhaps a week past their peak. We call them blue, but the colour of French lavender is a closer match.

The Snowdonia spring, our neighbours tell us, is three weeks late, or (seeing it in a positive light) three weeks longer than usual this year. It is the most beautiful ever : the sky is azure, the opening leaves of oak and beech olive, russet and that most tender green, scarcely shade the woodland floor where bluebells in millions and clumps of primroses compete with the fresh fronds of ferns. In damper shade the little white stars of wood sorrel are like timid wood anemones. Locals say there is a relationship between wood sorrel and copper – which rings a bell at Cae Gwian: a projected gold mine here in the 1840s (we still use the old grey stone building) turned out to hold nothing but copper after all. What flowers would gold has favoured?

The next valley to ours, running north-south down to the estuary of the Afon Mawdach, has been bought by the Woodland Trust. Its name is Cwm Mynach, the valley of the monks (of the Cistercian Cymer Abbey at Dolgellau).Its secluded meadows, hemmed in almost completely by steep hills and dominated by the cliffs of Diffwys, a 2000-footer, must have been some of the loveliest in Wales before the foresters arrived. The Woodland Trust is dedicated to restoring the ancient oak woodland now brutally invaded by conifers. They planted spruce, larch, douglas fir and the hideous (and useless) lodgepole pine under the oaks with the object of shading them to death. Often they succeeded, but veteran oaks still persist, and in the remaining open meadows show how magnificent such sessile oaks can be.

We started the rescue and restoration of our own oakwoods at Cae Gwian nearly 20 years ago now. It’s a long job, but hugely rewarding.

I was nervous about going back to Saling Hall. Our successor there is a man of action, and I knew he would waste no time before tackling his new project. But what I saw when I went back last week astonished me – and made me realise how long I had let things drift.

Judy and I had often talked about felling the long file of Lombardy poplars that flanked the front of the house, memorable trees (they were planted in the 1930s) that contained the front courtyard, separating it visually from the churchyard next door.

Last week they had gone. A loader was shifting their immense logs onto a pile bigger than a bus. The sense of light and air around the pink brick façade of the house was extraordinary. The rather gloomy presence of the towering trees was replaced by the broad green dome of a wild service tree I planted in the churchyard in 1973, looking in perfect harmony with the grey flint and gothic windows of the church. It was our predecessor, Lady Carlyle, who wanted to hide the churchyard from the bedroom window (so we were told). Her poplars had gradually become the main feature – and to see them gone gave me a gush of relief, delight…. feelings I could have experienced years ago if I had been more resolute.

‘The axe is my pencil’ said Humfry Repton. Knowing when to fell trees is as vital as knowing which ones to plant.

Not only the poplars are gone. Boring Lawson cypresses I should have condemned twenty years ago (but didn’t, on the pretext that there were shelter from the cold east wind) are there no more. Old pollard bat willows have gone from the moat (I’m not so convinced about these); a dozen old friends – or at least acquaintances – are piles of firewood. There is less muddle, and less mystery too. Over the years our gardens create their own untouchable auras. Nostalgia feeds on inertia and vice versa. Seeing radical change, and knowing it was necessary, is exciting, surprisingly emotional but hugely positive.

It did well in the heats

Of all plants perhaps the wisteria looks most obviously pregnant before it bursts its buds. Just now the competition is fierce among the countless wisterias of Kensington. There are veterans bending railings and wrenching down-pipes,  infants reaching wildly for their first grip, and dozens of perfectly-pruned, proudly, displayed specimens adorning the fronts of terrace houses. Teamwork has done wonders. Just round the corner three householders evidently work on their marvellous plant together. Its gnarled spurs, now starting to dribble their purple down the masonr, cover sixty or seventy feet of façade.

What about a wisteria championship? Who would like to organise local and regional heats, with points for size, coverage, tidiness, colour, and above all number of tassels? Just a London one, perhaps, to start with. I can see The Evening Standard under its feisty Russian proprietor making a go of it.

Size is not everything. The world’s biggest is apparently in California and covers an acre of ground. In the forests around Kyoto I have seen the tree canopy across a valley mauve with wisteria here, mauve with paulownia there. No, this is not that sort of contest; more a concours d’elegance. The time to start is now and the place, judging by what I can see from the café on the corner, London W8.

To Strawberry Hill to see the progress of the restoration of Horace Walpole’s riverside summer house. Is any house more famous and so little known? The reverend fathers who took care of it for so long loved it dearly and defended it well, but they had no money to restore its glories. Now some inspired fund-raising, boosted by a handsome Heritage grant, has set the wheels in motion. The results, sticking as faithfully as possible to Walpole’s plans, tell us almost as much about him as reading his irresistible letters.

Riverside, alas, the garden is no more, although the river has not gone away. The 200 yards between Walpole’s raised terrace walk and the Thames have inevitably been filled with houses. Of the 40-odd acres of garden and park, originally in open countryside, some four remain. We know enough about Walpole’s planting to reproduce much of it: young lime trees in serried rows already begin to form the

patte d’oie whose alleys lead to his favourite bay window. One oak survives from Walpole’s time on the terrace walk. More trees serve to screen the college buildings that could easily be uncomfortably close neighbours.

He achieved a truly wonderful deep brilliant guardsman red with a wall-covering of silk mixed with the wool of a particular Cumbrian breed of sheep. The wool is so springy that even in a weave there are no reflecting surfaces. The scarlet in unremitting purity has no highlights to help your eye to focus. Your gaze buries itself in pure colour.

All this red is set off by intricate gilding: a throne-room could hardly be more dazzling – and there are more intimate rooms where gilding traces a sort of Medieval allegro above your head.

There is not yet much furniture, nor very many books in Walpole’s famous library. The greatest want, though, I felt, as we explored, was the voice of the man himself. Perhaps an actor with a suitably camp voice could pronounce Walpole’s commentary as he opened each door to reveal his latest jeu d’esprit.

“Gloomth” was famously one of the effects Walpole aimed to create. He loved to pass from gloomth to brilliance. Where you do, from the grey Gothic corridors to the long gallery upstairs, you blink – just as he intended.

There are cars circulating in London at the moment scattering petals as they go from the accumulation on their roofs. The odds are they come from Kensington. The Royal Borough is blossom-crazy, with sometimes spectacular, sometimes frankly garish results. I hadn’t realised, I confess, before it became my borough, what an arboretum of street trees it contains, or what a show they make in April and May.

The theme tree in our street is our native double white cherry,  Prunus Avium ‘Plena’. It was one of our favourite trees at Saling, a sumptuous white cloud in April and as prettily motley as cherries get in autumn. There must be forty in the street here, ranging from craggy old veterans to novices only planted last year. The disadvantage of cherries in pavements is the way their roots emerge from the ground as writhing monsters – as gardeners know only too well.

I wrote a while ago about the ludicrous planting of the Avenue de Champagne, that noble address in Epernay, as an arboretum. When local authorities hire enthusiasts, people who love trees too much, I fear this is the result.

When I first saw the bare weeping tree in our neighbour’s garden I took it for another cherry. Now it is in leaf I am thrilled to see it is the exceedingly beautiful and rather rare weeping Katsura, Cercidiphyllum japonicum “Pendulum” – so pendulous, indeed, that its branches would reach the ground without judicious pruning. Passers-by walk under a beautiful green parasol over the pavement. Its little heart-shaped leaves are now a brilliant tender green. In autumn it will turn everything from cream to scarlet – and the street will have that warm sweet elusive scent of strawberry jam.

There are some almost-avenues in neighbouring streets, with the trees correctly uniform on both sides. Ours, though, is a bit of a muddle. There are two old planes, a couple of limes, two hornbeams, a scattering of the default street tree today, Pyrus “Chanticleer”, and (horror) what looks very like the dreadful Prunus “Amanogawa”, that pink scarecrow from Japan.

Recorded history divides naturally into eras that can be defined by how the recording happened.  For millennia memory was alone. Memory was made redundant (or at least optional) by writing, later supplemented by illustration. Illustration became cheaper and more available with engraving.

Then, barely two hundred years ago, came photography. We have seen the participants in, for example, the Crimean War just as they saw each other.  By the end of the 19th century came the movie; we are fully acquainted with the (rather jerky) movements of our forebears. Then speed becomes the essence of communication: in increasingly rapid succession we have the Telex and its relatives, then move on to the fax machine.

If I/we thought the fax was a lasting record of our communications we were wrong.  I I have just been sorting and filing my correspondence of 50-odd years. I had to be drastic. I read or skimmed everything I had filed over the half-century, bent on keeping 20% at most. When I came to the fax years, though, there were no decisions to take: the pages were faded to blankness; nothing was left.

So many of us had abandoned pen and paper already when the email arrived. With it the succeeding eras of communication reached a precipice. Most of what passes between us now whizzes off into the ether…. What is it? Where is it? Is there any permanent record at all, anywhere, of the thoughts and messages that link most of us today?

Our new house is entirely surrounded by trees. We haven’t seen it in summer yet, but as spring arrives I am starting to realise that the delicate curtains of twigs and branches have only one meaning: leaves will blot out any sight of the London around us.

It certainly wasn’t my intention, tree-crazy as I am. Most trees are best seen at a little distance, not in your face. Our front yard is completely filled and canopied over by a pink Magnolia soulangeana, just now in full flower and, between you and me, really rather flashy. The neighbour’s is

similarly full of a weeping Japanese cherry. In the street  outside stands one of a row of extremely vigorous native cherries (an odd choice, surely, for a street tree). The houses opposite will disappear for seven or eight months of the year.

At the back one neighbour to our 18-foot-wide garden has a flourishing walnut, the other a tall bay tree, and we boast a magnificent specimen of that bane of London gardeners, a sycamore, reputedly a hundred years old and definitely a fixture. Its wonderfully scaly trunk is six or seven feet round and the branches, not improved in elegance by constant lopping, blot out the next houses and what’s left of the sky.

So it’s gardening in the shade. Margery Fish, here I come.

To Tuscany, and my brother’s garden in the hills above Argentario, in the hope of a preview of spring. By April the legendary lilac-scented nirvana should be up and running Not this year – or not yet. The trees are bare, the furrows full of rain, and the wind is cold. There are touches of brilliant green on the elm and field maple but the oaks are not even fattening their buds. I hoped for irises; not yet.

Only the hedgerows and ditches are coming alive with wood anemones in dense clusters or desultory sprinkles, mainly white, then suddenly predominantly blue. The occasional one is even pink: a Guardian reader? Cyclamen are putting their heads up to look tentatively around. Here and there sudden dark blue dot marks a grape hyacinth breaking cover.

In the garden rosemary blue is the one celebratory colour at this time of year. You could take it for ceanothus in the distance, in tone and

volume, with some bushes, particularly the common trailing kind, almost matching the periwinkle creeping under it. Others are merely the colour of the sky where you can just see a patch of blue dimly through the low cloud.

I have sometimes picked all the blue flowers in sight and laid them out in line to reconcile them with the accepted terms. It never really works. The borage is just opening, startlingly bright blue, but which? The Italian for blue, of course, is ‘azzurro’. What is azure in English? The sky? Not this one.

There is a sprinkling of Honesty, a dowdy magenta, and a deadnettle with long bright white flower-tubes. Overall, though, it is the white of laurustinus that shows up in gardens and nearby where it overspills into the countryside. Its sheer mass is important – but I think of its dreary green and catty smell in summer and feel less exhilarated.

We are perched high here, at 1700 feet. Forty minutes’ drive away, at Porto Santo Stefano, the lilac is in full swing and the buds of the Judas trees are opening. Pink? Purple? – or the colour Goethe christened magenta? He called it the eighth colour, between violet and red, linking the two ends of the rainbow.