” Nothing is a better lesson in the knowledge of plants than to sit down in front of them, and handle them and look them over just as carefully as possible; and in no way can such study be more pleasantly or conveniently carried on than by taking a light seat to the rock-wall and giving plenty of time to each kind of little plant, examining it closely and

asking oneself, and it, why this and why that. Especially if the first glance shows two tufts, one with a better appearance than the other; not to stir from the place until one has found out why and how it is done, and all about it. Of course a friend who has already gone through it all can help on the lesson more quickly, but I doubt whether it is not best to do it all for oneself.”

Take a really good look. Has the case ever been more clearly put?

What is the difference between an artist and an illustrator? There must be one, because practitioners classify themselves in one category or the other. Of course there are artists who couldn’t illustrate (a book, let’s say) to save their lives, and illustrators whose work will never be called art. But in the middle ground there seem to me to be fine artists who are classified as ‘mere’ illustrators, suggesting that their calling is in some way inferior. So what is the difference, and which artist (or illustrator) am I thinking of?

I love the work of Stanley (‘S.R.’) Badmin. He portrayed the English countryside in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s with a precision and sympathy that made him, in the best sense, popular. In the days of their enlightenment Shell commissioned him to illustrate their marvellous county guides. Many of us learned to see the country through his eyes: particularly the trees. Has anyone understood

and recorded the tracery of winter trees, or placed them in context, with such skill?

Does this make him a great artist? The orthodoxy of today insists that an artist should trouble us, excite our consciousness about something beyond mere appreciation of the physical world, or at least make us aware of that old standby the human condition. Art, as now defined, must induce strong reactions. Any reaction will do, including disgust. Nor does the medium matter: light bulbs are fine; so are turds. Motive, in other words, outweighs competency – by such a margin that mere skill with materials is counted against the protagonist.

There must, therefore, be a new category for people who represent what they observe with skill, care,  even inspiration – but don’t have pretensions to deeper, or less coherent, meaning. Disturbing their viewers  is not their intention. Perhaps illustrators is the term for them. And for great ‘illustrators’, whose work is beyond mere competence, who are excited or inspired to dare to go further and find or create new convergences of ideas? We used to say ‘artists’.

Does this cover it? Illustration stops at a safe point, within our expectations and comprehension. Art finds another dimension expressible only in the meeting of the medium and the subject. When S.R. Badmin drew a tree he gave his pencil his understanding of growth. What David Hockney does is not categorically different.

Who was right: the person who said ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’ or the one who said ‘I prefer the radio: the pictures are better’?

I like books with lots of words in them: page after page of grey matter. Books like the radio rather than the telly. Picture books (I’m thinking of garden picture books) only half-occupy my mind. I am asked to admire one perfect garden scene after another; the captions are rarely enough even to bring me into  real contact with the scene, let alone profound or exploratory. Of course there are

exceptions, when the author has thought through the whole process, using words and pictures together to communicate and explain, but they are rare. What do we call books that are too good for the coffee-table?

I have just put down one of them: Hugh Cavendish’s A Time to

Plant, about the redesign of the über-Victorian garden at Holker Hall in Cumbria. The Cavendishes (Grania is a wonderful photographer) have been working on the design and planting for nearly forty years. Perhaps my sympathy with them relates to the fact that forty-odd years is the time we have spent gardening at Saling.The book is simply the logical outcome: time to explain and invite your reaction. A serious and successful match of words and pictures. Should I see it as a challenge?

There is no light meter more sensitive than a leaf. Barely two weeks since the shortest day, a mere twelve minutes between sunrise and sunset, and there are plants sitting up in their sleeping bags rubbing their eyes. Primroses always seem most alert; their leaves spring to attention as soon as any warmth confirms the change of season. And today, after a frosty night, the air has balm in it and the primroses are opening flowers.

Even if there is proper winter in the forecast a new year with moderate temperatures gives us a head start. Once the aconites have surfaced, the primroses started, the hellebores

pushed up their flower-stalks and the snowdrops their spearheads they won’t go back. Catkins are lengthening all around – most specacularly on Garrya elliptica and the proud pyramid of the Turkish hazel, where the first are already nine inches long.

We were given a new version of Daphne bholua when we went with the I.D.S. to Lake Maggiore three years ago; a form simply labelled ‘d’Aman’ (which is where it comes from). Planted from its tiny pot in the shelter of the big walnut tree on the kitchen lawn it has already reached seven feet, with short branches held close to its trunk – an arborescent look that promises heaven knows what eventual height. It started to flower with the first hellebores. They say you must be gentle with daphnes, and not cut them too enthusiastically. Otherwise we would have a big vase of its ravishing pink flowers in a bower of its shiny green leaves perfuming the house.

Dear Doctor, I have a chronic case of lemna minor in my water garden and wonder if you have a remedy for me. It completely covers the surface of one of the two 12-foot square ponds; the other, under the constant splash of a fountain, is also affected, but less seriously. Why it has infected us now I don’t know. In forty years it has made occasional appearances and I have netted it off, but this time the problem is serious: it has spread through the clumps of Iris kaempferi that occupy three of the corners.

How am I to clean it out? I could try blasting the clumps with a pressure hose – but thatwould send the tiny plants flying everywhere. I could dig the irises out of the water and try to clean them elsewhere before putting them back. No chemical treatment for duckweed, of course, is available or legal  for mere gardeners. And why wouldn’t the pest come straight back next year? I’ve noticed, by the way, that ducks rarely touch the stuff. Nor do moorhens – of which we have an oversupply. Grass carp, I’m told, devour it along with everything else.

An apparent lawn is no substitute for the gleam of water. And I love my floppy irises, some purple, some white, sometimes flowering right up to the first frost. Can you help me, please?

The garden could hardly be more monochrome this afternoon if it were a black and white photograph. When the sun sets there will probably be a gleam on the horizon, but now, from the grey fish in the grey water to the black tracery of trees there is a cold consistency of tone. I can enjoy it as one does an engraving.

Until I turn round and see the only warm colours, almost shocking in their contrast,  and their isolation. One is the line of

red-stemmed willows, shockheads of dull orange in this light, an ember glow rather than a flame. And here, just by the temple, a liquidambar with an extraordinarily slow fuse. In autumn it was merely less green; a sulky colour hard to name. Now, still in full leaf, it is the full motley, from orange-scarlet to the brilliant black-maroon you see on certain spindles. Its name is Palo Alto, so California is its home, (and there they call it a sweetgum – why don’t we?)

Why it waits so long, and needs a week of frosts and four weeks of rain (and endures the shortest days) to arrive at its moment of glory I can’t imagine. It could hardly be more arresting under a California sun than it is in our sombre January landscape.

How good it is to have animals back on the land around us. It seems decades since we had their company; the last sheep disappeared with the foot and mouth calamity of 2001. Since then only the birds have broken the silence of the fields.

Suddenly last summer we heard the beefy bellowing of cattle from across the valley.  I had wondered why expensive-looking fencing was going up round fields that had been monotonously arable for twenty or thirty years. A substantial herd has now transformed the landscape on the other side of the stream I follow on my daily walk. Now I realize how much I’ve been missing four-legged country company.

We tend to commune down at their watering place, by the stump of a huge old silver willow. I had wondered why the farmer had suddenly summoned the energy to cut it down. Constable wouldn’t have approved; the beasts in its shade would have made just the sort of vignette he loved to draw. Perhaps the roots threatened to block the land-drains feeding the drinking-hole. We meet there and stare at each other in the afternoon for half an hour at a time.They’re eating mangel wurzels now – and a great deal of mud, too, it seems, as they muzzle round looking for bits of root.

The voices of cows sometimes remind me of trucks and sometimes of trains; American trains in particular. Then the other day it dawned on me what they are actually imitating. A neighbour started up a chainsaw. Minutes later one cow took up the chorus ; then another. Close to, their efforts seem absurd ; a pointless waste of effort. But heard from half a mile away in the garden they speak of centuries of rural continuity, the ancestral cud of England. Then I love them.

I’m a great believer in averages. Choose the right slice of time and they always justify themselves. Nevertheless our weather records for 2012 surprise me. The national news tells us that it may have been England’s wettest year ever, but here in our corner of Essex it hasn’t broken records. At about 700 millimetres of rain, or 27.5 inches, it is certainly on the high side. We’ve had more, though. However puddly the ground

now, and however dismal the daily downpour, it is merely making up for the months at the beginning of the year when it should have rained but didn’t. There was hardly a drop in January, February or March.

Weather forecasting is easy. We were discussing the subject in October. ‘I can guarantee’, I said to my wife, ‘that we’ll have a soaking in November and December. It’s got to keep up with the average by the end of the year’.

I suspect there’s a hole in my logic, but who can deny that normality keeps elbowing its way back in ?