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 ?

‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,’ said Dr Johnson, ‘it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ We have longer than a fortnight, and the issue is not hanging. It is moving house. But it is wonderful how it concentrates our minds.

We have lived at Saling Hall for 42 years. The house and garden have that familiarity which is easy to identify, or perhaps confuse, with love. You notice the slightest change in the loved one’s features or demeanour and find, or try to find, an explanation. The return of honey fungus or a blocked drainpipe is easy to diagnose. But the whole person, the whole place, remains mysterious. Its dimensions are easy, its spirit is elusive. You cannot stand outside yourself.

So we are to move. Before Easter when the garden will be full of buds. Our first instinct is to list the plants and objects we simply must keep hold of by taking them with us. There’s a game for the long dark evenings ahead. Our second is to speculate about the garden: what will happen to it? How soon will our vision be overlaid with novelty, with neglect (unlikely in this case, I’m happy to say) or just by changing priorities?

We are incredibly lucky: our successors here are already friends, who know the house and asked if they might buy it. Our luck is even more incredible because this is the second time the same friendly arrangement has happened. When we sold our farm in the Bourbonnais eight years ago it was to the godson of a friend. Somehow continuity seems priceless. It was, of course, the rule in the centuries before estate agents existed. We may have no influence on what our successors do, but it is reassuring to think in terms of a baton being handed on.

Remember when we got our first Camcorders? It was in the late ’80s or early ’90s. It was thrilling to be able to film our surroundings so easily without fussing about camera settings. The way the new device adjusted to light conditions was uncanny: you could almost film a rabbit going down its hole.

The results have been standing, all but forgotten, on a bookshelf here for 20 years or so, hard to look at without resurrecting ancient technology. So have our video tapes in different formats, in many cases our only real record of what was happening in the garden at the time.

So we have had them converted to CDs (by a firm called Snappy Snaps) so that we can look at them on the television set or a computer. Even perhaps edit them – if I knew how.

How much better this garden looked 20 years ago. It was in its heyday then, 20 years after planting. Our original intentions were clear, unblurred by failures and over-exuberant successes. Compromise, I’m afraid, leaves indelible traces, and compromise dogs us as we settle into middle age.

But our most exciting rediscoveries are the films I made of our new property in France, lingering lovingly on every detail of abandoned farm buildings, manure heaps, overgrown ponds and rows of hideous telegraph poles. I was so absorbed, it seems, that I forgot to provide any commentary: the pans and zooms are all  performed in solemn silence, broken only by the cuckoo and the nightingale and the tinkling of streams – the perfect soundtrack.

The films record, spasmodically, nearly ten years of development. I even found my tongue along the way, and started to reveal, in a stuttering sotto voce, what plans I was hatching for ponds being dug and streams redirected, copses planted and alleys aligned. I could not have been given a more exciting present than my own past, my projects unfurling, succeeding or failing. Where is that old Camcorder? I must get it out and dust it off. No, I forget: almost any camera can film things today.

Charlotte's eye view of America in France

When we went back, in a fit of nostalgia, to our old farmhouse in the Bourbonnais last summer we were delighted to find it in better order than ever, the garden spruce and the house brimming with the family who bought it from us eight years ago. They gave us lunch at a long table in the shade of the plane trees we planted 20 years ago, a pleasure I didn’t think we’d ever have.

‘Is my (very) old Land Rover still going’, I asked, ‘may I take it for a spin?’ I wanted to do my old circuit of my plantations and ponds, to see if my new tracks and the alleys I made though the woods were still navigable. ‘If we can come too’ said our friends.

They were more than navigable, in fact in much better shape than when we left. As I drove they asked me about every twist and turn; why these trees here and those there (they are mainly oak and pine); how I discovered this spring or made that pond – and why that one had collapsed into a muddy puddle.

But best of all were the questions from the 18 year old daughter. She wanted to know the names of the trees and where they came from. She wants, she says, to be a landscape designer, wants to study in England – and tells me my work is her inspiration. Imagine what that does for the morale.

This week she emailed me some photos of the little valley where I planted American trees that colour cheerfully in autumn. There was deeper soil and more moisture there (in an area of generally gritty, unhelpful ground). I planted sugar and red maples, pin oak, scarlet oak and willow oak, some larches, Cryptomeria japonica, bushy vine maples and spindle. The fireworks are only just starting, but they are already converting one bright French girl into a future paysagiste. I am a lucky man.

When it gets dark at tea-time I look around my bookshelves in a different mood. It isn’t the latest book I want to read, but one that carries me along on the broad tide of thought that spans generations; indeed centuries.

Gardeners have always had the same preoccupations, and similar questions in mind. Their priorities change, and so does their rate of progress in answering questions. 170 years ago progress was in overdrive, as I learn on consulting one of my favourite winter evening resources: The Gardeners Magazine.

John Claudius Loudon conducted this magazine, the first of its kind, from 1826 until he died of editorial exhaustion in 1845. In 1842 Queen Victoria had been on the throne for five years. It was a time of exhilarating progress in many spheres. Reading Loudon’s review of the year 1842 is positively exciting. The German chemist von Liebig had just discovered the value of nitrogen to plants and revised the whole science of manure. ‘The higher the animal the better its manure’ was one of his sayings, with the conclusion that ‘night soil’ was thus the best manure of all – as the Chinese well knew. Liebig propagated the idea that roots need oxygen, too. He advocated mulching to keep them near the surface, and using a mixture of unsifted rough turfy soil and stones in pots to increase drainage. Plants that needed protection under glass became hardier this way, he found.

Joseph Paxton had just built his Chatsworth glasshouse with bigger panes of cheaper glass than those used before – starting a craze for greenhouses. ‘Strained wire’ was coming into use for fences that were ‘inconspicuous and  cheap.’ The ‘increased taste for the pine and fir tribe’ was bringing conifers into gardens. Ferns and ferneries were coming into fashion. Loudon had advocated, with remarkable success, the proper drainage and weather-proofing of workmen’s cottages. The queen did her first ceremonial tree-planting (at Taymouth Castle), signalling a new tree-consciousness. Loudon persuaded the authorities to label the trees in Kensington Gardens and St James’s Park; a momentous move for, among others, the nursery industry. And Chevreul’s new colour wheel was circulating among gardeners, revolutionizing their colour schemes for flower-beds.

The Gardeners Magazine was an extraordinary community effort. Loudon persuaded and provoked gardeners world-wide (there are notes from India, America and Australia) to communicate their experiences in a way that every good editor should, but very few have. How he would have loved the Internet.

It was when the Creator was making all His ingenious arrangements for His new earth that His eye fell on something that one of His beautiful mammals had dropped on the ground. ‘That doesn’t look very nice,’ He said to Himself. ‘Couldn’t I do something clever with that?’

Only the day before He had solved one problem that was worrying Him. The earth, or parts of it, looked rather monotonous month after month, all leafy, but a bit samey.

Then a new word had popped into His mind, as words do. ‘Deciduous,’ He pronounced it. ‘I’ll make half these plants deciduous. Then all these leaves can turn jolly colours and drop off, and we can have a lovely fresh start in spring.’ It meant, of course, a bare patch in between while the new lot of leaves and flowers were getting ready. Mightn’t people feel a bit depressed, with cold weather, not much light and everything bare?

This was when He noticed the mammal’s contribution. ‘There’s a challenge,’ He said. ‘Let’s see if I can turn that into something to cheer everybody up.’ So He made it sprout lots of whimsical little pink flowers and painted its leaves with pretty silvery lines. And ever since, when deciduous plants go bare, the cyclamen puts on its show and everybody smiles.