There may not, I suppose, be many records of the birthdays of goldfish, but mine has passed his 35th, and we are quietly celebrating together. What’s more, he has passed more than 30 years of his life swimming alone, the only inhabitant of his tank in the conservatory. His companion died and I hesitated to introduce a stranger into his placid life.

I am no judge of a goldfish’s state of mind; he may relish his independence, he may be lonely and depressed (or indeed he may be a she) but there he is every morning basking peacefully among the leaves. A few flakes of fish food give him obvious pleasure – but what he likes best is the hose; a jet dropped from high enough to bubble oxygen into his water. Each time I do this he swims a little jig.

His name is Diogenes, after another loner who lived in a tub – although I like to think my Diogenes is more of a philosopher.

I try not to let this diary become too meteo-centric, but there is no avoiding the topic du jour. Magnolias are going over, and horse-chestnuts are in leaf, and we are still in March. The spring of 2011 was pretty alarmingly warm, and excessively dry, but this fast-forward eruption of a season makes it moderate in comparison. We have a blackthorn summer instead of winter. The daffodils in the Royal Parks had the shortest flowering in memory: there will be none for Easter. If this sort of spring becomes a habit there will be less and less reason to grow them: a week in flower and a month looking miserable is not going to keep the popular vote.

We rarely pay our lawns much attention, but last winter there was no ignoring the moss/grass ratio. In some places it was hard to find any grass. We scraped out a small mountain of moss with a scarifier and then went to work with a great yellow machine much like the ones that leave a ribbon of tarmac behind them. Its revolving drum cuts furrows an inch and a half apart and drops grass seed from a hopper straight in. It hasn’t rained for a month, though, and I fear we’ll have to use the sprinkler before it’s banned, any day now, to see any germination.

Tidy people with orderly minds are excluded, I’m afraid, from the sort of pleasure I had the other day rummaging in the potting shed when I noticed, buried in old seed packets and balls of string, a thick little black book.

It is our garden diary for 1975, a year when we planned and planted with an energy I only half remember. The notes are half in my hand-writing, half in another, much neater and with more complete sentences and many references to nature, as well as this kind of thing: ‘April 25th. Made second sowings of lettuce, spinach, beetroot. Planted Helleborus corsicus behind cottage with R. rubrifolia, Hosta glauca, Asters, yellow foxglove, hebe, Viburnum fragrans. Piptanthus flowering’. (Most of which are still here).

Who was my co-diarist? His observations grow sharper: ‘Potted geraniums in greenhouse. There are more in flower every day, particularly Catford Belle, which seems more dwarf than miniature. The ferns are doing well, Adiantums especially fine and the effect in the shaded corner is almost sub-tropical. First strawberry flowers out; fed with liquid fertilizer’.

Then the penny dropped. This is the last volume to record our first proper gardener, Christopher Bailes. The entry for September 13 reads ‘Chris Bailes left today to go to Merrist Wood College. He has been here three years and three months’. We had suspicions then that this studious young man would go far, if not quite as far as Philip Miller’s old job at the Chelsea Physic Garden, which he now adorns.

I’d be surprised if David Hockney’s iPad paintings don’t inspire a whole new school of art. Apparently he emails his morning’s work to chums – which must create a bit of a problem for his dealer. Are these originals? Since the difference between an original and a reproduction is the whole basis for the fine art trade I imagine some head-scratching must be going on.

iPad painting is not as easy as a real artist makes it look: witness my early effort, my tree of the month, alongside. This was done with my index finger; next step is to acquire a stylus, the sort of pen that works on a screen. I see that there are already a dozen kinds: which to choose is the next question.

I’ve tried two different painting apps, Brushes (apparently Hockney’s medium) and My Brush – which seems to me rather simpler to use. They offer what appears to be an almost infinite range of colours, lines and washes. Also the facility not available to a student before of erasing any stroke at will, and even playing back the whole

It is bewildering territory. I’m tempted to try my hand at a completely new skill – or at least hobby – simply because it’s there, between my emails, my newspaper and the weather forecast. A flash in the pan, maybe, but at least a great new challenge.

I was ambushed by a blast of honey just now; an overwhelming jar-full of scent, clear, golden, sweet and even waxy. I jumped like Winnie the Pooh. The trees around are bare, a few willow catkins are opening, maples are just showing points of promise where their buds will be ……. Where are the flowers?

Then I saw, behind a screen of the fine twigs of Japanese maples, some modest spots of dull yellow. It is Lindera obtusiloba, a Chinese bush I love for its waywardly three-lobed leaves, no two quite the same, memorably bright yellow in October. The leaves are slightly scented too.

I had never noticed its little umbels of flowers before, or even known they were perfumed. I have never seen any fruit. But I wonder at the energy the plant must expend in scenting the air like this. The reproductive urge takes many wonderful forms. The twigs I brought into the kitchen are giving everything we eat and drink a taste of honey.

Reading an article on the gardens of Suzhou by John Dixon Hunt in the excellent Historic Gardens Review Historic Gardens Review reminded me of my one visit to this capital of classic Chinese gardening in 1989.

Then it was called Soochow. I took a train (with some difficulty) from Shanghai and hired a bike to join the thousands who pedalled sedately, like a steady humming river, along the avenues of this historic town. There is a flavour of Amsterdam about its canals (which were kept impeccable, at least in the centre, I remember, by men and women in punts with nets to scoop up the slightest litter).

In its concentration of gardens it could be compared with Kyoto – except that Kyoto is a city of temples and palaces in a naturally beautiful valley, while Soochow (do you say Kolkata?) is a commercial centre on a river plain. Its gardens therefore have no prospects, no interest in the world beyond, but concentrate your thoughts on the ingenuities and intricacies within their high circling walls.

The gardener’s art was how to make a short stroll satisfying, even exciting, within these limits. Rule one, it seems, was to keep pricking the visitor’s curiosity, raising his expectations and then frustrating them. Each garden is a complex of elaborate low buildings (their roofs and eaves are very much part of the picture, curved and convoluted and decorated with dragons and creatures of all sorts). A great deal of the space between is filled with great grey rocks, as craggy or water-worn as possible. They are utterly unlike the calm solemn boulders of Kyoto; these gesticulate as though they want to move around and change places.

Often you find yourself squeezing through a claustrophobic chasm between high stones with nothing but stone to see, then emerge beside a little pool full of technicolor carp. A lacquered pavilion in the midst contains the master’s desk, scrolls and pens; an icon of tranquil scholarship (or, for that matter, petty-fogging bureaucracy). He cannot, you imagine, sit there long without succumbing to one of the insistent invitations to walk: over these stepping stones, into this rockery to admire the peonies or through that moongate where the skirts of a willow – and perhaps other skirts – are beckoning.

You pass a bamboo screen and glimpse another pool, or flurry of rocks, mysteriously inaccessible. Your steps are frustrated, your exploration interrupted, your expectation raised at each turn. As John Dixon Hunt points out, it is the art of delay, of delicious foreplay. Even a moongate is a means for making you step on alone (or bow your companion through before you). But I don’t think these are companionable gardens. A drinks party would be a solecism, almost an outrage. As, indeed are the crocodiles of visitors, both here and in Kyoto. Such gardens are turned inward to the point of obsession – or is it me obsessing?

The Murdoch family has had such a bad press recently that I keep remembering a visit to Dame Elisabeth, Rupert Murdoch’s mother, at her garden south of Melbourne, it must be ten years ago. Ten years ago she was only 93; at 103 she remains a central figure in the cultural and charitable life of Melbourne – and a passionate gardener.

We were introduced to her at a garden festival at Hatfield House by Marchioness Mollie. We went to tea with her a year or two later at Cruden Farm, the house her husband Keith gave her when they married in 1928. There was nothing formal about it; she put the kettle on and fetched a cake tin, then told us that she had just driven to Melbourne and back (she drove herself in a small car) to chair a meeting of one of her
charities. The garden, she said, was too big to walk round, so she drove us in her buggy, stopping every few yards to point out a plant with evident knowledge and relish. There was a lot of new planting going on around a recently-made lake.

You reach Cruden Farm down a long curving alley of Corymbia citriodora, the gum tree equivalent of Betula jacquemontii, but whiter of trunk and more sinuous. A Rugby goalpost, as it were, with hips. Tall trees shade the white clapboard house, one of them an oak I have never seen before or since, an evergreen with leaves rather like Quercus turneri but immensely tall and as deeply drooping as a weeping beech. Its name is Q. Firthii. I want one. Hydrangeas are stacked in tall banks round the house, their feet in a lush bed of agapanthus; blue and white the predominant colours.

But any memory of the planting is hazy beside my memory of the woman who was brought home here as a bride at 19 and has reigned in the garden (and in Melbourne) ever since. The innocent pursuits of philanthropy and gardening have occupied her for eighty years.

I’ve often noticed that snowdrops flower earlier in drier ground. They spread better where it’s damp, but there is little doubt that the extra warmth of ground dried out by, in particular, the roots of trees and shrubs encourages their flowering. We had little bouquets fully open at the foot of cypresses (which have mats of roots concentrated close to their trunks) while the squadrons scattered on the long grass were just showing their heads.

The same thing doesn’t quite seem to apply to winter aconites. I planted them close in to a mature beech where the tree roots are densest. They flowered, but sparsely. Each year, though, their seedlings form a wider circle round the tree, growing better and flowering earlier as they reach what is presumably less rooty ground. Or is it? Are the most active roots in reality under the edge of the canopy? Do aconites agree with snowdrops?