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?

Coleridge rings insistently in my head as I prowl round the garden in the icy dark. ‘Whether the eave-drops fall, heard only in the trances of the blast, or if the secret ministry of frost shall hang them up in silent icicles ……..’ Which side of zero is it tonight? Will the white hand release its grip and give us back green and the balm of living things?

I listen, straining to hear – not that there is a blast to drown the sound of drops. On the contrary, ‘trance’ is the very word for the suspended animation of the invisible garden. Yes: there is a sound: a timid tinkling of water on the move, in a downpipe, into a drain. I wait, to be sure, seeing nothing. In clear daylight all life, all movement was locked. Has the wind changed? There are no stars; the pressure from the east must be deflating and letting a gentle front of mildness steal in, not seen but very faintly heard.

Coleridge will not go away. ‘ Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee ……’ But I still prefer spring to winter

I have embraced my iPad as eagerly as anyone, but I do not twitter and will not tweet. It’s not that I disdain brevity of expression. Indeed for almost forty years my Pocket Wine Book has tried to encapsulate the essentials of its field in far shorter phrases than the 120 characters allowed in a tweet. That’s what I call verbosity.

No, it’s not the language I fear for. It’s our minds. Once we had, and thought we needed, a variety of ways to learn the contents of each other’s minds.

Surely this is the whole point of literature. The power and delight of a library is that each book you open is a glimpse into another’s consciousness. Lectures, essays, sermons were formal means of exposition. And the highest means of all was poetry.

Now we have twitter; the thumb-jerk expression of fleeting thoughts. It is pure chance if they have any significance beyond their moment of conception – and transmission. Will some future Jobs or Zuckerberg find a way of validating second thoughts – even third ones? Could there be a shiny new format for joined-up thinking?

Our friends’ little gardens between the houses in the middle of the village are noisy with birdlife already. Tits, chaffinches, sparrows, robins and blackbirds are hopping and swooping everywhere.

Here in the seclusion of a much bigger garden there is near-silence. A couple of blue tits come to the peanuts in the feeder, a woodpecker cackles and a pheasant shouts. One blackbird sings in the weeping willow but there is hardly any movement in the bushes. I wonder why. And then I realize. There is nowhere in this garden, literally nowhere, that a squirrel can’t reach. Our trees have given them a monopoly; total control. Birds have to go into the village to nest.

Ever since Picasso declared war on beauty, especially feminine beauty, mocking it or jumbling it up, artists have fought shy of it. ‘Major’ artists, at least. Lucian Freud, as major as they come, found ugliness in the human flesh that should, surely, evoke our warmest feelings. It is perverse to say, as some critics do, that he was loving the blotchy flab he painted so precisely. What he was loving was paint.

No wonder, then, that David Hockney’s paintings of trees in his native Yorkshire landscape are causing queues round the block at Burlington House. Here is a major artist daring to admit that he loves nature and wants us to share his feelings. The point of his huge canvasses of the most humdrum of woods and lanes is that they are worth studying in minute (or rather magnified) detail. These are not beauty spots, sublime scenery or sunsets. Not the faintest memory of Turner. His Yorkshire Wolds (or the corners he chooses) are interchangeable with the bottom of your lane – or indeed my daily Essex walk.

Loving trees as I do, I find endless details to admire even in my 40 minutes to the bridge over the stream and back: the alders, the oaks, the bat willows and the hazel bushes (their catkins are starting to lengthen). Their winter colours, in sun or shade, or rain, form a palette of extraordinary richness and beauty and their tracery against the clouds is infinitely fine.

Hockney is celebrating precisely these things, and giving us permission to do the same. He uses strong colours partly in celebration, out of sheer excitement at what he sees. Partly, perhaps, to surprise his metropolitan viewers into looking at something they would otherwise take for granted.

Does it sound smug to say that I could never take a tree for granted: that I am right up there with the painter? Not many, I fear, are as lucky. This is the importance of what Hockney has done: an old man with the eyes of a child is making nature mainstream.

When it rains properly, instead of the usual desultory dripping, it forms a shining crescent in front of the house around the circular lawn. I enjoy it from the bathroom window, sometimes by moonlight, before going down to see what the raingauge says. Very occasionally (but this takes half a day’s downpour) we get a shining circle. To see the beauty of puddles you must live where they are rare, and it feels as though the past year has been as arid as any since we moved in to Saling.

But it hasn’t. When I tot up all the drips and dribbles in the rain gauge 2011 gave us a total of 21 inches; five inches more than our driest year, 1976. The most striking figure to come out of the statistics is the steadily mild temperature. It is ten months since we had anything more than a ground frost. March 15, 2011 to January 20, 2012 is an extraordinary run.

I was surprised enough to make our summer-bedding marguerites, still going strong, a Flower of the Week back in November. Here they still are in January, not actually flowering, but apparently so hardened off that they’ll do for next summer.

Remind me who it was who said that England doesn’t have a climate; it has weather. The past twelve months have proved them wrong – there’s hardly been any weather at all.