Gainsborough's Holywells at Ipswich

There is a landscape I have never seen that has been haunting and inspiring me for twenty years. It is a chain of ponds in a painting: a retreating procession of silver surfaces that took hold of my imagination and still won’t let go.

Wherever I first saw it, presumably in a book, it went with me to France when I was trying, with laughable over-ambition, to impose my will on two hundred acres of deep bocage. I set about channelling the stream that issued from a generous spring in the hillside to form three oval ponds descending into the valley so that from the track at the top they formed a gleaming chain. It was a struggle. The soil was so ‘filtrant’, to use the French term, that as soon as I cut into the marshy stream bed as it meandered down the hill it immediately carved itself a channel and disappeared in the coarse sandy ground.

Eventually, using a piece of pipe here and a primitive bridge of logs there, I persuaded it into my little ponds. For a few summer weeks I had my picture. Then the deer identified them as drinking troughs; their hooves broke into the lip of each carefully excavated hollow and the water found another way downhill. Cattle joined them from another field and a general swamp began to form.

You would be amazed how soon goat willow seedlings spring up, reeds multiply, and the muddy mix is a pond no more. As for the swamp spurge, Euphorbia palustris, I optimistically planted; the Azalea mollis in bold groups, the bluebells and ferns and the red-stemmed willows, their trashing was almost instantaneous. Do you know how much deer love stropping their velvet on young willows? Does the aspririn in the bark cure their headaches?

The picture stayed in my mind though, and came thrillingly to life when Lady Salisbury apparently dreamed the same dream at Hatfield House. Using the spillway over the dam that forms the lake, she remade the identical scene – but solidly in sensible material, and with an abundant supply of water: three shining discs descending, in this case, into an ancient wood.

Did we share the same inspiration? Indeed we did, And last weekend I saw it, in its frame, for the first time. It hangs in the wonderful little gallery in Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. It is Gainsborough’s painting of the park at Holywells, a mile

Euphorbia arborescens on La Gomera

The name of my daughter’s hillside, the slope at hang-glider pitch overlooking the bay of Beaulieu, is La Petite Afrique. From her house, seven hundred feet above sea level, the mountains of Corsica can appear on the horizon, ninety miles to the south, usually at dawn. There are, remarkably, no springs along this cliff-line, where the Alps stop dead at the coast. Where does the snow-melt go? Much of it out to sea down the flood-drain of the River Var, but presumably also in submarine sweet water springs far below the Mediterranean.

So La Petite Afrique is dry, facing south-east and exposed to the daylong onslaught of the sun. The rubble at the foot of its crowning limestone cliffs is none the less fertile: a forest, indeed, of wild olives and tall pale-green Aleppo pines, with carob and
occasional ash trees, rosemary and thyme, and a strange tree euphorbia that seems to grow nowhere else along the coast.

Euphorbia dendroides is a beauty: a highly desirable dome of brilliant spurge green in spring, flowers of that intense yellow-green covering grey-blue leaves. Old plants are low-branching trees measuring five or six feet high and wide from a single short stem. Seedlings catch your eye as you scramble up the rocks; just four or five tiny blue leaves on a stick. What you can’t do is move them. Transplanting never seems to work, and I have had no luck with seeds. In any case conditions in Kitty’s irrigated garden would be far too humid.
Or would they? The other place I have seen a colony of tree spurge is out in the sea mists of La Gomera in the Canaries, on a similar rocky hillside but swathed in Atlantic fog.

Is there a good book about Euphorbia? From soft little scramblers of wet meadows to giant Mexican cacti they are an adventurous race. We all grow Euphorbia wulfenii; would be lost without it, in fact. Now my ambition is to grow its arborescent cousin.

Water is always on my mind – or in my prayers. After forty years in Essex I should be used to months without rain, but it still makes me anxious, looking at a barren sky. I’m sure this is why I make it as evident as I can in the garden. I can’t manage a stream, but I can do ponds, little cascades and a fountain: six tricks in all, designed to fool you into thinking water is flowing from one end of the garden to the other, coming to light intermittently on the way.

It first appears in the form of a duck pond, the central feature of the little park in front of the house. By the end of the summer, especially this year, there is as much beach as water, and the carp flip about in the muddy shallows with dry backs. Then, a hundred yards away and just beside the house, a little cascade delivers what might be the same water (it isn’t) into the moat. The illusion works when the duck pond is moat (a rectangle sixty yards long), fed from one end, can pass for a broad stream feeding the next watery event, the water garden, out of sight and at a lower level, across the back drive.

Its two square stone ponds are secluded in a dell of profuse planting; one still, one with a single fountain jet splashing and sparkling. Stone steps lead from the fountain to a long alley among the trees. No more water, until a sudden drop of seven feet into a hidden valley, where it dribbles down rocks into a vaguely Japanese-looking pool.

You couldn’t know it, but this water comes from a completely different source: a ram pump on a spring four hundred yards away and fifty feet down hill. The seeming magic of the ram, using nothing but water power to move a steady flow uphill, always fascinates me. And this water is made to work again – trickling from a buried pipe to feed the last of the watery manifestations and I think the prettiest of them, the Red Sea, curling round a promontory of white-barked birches in front of the little garden temple.

The gleam of water in one form or another, reflecting the trees, in broad surfaces or damp tinkling corners, provides my unifying theme, and reminds (not that I need reminding) me how scarce and valuable a commodity it is.

Home from a weekend in Yorkshire deep in snow. The skeletons of the woods are drawn in bold black lines on the swelling white hills. We walked, or trudged, to a gazebo commanding the village of Settrington to sip old champagne* as crisp as the air and enumerate the surrounding hills, dales, farms and copses. The mausoleum of Castle Howard was just distinguishable (it could also have been a big ash or oak) on the skyline to the west.

A brown wall of beech hedge surrounds our hosts’ house like the wash-line of a framed watercolour. You are acutely aware of the structures of trees; elongated and aspiring in the middle of a wood, billowing and outreaching on the edges. On a distant hill you see only a dark mass with the bulges of surface tension, like a pool of mercury in the blank white jigsaw puzzle of fields.

Do we think enough about lines and shapes in our gardens? I am reading a small classic of garden design, l’Optique des Jardins, by Robert Mallet, whose family owns the happiest marriage of French and English garden philosophies, Le Bois des Moutiers, at Varengeville on the coast of Normandy. Mallet makes the point that straight lines can easily be overdone. Vertical ones are like the bars of a cage; horizontal ones exclude us from what lies beyond; straight lines that are nearly but not quite vertical or horizontal make us uneasy, make us uneasy, like a picture that needs straightening. ‘Just one misplaced line’, he writes, ‘can drive you crazy’. It is in winter when lines make up most of the picture that we should study and correct them.

I was leafing through an old brown volume of The Gardener’s Magazine of 1830, as one does on locked-in frosty days, to see what preoccupied our fellow-addicts 180 years ago. The first article I opened was the Conductor’s (that is John Claudius Loudon’s) Notes and Reflections made on a tour from Paris to Germany. He compares the vale of London with the plain of Paris. “The vicinity of Paris is all nakedness and long lines; that of London all clothing and accumulations of houses and trees, with abrupt or circuitous lines. The approaches to Paris on every side are characterized by straight roads, straight rows of trees, straight avenues and alleys, and straight lines in almost every thing. The approaches to London are not characterized by lines; the roads, trees and alleys in woods, are irregular, and neither strikingly crooked and curved, nor always straight.” France, he goes on to say, is over-regulated and controlled.

Loudon first visited Paris in 1815, just after Waterloo. Fifteen years later, he says, ‘Progress is very considerable’.

* Someone asked. Bruno Paillard 1985

I suppose I used to assume that moss and damp went together; that our mossy bits were just shady and badly drained (as they may well be). I had no intention of cutting down the trees or installing new drainage, so tant pis; let’s enjoy the moss.

But here we are, after one of the driest years of our times, and there is more moss than ever, so it can’t be rain. Anyway it looks marvellous. If I hadn’t read so many lawn care articles I’d say I prefer moss to grass. The Moss Garden in Kyoto (the result, they say, of ages of neglect) makes me want to take up neglect as my retirement hobby.

Why is our moss shameful, where theirs is a matter of pride? Because, I fear, Japanese summers have plenty of rain, and ours, in spite of folklore, not nearly enough, or only during Test matches.

We have to keep tipping the balance in favour of grass, because grass is our default ground cover. Even if the evidence, in large parts of this aging garden, points in the direction of ivy as nature’s choice. Ivy is fine in surplus areas where no one walks. I am rather pleased with a patch under an alley of Norway maples which I decided, a year or two ago, to dedicate entirely to ivy, suppressing any competition or variation that cropped up. An annual strimming keeps it flat and tidy – except of course, where it sets off up the trunks of the trees. But finger-nailing the invading shoots of ivy off my tree-trunks is a part of my garden psychotherapy. It delays my getting on with proper jobs: there is always an ambitious tendril somewhere in sight, an urgent distraction and soothing balm.

To Wales for a walk in our woods, on a day as clear and glowing as only winter can offer. Summer is just a distraction in this wild upland country; in winter you see the real thing, the flesh and bones of the countryside painted in its deepest, warmest, most varied colours.

As a forester I try to look at the woods from a business point of view. This block of trees (black, in this low light, gothic, jagged and aggressive) is due to be felled next year. How much will it fetch? The price of timber is right down (this is the right stuff; what they use for homes – only they’re not building any). The trees will safely grow on for a couple of years, but perhaps the euro will die, and then who’ll build houses?

My natural interest, though, is what the view will be when they’re gone. Cader Idris is straight ahead, and over to the right shall we just catch a glimpse of Cardigan Bay? There will be a dreadful mess for a couple of years, then new plants will start to give it a pattern; timid lines of green. I hope to see at least a low cover of new trees in my lifetime: but then what?

This is the nearest a forester comes to a gardener’s perspective: weighing the impact of the different possibilities on the fallow landscape. One is to leave it fallow, or at least parts of it, and watch the first-year foxgloves and the gradual return of the heather and bilberry, and gorse and brambles and bracken, the inevitable birch and rowan seedlings, volunteer spruce and larch, and hopefully a smattering of oak. Leave it two hundred years and, theoretically, oak will be the climax vegetation – at least in sheltered spots and gullies where soil has accumulated over the ungiving granite.

I have planted a lot of oak. It struggles. Local Welsh oak has no sense of direction: mostly it goes sideways, with a nudge of course from sheep. In autumn its patchwork of colours is wonderfully wayward: one tree is copper, one gold, its neighbour jade and the next as dark as an Amsterdam front door.

Larch I love; its pale seedlings brighten the woods as fast, even, as birch. But there is a threat hanging over it: the same Phytophthera ramorum that threatens our oaks. It has reached South Wales, apparently travelling north. No one is planting it around here any more. Our tall stands of larch, planted in the 1960s and now seventy feet high, straight poles to a thin canopy, are the most graceful parts of the woodland, and their pale spring green and autumn gold two of its principal delights. If we see trees browning in summer we have to call the authorities, and they will say fell. I remember the elm disease, thirty five years ago, and I tremble.

But now, in the short days with long shadows, I can spend time on the details, see the work that nature puts into arranging heather and rock and bilberry, gorse and bracken and long-jumping brambles; none of them, not even the brambles, quite destroying the magical equilibrium. I can prod little freshets into new courses, promote them to streams, yank a ponticum from a path, play the gardener on a domestic scale within the implacable macrocosm of the forest.

So many plants have reacted strangely to this endless autumn that one more may seem inconsequential. It is sad to see Japanese maples standing with shrivelled brown leaves because there was no cold to trigger their abscission process, no autumn colour and no leaf fall, but they will rearrange themselves.

I’m not so sure about my favouritedelphinium, which looks set to flower in December. It is one of the noble named varieties that seem to be gradually disappearing from nurseries, their propagation (by cuttings in March) being a chancy business. My ‘Clifford Sky’, the purest blue with a white eye, came as a rooted cutting from the admirable Kevin of Beeches Nursery at Ashdon. In its first season it sprang from the border like a rocket. Last year it produced nine splendid spikes. Perhaps I dead-headed it too enthusiastically: back to one foot from the ground. Now it has gathered all its forces to flower again. A bad freeze and its strength will be sadly depleted; small chance of many cuttings or a good show next year.

I get self-conscious when the time comes for winter bedding plants. It’s probably the snob in me that recoils from popping in the same blue and yellow pansies as you see for sale on garage forecourts at this time of year. Surely I should be more original?

But whereas I blithely plant perfectly routine perennials (in what I hope will be original and ravishing combinations), I never get round to sowing anything for the winter. I hope my wallflowers will do it for themselves. Indeed I spent half a morning in the summer slipping seeds from a self-sown wallflower in a wall deep in all the gaps in the brickwork around it. There followed 10 weeks without rain. I hosed down the wall once or twice when I remembered to, but none of the seeds germinated.

So here I am with trays of pansies and wallflowers from Springwell Nurseries, a jolly spot on the road from Saffron Walden to Cambridge, deciding how to deploy them casually, as if they had volunteered. That is not how they will look, but nor should they; at least not the pansies. Their wonderful satin extravagance needs a more or less formal frame. There is a new one (to me) this year; not bright yellow but pale primrose. I will speckle it with the one called ‘True Blue’ in the bed behind the cottage where the rugosa roses stand gaunt in winter.

My favourite wallflower for years has been the old cultivar ‘Scarlet Bedder’; a gauge, I’m sure, of my deep conservatism in choosing flowers. This year there is an F1 hybrid called ‘Treasure Bronze’ which is so much healthier looking, stockier and more compact that I am planting it instead. Sadly there is no chance of a true F1 seedling in a wall.

Heaven knows what the provenance of the pansies may be. ‘True Blue’ is a strong colour I would have called violet until I checked in my old RHS Colour Chart. The name is right and I am wrong; it corresponds, making allowance for its lustrous texture, with colour 95A, Cornflower Blue. The Colour Chart originated in the 1930s with the British Colour Council, now long defunct. Another of their publications was a Dictionary of Colours for Interior Decoration, in two bulky volumes, which goes to the length of having three samples of each colour: one matt, one glossy and one a piece of carpet. My copy belonged to Anthony Denney, who gave it to me when I started to garden. His message: texture is as important as hue. And light of course decides everything.