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.

A mere half lemon-slice of moon was enough to light the garden last night – or rather to fill its shroud of mist with light. November, moon and stars and mild air is an unusual mixture, the garden seems to hold its breath for winter, with no change more urgent than another leaf spiralling to the ground.

Moonlight views have always fascinated me. They are almost impossible for painters (or so I suppose, or wouldn’t we see them in every gallery?)

They simplify so much that they reveal the very basics of mass and proportion. But they falsify by cutting out the details of colour and texture on which we base most of our gardening judgements.

It’s odd, isn’t it, that only the sort of painters who hang on park railings dare to paint inherently beautiful scenes. There was rising mist on the ploughed land yesterday as I took my usual walk through the low meadow among the bat willows, then up to what I think of as our Downs – the swell of sandy land and short grass. For a moment the dark plough, the verticals of the willows and thin white mist were absurdly picturesque. No real artist would have looked twice. ‘Chocolate box’ describes a subject as much as a technique.

The ground was squelching after weeks of rain when we arrived in Scotland – and the sun was shining. The rain we had been praying for in the South made a four-day visit, leaving the North clear of cloud and lit by a low sun so bright that driving westwards in the afternoon became a challenge.

It is a strange light for gardens, gilding half the scene and casting the rest into deep shadow; not the time to take decisions (or photos). On our way home we called at Howick, the extraordinary arboretum on the coast near Alnwick that puts most other tree collections to shame in the originality and profusion of its planting. Lord Howick seems to have almost commuted to the Far East. His collections of seed-raised trees and shrubs cover acre after acre.

You may have to navigate through long wet grass to read the label on a tree in heavy berry mode or colouring brilliantly, but the bold way a plantsman can take on a whole landscape is inspiring. The valley winding a mile down to the sea was clearly once a beech wood. Immense old trees stand with a faint air of doom among the wind-torn remnants of their contemporaries; a landscape from nature that suggests natural continuity rather than the imposed order of a botanical garden. And yet there are trees here we would consider touchy in the south, and trees we never see, in a bewildering range of families prolifically interwoven. The light was fading, the sun brilliant on the western horizon, the urge to return intense.

It’s a simple question, but not easy to answer: why am I so drawn to old gardens, old houses… anywhere palpably old? What is the appeal of history? What does it matter that (let’s say) a garden has been growing, in more or less recognizable form, for a century, or centuries?

To people who think or feel as I do age gives a sense of validity. I am easily seduced by the word ‘authentic’ – although who is to say that what’s left of the past is more authentic than what has just been created? It’s hard to argue rationally that Dickens’s London is more authentic than, let’s say, Canada Square.

Surely what speaks of today, made and inhabited by living people, is more real than anything remembered – let alone reproduced. Yet I hanker for traces of the past, for scraps of grey brickwork or stone that have, as we say, ‘seen a lot of history’. Somehow they offer reassurance. I see new buildings, or new planting, as something provisional, as though it were waiting for some sort of authentication that comes only with passing time. Patina adds a vital dimension to the actual. It lets imagination get to work, ‘authentic’ or not.

Do you remember Stanley Holloway in the Tower of London? ‘It’s ‘ad a new ‘andle, and per’aps a new ‘ead, but it’s still the original axe’. It’s what you might call an existential question.

Marks Hall (it was raining)

It is not easy to plot the chromatics of autumn. Timing is tricky, but so is the matching of tints that vary from year to year. A tree that turns yellow one year will do orange the next, or a bush usually reliably red go off in a sulk of yellow. There are consistent performers; Acer palmatum Osakazuki is famously hard-wired for a fiery climax, but mainly we just trust that October and November will give us the visual warmth we crave.

Spring is not so different: pricks and splashes of bright colour on bare branches or bare ground are scarcely susceptible to colour coordination. We just have to put up with pink screaming at yellow.

When someone does make a successful effort, though, at more subtle and considered colouring the result can be marvellous. We walk more and more often these days in the rapidly developing arboretum at Marks Hall, twelve miles away near Coggeshall. The Winter Walk beside the lake there is planted with real sensitivity for quiet autumn tints. (We do well in East Anglia for winter gardens: Anglesey Abbey and the Cambridge Botanics both have splendid examples.)

At Marks Hall the groundwork, as it were, is done in tufts of a delicate buff grass, a pennisetum, like big stitches in a tapestry.Through it run skeins of dogwoods and spindles that turn tender shades of pink and buff, grey and rose and yellow. There are gold-leafed ginkgos overhead, white-trunked birches and sage-green sarcococcas. It is the deliberate limitation of the palette, the avoidance of high-pitched colours, that gives it resonance.

We are not spoilt for good woodland gardens in Essex. Beth Chatto’s is an exception, of course. Marks Hall Arboretum is becoming important enough (as I have risked before) to be dubbed our Easternbirt.

The frost (it was only a touch) that browned the face of the Bishop of Llandaff last night was the first here for seven months. Mid-March was our last even moderately cold weather. The cold spell that gave last winter its fearsome name started in late November and reached its climax over the weekend before Christmas, when I recorded two days of bitter cold and clear blue skies, and the greenhouse door froze shut. The lowest temperature on our thermometer, sheltered on a north wall, was -9°C. Since then the coldest night has been January 31st, with a low of -1°C.

Now we are cruising in an autumn so benign that the dahlia is the only plant complaining. My complaint is drought. Ten months have given us only 400 millimetres of rain. We need 200 more in two months to hit our long term average. The wonderful thing about averages is that they always turn out about right.

In spring I complain that everything is happening at once; I panic at the hectic pace of growth and the daily changes in shapes and colours. I fall behind in even seeing, let alone being constructive Now the garden has slowed almost to a standstill is the time to plan ahead, to decide on winter work, to make serious decisions.
But no; lassitude takes over. I am not seeing clearly or analytically; not seeing the garden as a picture, just passively absorbing the atmosphere of the settled, somnolent world.

Beauty in a state of déshabille is a stiff test for a garden. It can be poignant, though, and it can reveal the quality of a good design. We went to her garden to remember the peerless Jill Cowley last Sunday; the garden she made with her architect husband Derek Bracey at Great Waltham. Jill suffered for ten years with a bone cancer that put her through hell. Only in the last two years did it stop her gardening, though, or playing a key role as deputy chairman of the National Gardens Scheme (she was its Essex County Organizer for ten years).

For two years now the grass has been cut and the hedges trimmed; in the borders, though, among the roses (they clamber up every tree) and the unpruned shrubs, it has been the survival of the fittest, The result? A revelation of the gardening style of the 1970s and ’80s, powerfully geometrical, decisively linked to the old farmhouse and dairy and linking them to a garden house, a pergola, statues, a bridge over a (now dry) pond, and memorable views into the surrounding farmland. We have an advantage here in Essex: the fields are lined with shimmering silver willows, now in autumn the precise shade of olive green that seems to be de rigueur in fashionable decorating.

The Gibberd Garden at Harlow belongs to the same school of design. So, to a point, does our own at Saling. The difference in Jill’s is the intelligent exuberance of her planting, still traceable in its déshabille. Jill was a traveller, a reader and writer, a gambler, a person who filled more spiritual space than others – which, perhaps inevitably, made her a great gardener too.