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.

We have been travelling far more than usual in the past couple of months, coming home for a few days only to set off again – to Germany, Italy, Wales, France (twice). And, strange to say, the garden has hardly budged. You can’t keep dashing off like this in the first half of the year, but in autumn the garden settles down to a gentle tick-over. And there has never been an autumn more settled and stately than this.

Day after day in October with a clear sky; high pressure yet mild temperatures.

The michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums that fill the borders now, the dahlias and salvias and fuchsias and cosmos and cleomes, gradually expand, put on weight, begin to lean and topple, but the picture scarcely alters. The purple vine is heavy with clusters in the branches of the golden acacia. ‘Buff Beauty” has heavier flower-trusses than in June.

An unexpected bonus of last winter’s cold is the late flowering of one of my favourites: Francoa ramosa with its graceful white saxifrageous flower-spikes. After last winter there was hardly anything left of its low furry-leaved clumps. In their slow recovery they missed their summer flowering date altogether. For six weeks now they have been keeping company with the bright blue Salvia ‘Guanajato’; unlooked for, dazzling, lovely.

How much can you recall of the priorities of the past? I read of the recession of the ’80s, or the collapse of the ’70s, with only a dim recollection that there was trouble of some kind. The decades rumble past like goods wagons down the track. I take down the green bound volumes of The Garden that contain the first four decades of this diary (or most of them) without a clear idea of what I’m going to find.

1981, 1991, 2001 …… what was I writing about three, two and one decades ago? I can tell you. At this time of year in 1981 it was the remarkable success of

The Woodland Trust, then almost ten years old. It already had 15,000 members and had just bought Stour Wood, 134 acres in Constable country, for £70,000. I was also celebrating our new-built conservatory, and marvelling at how quickly its new plants were growing.

Ten years later I was preoccupied with our new property in the Auvergne, and with the murky water in the moat at home. Another ten years and the theme was a year of prodigious growth: 2001 went from a wet winter through a mild, frost-free spring (rather like 2011) to a summer weighed down with flowers, fruit and foliage. I measured a young oak that grew 14 inches in a single day.

That’s the joy of gardening: you could change the century, as well as the decade, and we’d be banging on about the same old things.

Malus 'Red Sentinel' in early October

I aspire to be decisive. I am capable of drawing up a plan, arguing and agreeing with myself about, it, and even putting it into execution. But then I’ll spoil it with second and third thoughts, unneeded extras, something white to complement the blue or vice versa – and the impact is lost.
Which is why I so admire Susan Orr and her Dorset garden. It is a series of low-walled yards nestling up to the farmhouse and the barn where she keeps her horses. Perhaps they once divided sheep from pigs. Sue has used their geometry with the assurance of a Le Nôtre.

From the kitchen door your eye follows box hedges to a white iron gate, but the hedges themselves spell out more patterns to come. At each corner there is a slightly raised square, ending that run and announcing a crossroads. The pattern repeats, a series of squares with quite sober filling: the first four simply crab apples laden with fruit blushing green to red, further on sedums or artichokes.

Why does this work so well? The proportions are comely; nether mean nor grandiose. There is a powerful unity in repeated quiet green: stronger in simple shapes repeated, I think, than in the curlicues of a decorative parterre. Colours speak out clearly: the pink crab apples, the deep red sedums or the sugar-pink nerines, each in its box.
Perhaps I am drawn to it most of all as a glimpse into an orderly mind – a state of being to which I can aspire, but which will forever remain out of reach.

Autumn arrived yesterday, apparently from the Sahara, riding on a hot wind that crisped the leaves of unprotected trees and threw them around the garden. It also put a gleam on the pond which for a month has been a dismal sink of duckweed. At last it slid to one side and let the sky in.

The still hot days seemed like a fantasy. There were no garden suppers all summer – until late September. Is the climatic confusion on balance bad for plants? Are they like children that need a good routine and a story before bed? It has certainly been good for the grass. The leaves are scrunching on an emerald carpet. It rained enough at the right time and the growth has been ideally slow and steady for weeks.

I’m worried about our autumn colours, though. The best of the Japanese maples really catch fire in late October or early November. Ones in full sunlight are already looking a bit shrivelled. My favourite golden Acer japonicum (I won’t trouble you with its latest name) has been blowtorched, and in future articles I shall remember that the forest-dwelling vine maple, A. circinatum, really needs its forest.

We have just said goodbye to two trees. It can take years to realize that a tree has morphed from impressive to oppressive. I was reluctant to fell a big Lawson cypress, the golden ‘Winston Churchill’ – largely because my father was so devoted to ‘Winnie’. But its gleaming flat yellow fronds, beautifully overlapping to create a wonderful texture, were effectively blocking the view from the Long Walk to the fountain in the Water Garden.

Across the way, a Portugal laurel, also just 40 years old, had gone native, thirty feet high and suckering widely (this surprised me). Both went in a moment of decision that has changed the garden. We ground over their stumps and their space is already smooth and billiard green, completely dissolving the old sight-lines so I feel almost lost in the space. The new monument, formerly hidden by the cypress, is a more-than-respectable Syrian juniper, a broad thirty-foot pillow of the subtle juniper grey that Getrude Jekyll loved. How shall I bind it into the picture? It needs an anchoring block of soft foliage. Another maple?

Who on earth is chopping down a tree this beautiful autumn morning? It must be a big one, to judge by the length of the demented racket of the saw. But there is no tree, and the random roaring corresponds to no pattern of felling and logging. The noise fills the neighbourhood, obliterating the peace of every garden, annulling anemones and making roses irrelevant. There is an oily smell with it, too.

Yes, it is a leaf blower: an infernal contraption designed to cost fifty times more than a rake without fulfilling its purpose. Every autumn the nuisance gets worse. We were woken at five in a French hotel the other morning when the council sent a man round to blow the leaves off the pavements into the path of the almost equally noisy street-scrubbing lorry that followed at six. Would a 200 per cent VAT rate put a stop to it? I doubt it.