St Jean de Beauregard

France has no RHS, or anything like it, so no Chelsea Show, let alone Wisley or Rosemoor. What it does have are two chateau-shows, competing genteely twice a year, in spring and autumn, near enough to Paris to attract the curious aspirant who seems to make up the main constituent of French gardening today.

Les Journées des Plantes de Courson is the better-known and more competitive of the two, recruiting British judges and attracting more specialists in woody plants. Last weekend we went to its rival, the Fête des Plantes at St Jean de Beauregard, whose autumn show has the air of a harvest festival, subtitled Fruits et Legumes d’Hier et d’Aujourd’hui.

The chateau of St Jean is on the southwest fringe of Paris on the road to Chartres. It’s 17th century builder was Pierre-Pail Riquet, creator of the greatest public work of his age,
the Canal du Midi. His descendants, the Curel family, achieve the almost equally difficult feat of keeping up a 17th century château and its gardens rather uncomfortably close to Orly airport.

I am always amazed at the self-confidence of such chateaux. Their scale, and the scale of their dépendances (stables, offices, farmyards,dairies, dovecotes, bothies and the rest) seem more remote from modern life every year. Which makes the Curels’ jardin potager as rare as it is beautiful.

Did gardeners of the time of Louis XIII really mix up the edible and the beautiful, or is it a modern fancy? It is a well- worked convention today; often stiffly, with contrasting colours and regular lines. At St Jean the vast parterre potager, several acres in a single wall, mingles the serried and the inspired as beautifully as I have ever seen it done. Ancient fruit trees line the walls and trace the principal axes. The rest is a tapestry woven with vegetables and perennials and annuals in patterns and harmonies that seem endless and effortless.

Has modern English taste been a major influence? In the freedom and profusion of the flowers, yes. In the subtlety of their blending I’m not so sure.

Lake Konstanz from Mainau

Back from a dendrologists’ outing of one of those blessed parts of Europe where trees find exactly what they need and grow to their full potential. High rainfall is nearly always part of the recipe – but so be it. It was an inspiring visit – and not just because of the trees.

Weep, Wisley. Gnash your teeth, Hyde Hall. There is a magic island garden that outshines you. Not, for sure, in every department: not for variety of plants or of horticultural idioms. But for design, cultivation, taste and above all setting Mainau has no peer in this country. It is the Tresco of Germany; an island with a privileged climate at Germany’s southernmost point, on the country’s biggest lake, bordered by Switzerland and Austria, surrounded by orchards and sheltered by Alps.

The castle and garden of Mainau were created in the 19th century by the Grand Duke of Baden and continued by the family of the Kings of Sweden, the Bernadottes. Jean-Baptist Bernadotte was the most fortunate of Napoleon’s marshals; a solder from Pau who was elected King of Sweden and whose family is still in place. The late Count Lennart Bernadotte was a naturalist, a dendrologist and a natural gardener. His daughter Bettina is now queen of the island, which is run as an environmental and educational trust.

Count Lennart inherited a near-jungle of huge trees towering in each others’ shade. He calculated the precise effect of removing almost half of them, tree by tree, drawing projections of the probable effect of each removal. Today the arboretum seems ideally spaced, the lawns between monster cedars and sequoias and oaks perfectly proportionate. You approach the schloss along an alley of giant tulip trees. Glimpses of sails on the lake below draw you across emerald lawns between soaring cedars to a hayfield on one side; a rose garden on the other; the epitome of a German lordly estate where agriculture and horticulture are easy partners. In fact it is much more: an institute for developing high horticulture and teaching ecology side by side.

The trees were reason enough to visit Mainau, but even hardened dendrologists were awed by the flower gardens by the lake, from the thousands of dahlias, in banks and swirling borders by the water, to softly-contoured enclaves of subtle planting, of grasses and late daisies and salvias that merged with meadows and woody groves.
What park or garden in England, we asked ourselves, has settled so many questions on the marriage of garden and landscape so harmoniously?

When we built our kitchen, forty years ago, we commissioned the stained-glass artist Jane Gray to make us a panel over the door between kitchen and conservatory. It illustrates our four favourite plants, one for each season, surrounded by a garland of autumnal vines. The flowers are a Corsican hellebore for winter, a Crown Imperial for spring, blue agapanthus for summer and white Japanese anemone for autumn.

I remember exactly how and why we chose them. Even where. We would still choose exactly the same flowers forty years later – with one exception. At that time we had just discovered the Crown Imperial; the sumptuous, juicy, rather smelly Fritillaria imperialis. There were scores in our new garden, both yellow and deep umber-orange, forming a long alley beside the box hedges along the central garden path and in clumps seemingly at random elsewhere. We loved upending the bells to show visitors the five white drops of nectar under each. Nothing in spring was more exotic than these oriental apparitions.

Today I’m not so sure. They are still here – but not in anything like an orderly alley. We soon discovered that they wander around at will, mysteriously displacing their huge bulbs. The result: you never know when you are going to spear or dissect one as you dig: until the strong sweet smell hits your nose. Every year as I work in the border I find myself reassembling their fat juicy segments. I bury them in the corner of a wall until they recover and form new bulbs ready to flower again. They die off slowly, too: you have to tolerate their thick stems yellowing and flopping right through the spring before you can yank them off. Glorious flowers they may be and with a fascinating story, but I am slowly moving them (when I can find them) to a wild corner they can have to themselves.

What replaces them as the icon of spring? We’re still thinking.

Is it guilt that makes us, or at least our legislators, so absurdly over-protective of badgers? No creature has so many walls of regulation, euro and home-grown, keeping it from harm. Guilt for what? They should be feeling the guilt, not us, if the disappearance of our hedgehogs is their doing. We haven’t seen one of our spiky friends all summer. Or do we feel guilty for preferring furry things that can’t answer back to the young of our own kind, which resoundingly can?

And if badgers are molly-coddled, what about bats? The bat lobby is so powerful that at least one ancient church (St Hilda’s, at Ellerburn in North Yorks) has become unusable; its congregation is rated irrelevant while bats leave their messages on the altar and the stink of their urine in the air.

I had a letter recently from the bat authorities that left me worrying about their belfry. ‘You have a cave on your property’, they wrote. (This is true). ‘You have closed it with a gate made of vertical bars’. (Also true: to keep people out. The bars are four inches apart). ‘You may be unaware that bats prefer horizontal bars’. I admit I’d never asked. Nor can I imagine why my money and yours is being spent on civil servants asking bats their preferences.

Bats are our ecological allies. They eat lots of insects. Some are rare, even endangered. The lesser horseshoe bat, though, is abundant, and if it suffers some inconvenience in barrel-rolling to fly through my gate I shan’t beg its pardon.

Cardigan Bay, Harlech in the middle distance

Back from a week in Snowdonia. Chilly for August, but ideal for long steep walks. Our favourite, starting from our woods overlooking the Mawddach estuary, follows the ancient Harlech road from Dolgellau, more or less straight uphill (which is why hot weather is not ideal) to a ridge at 1800 feet.

You are walking through heather and reeds, with low gorse here and there; the track often a glittering rivulet under your feet. The gate in the wall at the top opens on a panorama of Snowdonia and Cardigan Bay, from Bardsey Island at the tip of the Lleyn peninsula to the west, to Snowdon itself almost due north. On the western horizon the hills of Wicklow are a faint line. To the east rises the smooth shoulder of Diffwys, to 2500 feet. Turn around and the long leonine ridge of Cader Idris forms the southern horizon, with our dark woods and the silver arrow of the Mawddach far below.

We took a rough scramble down a too-steep path last week, arriving at the woods hot enough to plunge straight into our pine-fringed tarn. But not for long; there has been no summer to take the chill off the black water.

The pace of growth in these woods, with 60 or 70 inches of rain a year, is constantly surprising. A great deal of the forester’s job is to discourage over-vigorous interlopers that take space and light from the main crop, whether it be spruce, larch, fir or the long term goal and point of the enterprise, oak and beech. I have a kill list, with the most pernicious weeds at the top: rhododendron and the invasive and useless lodgepole pine, mistakenly planted (it is useless timber) in the 1960s and self-sown everywhere ever since. Next come Lawson cypress (a similar story) and, sadly, western hemlock. Hemlock is one of our most beautiful trees, pale green, graceful, drooping, with a formidable straight trunk. The trouble is no one wants its timber.

Birch needs weeding because it comes up everywhere, fast, and its slender twigs can enfold and stifle the far slower oak. In fact nurturing oak, even pruning young trees (they have precious little sense of which way is up) is my most time-consuming job. I can spend all morning moving slowly through bracken and brambles liberating little trees, with a deep sense of doing good.

It looks as though the early spring may be mirrored by an early autumn. Is there only a set length of time that plants can keep up their mid-season functions?

To my alarm, already in July I could see turning leaves – even on a few trees quite dramatic changes of colour. Our red maple, an American not usually at home in our alkaline soil, but making a good shift of it over 30 years here, shows more of its red capabilities now than in most autumns. (Here it usually turns pale yellow in October).
Koelreuteria, the so-called pride of India (it comes from China) is turning red when its usual choice, much later in the year, is a vibrant orange. And Toona sinensis, perhaps more familiar as Cedrela, is already going the clear yellow it usually reaches in short misty days.

Mind you, the Toona has had a rough year. It was pillaged by pigeons from earliest spring. They sit on its dome and peck, peck, peck at new shoots, littering the ground and leaving the canopy threadbare. This summer, choosing a day when a party of dendrologists was due to inspect us, it suddenly cast a huge branch, one of its three principal stems; a prone 30 feet of heavy red timber and elaborate leaves that would have been painful to anyone on the lawn. Note: this is the second such collapse. This is a tree with poorly-engineered branches. They must emerge at the wrong angles.

Japanese maples don’t seem to be taken in by the funny seasons, or at least not to work to rule. Some nights have been coolish, but perhaps not cold enough to make them react. Meanwhile an extraordinary weight of fruit is taking its toll – undoubtedly the result of such a perfect warm spring and impeccable flowering. All the apple trees are bending and shedding barrow-loads of fruit. I have just been round shaking the branches I can reach and cowering from the cascades.

Poor John Downie, our most prolific crab, is stooping under the weight of lovely little glowing apples, right out of my reach. Yesterday I found a major branch on the ground in a pool of fruit. I fear more may succumb.

Why does the sun come out as it goes down? It has happened so many times this summer that I am looking for an explanation. It is happening as I write.

Is it a local phenomenon? Obviously it depends on your viewpoint. There have been pesky grey clouds all day. It is too cold and breezy to sit outside. Then, just as I start wondering where I left the corkscrew, the garden floods with light.

It could be a weather front moving on at the end of the day. Sometimes it clearly is; the cloud formation shows it . Not this evening, though, with what appears to be an equal covering of cloud everywhere except this window in the northwest where orange light is streaming in. It sets light to the old red bricks of the Tudor chimney above the conservatory. It gilds the grey flint of the church tower, evening after evening.

The redness of the evening sky can be explained by the fact that sunlight at an oblique angle passes though more of the earth’s atmosphere than when the sun is overhead. The opening of the sunset window is what puzzles me. Is it a meteorological fact, or do we just live in a lucky spot?

Bishopweed and larkspur at Gravetye

Gravetye Manor in the Sussex Weald was William Robinson’s home for fifty years and his workshop for the ideas he first expressed in his hugely successful earlier books, the Wild Garden of 1870 and The English Flower Garden of 1883. The English Flower Garden went into fifteen editions in his lifetime. No doubt the cheques from his publisher, John Murray, paid for much of the 1000 acres of woods protecting his paradise. (I found a first edition for sixpence at a village fête many years ago).

When he died in 1935 he rashly left the estate to the Forestry Commission. The condition of the woods three generations later does them no great credit. Gravetye had a renaissance as a hotel in the 1960s until the turn of this century in the hands of Peter Herbert, a perfectionist and conservative hotelier. Since he retired in 2004 there has been a lull, but hearing that the new owner is once again taking the garden in hand we visited in July.

There is a great deal to do (the garden covers 30 acres) but we were delighted by what we saw and heard. The Great Garden and Little Garden, with their doors directly from the house, once again have a Robinsonian feel; the sensation of an exotic meadow profuse in tall flowers. Uniting the borders, filling much of the space with its foam of white umbels, is
Ammi majus or bishopsweed (or lady’s lace), perhaps as a rapid space filler while other plants mature, but in any case a seed I can’t wait to sow. There are masses of cosmos, of blue larkspur, campanulas, tobacco, aanemones, romneya and vetch: lightweight plants that none the less add up to an extraordinarily festive summer scene.

A memorable feature of the Great Garden, west of the house, is the broad bank, perhaps 60 feet wide, that separates it from the croquet lawn. Is there a bolder border anywhere? The clumps and drifts of semi-wild plants are heroic in scale; the effect exactly what Robinson intended by his invention of the Wild Garden.
A young gardener, his shoulders emerging from the towering tapestry, turned out to be a Breton, trained at Kerdalo, then at Great Dixter, and working his way round England. England, he told me, is the only place to learn gardening. William Robinson’s first book was Gleaning from French Gardens. How appropriate that a Frenchman is gleaning in his surviving masterpiece.