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.

‘Pruning’ is too polite a word for what I am doing in the garden at the moment. ‘Hacking back’ describes it more accurately – and it is one of my favourite annual jobs, comparable with weeding, and with the same essential purpose: to rebalance the growth of the past weeks and months in favour of less vigorous plants that I prefer.

I am usually as sentimental as the next gardener, but this is no time for soppiness. People say ‘I can’t cut that, there’s a flower on it’. Let it alone and you’ll have fewer flowers next year. Stragglers go in the buttonhole while I get hacking.

I set out with my favourite Japanese secateurs in my belt and with some particular plant in mind. This morning it was a philadelphus with long new shoots shooting up vertically from its drooping, flowered-out branches. They were pressing down on and shading out whatever grows below.

I haven’t finished with the first philadelphus, cutting off all the old stuff and bringing light and air to a young golden Cotinus, a stylish
but slow growing Trochodendron araliodes and a thicket of epimedium, when I remember another. Then I remember a deutzia, which needs exactly the same treatment to rescue the geraniums underneath. Zigzagging with my barrow from one to the other I suddenly realise that it is two years since I tamed a Mahonia ‘Charity’, now sending its shoots soaring like palm trees above a hapless Viburnum davidii. I clamber into the thicket; the half-inch Mahonia trunks snap easily under my secateurs, revealing their bright yellow wood.

I pass a corner where Viburnum tinus is thrusting its dull and dusty branches out through a pretty white-variegated privet, a form of lonicera nitida I can’t find in the books. It is worth spending time choosing its best feathery sprays to show off against the dark background. A vine maple is invading and shading out the bottom of my Syrian juniper, J. drupacea; more branches join the heap on the barrow.

It is not a methodical process. I look about me, sometimes in the middle of a bush where I have never stood before, and lay about me with my blades. I’m afraid hacking back is the proper expression.

John Grimshaw (John Grimshaw’s Garden Diary) John Grimshaw’s Garden Diary) has responded to my coinage of Pluviophily as a word for the love of rain with one for the scent of it: ‘petrichor’.

Petrichor combines the greek for stone and the blood of the gods. Two Australians coined it in 1964 in the journal Nature, explaining that the smell derives from oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, then absorbed into clay particles. Rain releases it into the air along with another compound, geosmin. These are what we smell – or at least what Australians do.

We have different plants and different soils. Having looked up geosmin (literally ‘earth smell’). I am more inclined to think it is its associated microbes that give me so much pleasure.
Although the long-range forecast suggests the novelty will soon wear off.

The opening of the tomato season is not quite the red letter day it used to be. The first bite of the first Gardeners’ Delight, the little scarlet globe exploding on your palate in a rush of sweetness and greenness, was a moment as important as the first asparagus, broad beans, sweet corn ……. No, more important – it ushered in a long late-summer season of perfumed salads and stews, tomato sharpness with bacon and eggs, the red tomato signature everywhere.

That was before the supermarkets woke up to the variety of tomatoes. There used to be one on their shelves. It was red, round,watery and tasteless. It still has a public – and still appears at breakfast in Greasy Spoons. I started writing about its inadequacies 25 years ago or so, and pestering the press departments of Tesco and Sainsburys. I remember the hallelujah day when one of them called me to say that their purchasing board was in shock. Tomatoes had overtaken bananas in turnover.

In the past three years new varieties have been pouring in, even from growers in England. We started seeing good ripe tomatoes, in pretty funny shapes, some of them, as early as February. It is a wholly benign development; who could not be thrilled?

And my tomato plants? As iffy as ever. But I still nip down to the greenhouse for a surreptitious Gardeners’ Delight.