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.

I’m such a pluviophile (and with so few opportunities to practise my passion) that I find myself watching the rain, or at night listening to it, and trying to calculate how many millimetre marks it is filling in the perspex cone in the kitchen garden. I picture the big juicy drops making the tiny water surface jump, or the minuscule misty ones accumulating on the sides until a nice fat teardrop tumbles to the bottom.

We need rain, almost always, and we sure do enjoy it when it comes.

Last night it was forecast. The BBC weather maps were spot on with light brown, darker brown and light and bright blue amoebas floating across, representing clear, cloudy,drizzly and wet patches (almost always from left to right, on the prevailing wind).

I was swimming when the first little drops made themselves felt, from a merely light grey sky. When rain comes on slowly you know it is the real deal. The merest pitter at 8.00 became a patter by 8.15. By now I was in the conservatory. By 8.30 it was a steady hiss punctuated by urgent tapping. The fishscale panes of the conservatory roof were delivering constant rivulets down the centre of each bay. I went out into the yard; yes, there was the gutter overflowing, splashing and spattering on the paving. It always does this after a dry spell; moss from the roof blocks the downpipe. But I love taking a kitchen stool out, climbing on it and reaching to clear the moss, and the subsequent slosh into the drain.

The smell of the soaking garden is best of all. How does rain release so much scent into the air?

The outdoor trial of our aspidistra, planted out in a bed through one of our coldest winters, with a minimum temperature of -12° C, ended in disappointment. It survived.