“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer”. Blake might have added (and probably meant) the politician.

I love reading Blake. He is the hippy’s Samuel Johnson: trenchant, terse, and often deep. These lines came to me in a context that might surprise you; reading the Annual Report of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. The M.P.G.A. does good, horticulturally, in minute particulars. Since it was founded in 1862 to transform derelict sites in London into green oases for recreation it has touched hundreds of little-known corners and turned them green. Often only the locals notice, but a tree or a bench or a planting of bulbs can be a very worthwhile contribution. This is basically what the Association does: it gives small grants where they are keenly appreciated.

A long-established and respected body can be useful in other ways: its moral backing can put gentle pressure where it can do good …….. carefully, though, and never General Good (see Blake above).
I was delighted to be asked by the chairman to succeed my friend Michael Birkett as President of this modest body, and of course accepted.

It is often the play of light or the surprise of scent that triggers moments of real rapture in the garden; surges of feeling that go beyond the pleasures and satisfaction of growing plants.

I just had a moment of raspberry rapture. This season has been perfect for them. I have never seen such a crop on our tall-growing canes. Lashings of gentle rain after the three month drought seems to be a perfect recipe – and picking raspberries in the rain may be a perverse sort of pleasure, but it has an appropriately Scottish feel.

Suddenly at nine in the evening of the longest day, while I in my Barbour was deep in the leaves, plunging to the heart of the bushes for the ripest fruit, the sun broke from the clouds and the raspberries became gleaming jewels among jade leaves. I felt elevated to a gardening nirvana, my senses (my mouth, too) overflowing with the purest pleasure.

Here’s another funny thing about the French. They have the world’s most beautiful, best kept, most photogenic, most productive and various, most orderly and desirable vegetable gardens. But where does the veg go? It never turns up at table.

The mystery deepens. French markets are a wonder. There can be as many photographers as customers around the jewel-like trays of fruit and veg in the dappled light of a summer market place. The restaurant across the way? It gives you a few radishes and, with your Suprême de Whatever, a little plate of sticky rice.

I exaggerate of course. But we’re just home from a few days’ journey, in perfect early summer weather, from the Côte d’Azur to Burgundy. We went back, 46 years later, to the hotel at Lamastre in the Ardèche that Elizabeth David sent us to on our honeymoon. Chez Barattero no longer has rooms, but the restaurant is still in the family, and still offers its famous Pain d’Ecrevisses Sauce Cardinal and Poularde de Bresse en Vessie. Vegetables? There were a few

pretty little carrots. Barattero may be in a time warp, but we then stayed at a château known for its Table d’Hôte and distinguished for its potager. A deep terrace on the south side of its hotel is a model of generous cultivation. An old orangery is now a prolific potting shed, where the rotovators and sprays crowd in among enormous benches of seedlings ready for pricking out, the seed packets on sticks promising every known variety of succulent leaf and root. Raspberry canes are trained along the walls, irresistibly ready to pick. The tomato patch is the size of a small vineyard. And the deep crumbly tilth ………

Dinner? A little lettuce salad with mushrooms and croutons. Then Blanquette de Veau with rice. You could just detect carrots: red dice in the veal sauce. Never a green leaf, no potato, no courgettes or beans.

But in the gastronomic temple of Dijon, Le Pré aux Clercs (you’ll think we do nothing but eat), things got worse. The melting and mega-rich piece of beef in red wine sauce was accompanied by….. a spoonful of rhubarb purée. That was the nearest we came to a vegetable in the whole evening.

I have a theory. The grander the meal, or the more the cook wants to impress, the less chance you have of seeing the produce of the potager.

In my dreams I see the Potage Garbure I ate years ago in a hotel in the Franche Comté. Cabbage, beans, peas, potatoes, turnips, onions, carrots, kale, tomatoes, nettles and herbs could all be seen and tasted in the translucent broth. The tureen was tall, the ladle battered silver.
Oh France, why do you hoard your true riches?

The other morning we had a visit from a combined party of readers of Hortus and supporters of The Garden Museum. (I dare say most of them are both). Is there a better treat for a gardener than the company of like-minded, well-informed fellow-sufferers in his own garden?

It was an enthralling morning, because of course everybody sees something different, conversation goes off at all angles, and you end up absorbing far more information than you dispense. It was also a beautiful morning, mild and rose-scented, each plant full of promise and my most egregious mistakes still more or less in embryo so early in the season. The week before I had turned the hose on the climbing roses, which with nothing to drink were seemingly stuck in bud. Almost unanimously they responded. The rose of the moment, to my eye, was Madame Alfred Carrière (or Mad Alf, as one visitor called it) hanging heavy heads of pink-tinged white from the tops of Ilex kohneana, the noble ‘chestnut-leaved’ holly. Unless it was Scharlachglut, scarlet and gold, lunging out from twenty feet up in the glossy green of an incense cedar.

A minor player in the borders that won a surprising amount of admiration was the little Amsonia hubrichtia, a pool of pale blue stars beside the almost royal blue of a tradescantia, just across from the identical indigo of Baptisia australis and Clematis x durandii.

We shall be hearing much more of the Garden Museum. Christopher Woodward, the director, is steering it boldly out of its Lambeth backwater into the mainstream of modern gardening. Just now there is an excellent exhibition of Tom Stuart-Smith’s work. But his future plans include more exhibition space, building on to provide a possible London base for such bodies as The Garden History Society and/or The Association of County Gardens Trusts, and the essential task of building an archive of such primary material as designers records and plans.

Spring is in the air …….

Trad’s Diary began in the first issue of The Garden, Volume 100 part 6 of the R.H.S. Journal, in June 1975. I happened to look it up because it contained the first article on The Chelsea Physic Garden; up to then, as Allen Patterson said in the article, ‘something of a mystery to contemporary Londoners. Its four acres of fascinating garden beside the Thames are never open to the public’. In 1975, for the first time, Patterson, its new curator, made arrangements with the R.H.S. for ‘Fellows’ (as we were then called) to visit it on certain days.

We were there again last week, for an evening party to celebrate the installation of a new curator, Christopher Bailes. Having given Christopher his first gardening job, 39 years ago, I felt not only a proprietary interest but a surge of pride, augmented bythe spectacular blooming of what was once a pretty humdrum botanical garden, however historic. The four acres are now a brilliant demonstration of horticulture at its most business-like, regimented in order beds at one end, then turning more and more romantic among the trees towards the river. Towering over the guests on the lawn by the house where Philip Miller wrote his Gardener’s Dictionary 350 years ago is London’s finest rose: Rosa brunonii from the Himalayas, having consumed the whole canopy of an ancient catalpa and clearly longing for another.

Trad, in that first article, dedicated the new magazine ‘to be the link between serious gardeners everywhere ……. To report all that is new and interesting, or that needs explanation, either on the scientific or on the aesthetic side of horticulture?’ It is a promise many editors have made down the years.

The R.H.S. was foolish to abandon the term ‘fellows’ for its members, not long after the time I am talking about. It should have been retained as a mark of seniority for those who had been loyal for, say, 25 years. Now we learn it is coming back, but as a sweetener for a substantial cheque made out to the Society. Autre temps …..

‘Roses at their peak’ is one of the notes I write in my diary every year – but never quite as early as this.12 months ago we were actually anxious about them: our daughter was getting married and roses were the main theme of the party décor. They peaked on cue: June 26th, while this year the entry went in on June 2nd.

The ‘peak’ is a pretty artificial concept; to me it means the moment just before we have to start dead-heading the bush-roses, when the major climbers are just revealing how far they have scrambled with outbreaks of colour high in the trees. You can see and smell the flowers on a bush more easily, but the ultimate rose picture is one of swags and flying sprays

far out of reach, sending down showers of perfume and petals as you stand wondering below.

The peak of the garden here, its most thrilling spot, has migrated from the concentration of its walled centre, where roses make a patchwork with a score of other flowers; alliums and thalictrums, campanulas and day lilies, Aruncus and poppies and delphiniums, to a secret corner of the wood. Standing there, bathed in sweet perfume, I look up through an arch of a ‘Felicia’, never pruned and stooping from 12 feet or so, mingling with ‘Natchez’, a tousle-flowered philadelphus. The grey/pink Rosa glauca has somehow infiltrated above head height, carrying my eyes up to ‘Wedding Day’, ascending in plateaux and glacis of cream and white through a pear tree into the flowering branches of an acacia.

Most soul-melting of all, though, glimpsed through the flanking bushes, are the apricot-fleshy-white flowers of ‘Treasure Trove’ surging over a little bower of the purple clematis ‘President’. This is Eden, and words cannot express its beauty.

The green scones of Cork

Do I have a weakness in the Carpe Diem department? I suspect it’s because I find I take less pleasure than I should (certainly than most others do) in the full-on pleasure of, say, a field of tulips or exotic summer bedding. Why should it mar my enjoyment that when it’s over, that’s that? After all it’s even more true of a plate of food.

Anticipation, on the other hand, gives me a disproportionate amount of pleasure. My friends thought I was crazy when I showed them my incipient arboretum: a field of sticks with labels. The analogy of laying-down wine is obvious. Am I really enjoying bottles that I won’t open for years? You bet I am.

These reflections always come round again at Chelsea time. My second, if not my first, thought is ‘what next?’ When the white
foxgloves are over what will there be to look at? Carpe diem. Enjoy what is in front of your eyes. And this year there was so much to enjoy that I did just that. Carpe without carping, as one might say.

The annual Trad Award went this year to Diarmuid Gavin’s extravaganza – though not to the flying contraption that reminded me of The Night Garden, the Ninky Nonk and Iggle Piggle. What I loved was the soft Irish greenery underneath: the soft scones of box and waving grasses (the wind was a great help) among pale circular pools.

Green was the theme in my other favourite garden, too: the Malaysian jungle around a quite marvellous pavilion like a giant barcode ending in a bracket. They were, of course, all tender exotic plants. I tried to convert it mentally into hardy evergreens, but after the experience of last winter it would not be worth trying.
Inside what I still call the marquee my favourite was Raymond Evison’s clematis tunnel, bold enough to take on the rosarians at their own game but in the pastel poetry of clematis.

To Heveningham to enjoy the sight of a great showhouse of the 18th century being restored to its original purpose and on its original scale. If this vast austere house is not quite ducal in its pretensions, it still rides the green swell of Suffolk like a grey battleship of formidable proportions and power, its little flotilla of follies around it. It is the archetype of the sort of pile that was pulled down in hundreds in the last century, built for occasions that will never recur and dynasties that have died out.

Among gardeners the word has already got round that earth has been moved here. Perhaps it is not so surprising that the style of landscaping that used to involve hundreds of navvies and wheelbarrows has come back into fashion with the bulldozer and the JCB. Charles Jencks led the movement with his garden of Cosmic Speculation, awakening memories of the sublime geometrical folly of Studley Royal three centuries ago. Kim Wilkie has since mastered the art of digging,

sculpting and terracing on a scale scarcely seen since the British dug Maiden Castle. At Boughton House in Northants he had the audacity to sink a massive hole where you expect an avenue; at Heveningham he has carved out an amphitheatre to give the massive house a stage.

Houses at the bottom of steep slopes always find themselves in an awkward situation. Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire is another example that feels trapped under its hill. The Wilkie solution at Heveningham has been to remove all traces of the garden along the south front of the house and cut the slope back in dramatic arcs that splendidly complement the immense unadorned façade.

Moreover he has contrived the terracing so as to retain three veteran cedars on the bank, swerving his curves to avoid them and emphasis their status. It is masterly performance, calling out for an opera company on the largest scale.

There is work on hand all around. The orangery is still in a state of gracious déshabille (and all the better for it) but the walled gardens are coming back to life, orchestrated with characteristic firmness, good sense and sparkling taste by Arabella Lennox-Boyd. In the wider park, and for miles around, (the estate has grown to over 3000 acres) the owner’s love of trees is obvious – he, by the way, is John Wood of Foxton’s fame. Countless new plantations of native trees are not only protected by tall tree-guards but are actually pruned to make shapely specimens. That doesn’t happen in an ordinary forest.