‘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.

“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?