I give myself one point for an English name and two for a Latin one. Names of weeds, that is. I play silly mind games in my weeding time, or recite poems – or even sing songs. One of the games is categorizing my fellow gardeners into tribes or tendencies – of which those who enjoy weeding is, or so I’m told, one of the rarest. I don’t believe a word of it. Weeding is the very essence of gardening – and in May, when leaves are at their most aromatic, its most sensuous task.

There is, though, a clear division between those who relish perfecting an already orderly picture and those who are only happy tackling chaos. It is partly, of course, a matter of how many acres you command, but those whose idea of heaven is rearranging granite chips around a Lewisia are likely to be daunted by my idea of a great afternoon: pulling nettles, digging docks and gathering great sticky armfuls of goose grass (cleavers for one extra point, Galium aparine for two).

I worked my way this afternoon to an isolated and overgrown rose bush, a tall dome spangled with dishevelled pink flowers in a wide skirt of cow parsley (Queen Anne’s Lace, Anthriscus sylvestris). The scent reached me yards away, achingly sweet. I picked a flower (it is R. Californica plena) and asked a visitor what it reminded her of. ‘My mother’, she said.

No, weeding is the wrong word for the springtime editing of the flora that distinguishes a garden from a meadow.

It’s still too soon to have a final body count, but there are a few victims of last winter I’m sure we shan’t be seeing again. Acacia pravissima, for example, the mimosa with odd square-shaped blue leaves, was always a long shot, even tucked into our south-westest corner by the thatched barn, sheltered on all sides. Minus ten was too much to ask.

A much greater cause of grief, and also surprise, was a long-established bush of Ribes sanguineum, the red-fuchsia-flowered gooseberry from California, discovered, like so many things, by Archibald Menzies early in the 19th century. Bean said it was hardy in the open at Kew; here it had a super-snug berth. Could cold perhaps not be the culprit? Drought, maybe?

Meanwhile I’m fairly sure we won’t see a reprise from the majority of hebes, nor from an only recently planted Hoheria ‘Glory of Amlwch’. New Zealand doesn’t see winters like this. Goodbye, Pittosporum tenuifolium. Farewell, Hebe salicifolia (I always thought you were a toughie).

I’m more sanguine about Escallonias, though, and delighted that Abelia triflora, a pale droopy bush, exquisitely scented, is completely unharmed. Its predecessor was eliminated by the winter of 1982/83. In fact my impression so far is that that was a damaging winter here in Essex.

Gardening never features on the Sports pages, yet there is a competitive element in most of us, and looking back on my most active garden-making years I realize I was often really gardening against one friend or another.

Mostly it was John Hedgecoe, an alarmingly creative photographer who in due course became the first Professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art, and sadly died late last year. His last and most ambitious gardening enterprise was at Oxnead Hall in Norfolk, but 30 years ago we were neighbours in Essex and battling it out, tit for tat.

John planted an avenue; I responded with a grove of trees. I built a ‘Japanese’ cascade; back came a fountain. Roses:

John used to tip on neat pig manure for bigger flowers. John introduced us to the architect Sir Freddy Gibberd, who was creating his wonderfully theatrical garden at Marsh Lane on the outskirts of Harlow New Town (for which I fear he must take a great part of the responsibility). Freddy was miles ahead, in time and in resources. (The Corinthian columns from Coutts Bank in the Strand ended up in his garden, and huge rocks from a Welsh reservoir became available to line his little river).

Gibberd’s wife Patricia had a brilliant eye for sculpture, which led in turn to more and more garden incidents – made, incidentally, with the quickest materials to hand: a poplar avenue takes a fraction of the time of a lime one. Ideas came so thick and fast that Freddy would take up the stones of a path he had just laid to make a different one.

It was the right atmosphere for pressing on with one’s own ideas, however half-baked. (I’m sure my garden would be much duller without the lurking spirit of competition. And now I’m just home from another garden that started my fingers itching to do something foolish – if that’s the definition of a folly.

Each time the rains dry up in spring just as the plants push out their sappy shoots I puzzle over what must be happening underground. Is it the big fat powerful-looking roots that elbow weaklings aside and suck up the dwindling moisture in the soil, or is it the fine thread-like roots in their masses that win the greater share? I suspect the threads, with their much greater surface area, do better in separating what water there is from its adherence to soil particles.

How they can keep supplying multiplying leaves with the liquid they need is beyond my imagination. The suction in each stem is transmitted to each minute rootlet – which has its own needs to keep it growing, too. The forces at work to keep every shoot and leaf turgid and functioning are awesome.

There has not been a millimetre of rain here since the scattering we had in March: the five weeks of the year with the greatest demand for water have been supplied entirely from moisture held in the soil by surface tension – and yet I hardly see a limp or drooping shoot.

Certainly growth has been slowed down. I started watering perennials a week ago. Aruncus sylvester (already with flower buds) quickly shot up to three times the height. Delphiniums looked as if they are about to flower at knee height; watering has made things a little better. A young Magnolia ‘Star Wars’, which always seems to overdo its flowering, had scarcely a leaf two weeks ago but fifteen flowers. A can of water a day and it presents a much more balanced picture of flower and leaf. Does localized watering with cans create bedlam below as every rootlet smells water and heads into the damp zone?

It is a comfort to read that there have been years like this before, when summer arrived before the cuckoo. 1893 broke all records for a racing start. In the South of England there was no rain from the end of February to the middle of May. Record temperatures telescoped spring into summer – and summer went on in the same spirit. 1893 was followed by seven years of drought (and 1894 saw record low winter temperatures). But what can you learn from a mere decade or so of seemingly consistent patterns of weather?

This year there have been only a scattering of drops since the last days of February, and April has been the hottest since heaven knows when. One record has been broken which I expect never to happen again: our champion crab apple, the Malus baccata from Siberia that crowns the churchyard gate from our front park with a dome the size of a small Orthodox church was in full flower on Easter Sunday. Only the latest Easter possible (this year it coincided with the Orthodox one) married to the earliest spring we have ever seen could bring this off. Village brides timing their wedding for the crab apple reckon on mid to late May for the photo among its enfolding white boughs.

I set out on Easter morning to list all the flowers in the garden, but soon gave up. It meant listing almost everything that flowers in spring. The back-marker, to my surprise, is the hawthorn in the hedges, just breaking its flower buds with the promise of a deluge of foamy white to follow the magnolias, the cherries and even the crab apples.

Climbing roses have been slightly delayed, it appears, by the long cold winter. The Banksian rose is on schedule, though; a thick yellow blanket around our bedroom windows on the west wall. Gloire de Dijon is tentatively opening on the same wall and Maigold’s first flowers, a bit anaemic compared with its usual brilliant orange, are just appearing. Rosa moyesii is also firing up.

Never has the ash been so far behind the oak. The elm, too, which in Browning’s April is in ‘tiny leaf’, has held back. The oak apart, it seems, our native trees have been less impressed with the premature heat wave than the exotics of the garden.

‘Faites simple’ (was it Voltaire who said it? Or Escoffier?) is often quoted as the soundest, the most essential, stylistic advice. Keep it simple. What does it mean to a gardener? I picture spaces in perfect proportion, a theme of brilliant relevance, an ideal triad of colours, a single tree, or urn, or rock placed precisely to balance a distant spire or crag.

Simplicity – and boredom. How often can you admire the designer’s judgement? The greatest designs have authority, true, which rarely comes from over-complication. You certainly remember a decisive garden better than one made by a ditherer. What Voltaire (or Escoffier) meant, or I hope he meant, is not cut out the fiddly bits, but know what you are aiming for and go for it. Evident intent, consistently pursued, is the winning formula. Decide what you want, and if you are side-tracked clamber back to your original plan as quickly and as gracefully as you can.

I have had an almost heart-breaking message from a correspondent in Japan. The city of Rikuzentakata, she tells me, was protected from the ocean winds by an ancient forest of 70,000 black and red pines. After the tsunami on March 11th one single tree was left standing. ‘Resin oozes from the trunk where the lower branches were ripped off by the power of the waves, but a thick spray of green needles at the top of the 10 metre tree shows it is very much alive’. Nearly 2,500 people in Rikuzentakata perished in the tsunami. ‘I can’t even remember what the town looked like, said one resident; ‘it is so completely gone’. The lone pine is now the symbol of their resolution to rebuild.

‘Overwhelmed by the images of destruction’, writes my pen friend, ‘I decided to watch Monty Don’s programme which I had recorded the evening before the earthquake and had not seen. I could not take my eyes off him. He had a glorious smile, prancing towards the Alhambra. I realized I had not seen a smile in days, that people smile when they are doing what they enjoy, and I felt it was alright to smile again’. ‘I must switch off my computer now to conserve electricity. Please turn yours off too, step outside and celebrate everything and everyone around you. No power source required’.

Short-lived but lovely: Amelanchier laevis at Saling

Surely it isn’t even legal, let alone customary, to have peach trees, pears and apples flowering at the same time. (Except, that is, at Chelsea.) What is ‘Star Wars’, that far from bashful magnolia, doing flowering alongside my peach tree? Indeed, why is my peach still at it, having started flowering in February? This is not season creep but season leap.

The cherries are all flowering together, bar the earliest. But so are the pears from my crusty old Bergamotte d’Automne, now a fifty-footer, to the designer -model Pyrus salicifolia, a ten-foot dome of aluminium leaves and beguiling cream flowers. The apple trees are showing a shy flower or two, the crabs (John Downie in particular) much more than that. Meanwhile the hedges are a foam-bath, dazzling white, of the blackthorn that proclaims bitter weather.

Whatever message the oaks and ashes bring has surely never been more emphatic. The oaks are showing the tender olive green of their emerging leaves while the ashes are still bare black tracery. I fervently hope they are in a muddle too. We have had no rain since the end of February: without a soak we are in trouble.

It is hard to say how much would have happened on the ground if it had rained: how far out should the roses be in the second week of April? Herbaceous plants are holding back. Early flowerers are flowering without growing; I am looking at a clump of perennial honesty that should be at least two feet high when it starts to flower. It is barely one foot. Weeds, on the other hand, are mercifully quiescent too.

Bulbs are in the same plight. Bluebell clumps are small and stunted, showing a few desultory flowers. As for daffodils, they have scarcely opened before they start to shrivel; the idea of an organized sequence has gone by the board. One of the last, and prettiest of all, my favourite ‘Thalia’, a duet of delicate white flowers on each stem, is already looking jaded.

Spring is always a hurry. I regularly complain I need more time to take it all in. But this year reminds me of New England: blink and you’ve missed it. Whatever am I doing sitting scribbling indoors?