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.

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.