Can birds see through windows? It depends, I suppose, on light and reflections. The pigeons pecking the buds of the sophora in the churchyard under our bedroom window in the morning certainly see me with my air rifle making to open the casement.

Can they hear noises inside the house? The mating ducks seem to love the courtyard under the bathroom window. This morning a pair of mallard were fussing energetically about until I turned on the shower. Then they stopped on the edge of the grass, looking up, heads cocked, and went on looking and listening all the time the water was running. When I picked up my towel they started squabbling again. I wonder if Gilbert White noticed the same thing. But no, of course, he didn’t have a shower.

The golden Water River

Back from China, excited and jetlagged. Beijing was still grey with winter, raw, yellow-hazy and smelling of pollution, but throbbing with life. The Chinese seem to live faster, louder, more Italianly than other races. You see more smiles – or am I just a romantic traveller?

At last, on a second attempt, I saw The Forbidden City. Versailles, Schönbrunn, the Kremlin …….eat your hearts out. There is no palace to compare.The scale, the spaces, the wide sky, the variations in a consistent style of building deserve the word awesome, however you pronounce it.

The Colossal rectangle, within its two miles of stone-built moat an arrow-shot wide, progresses from larger courts to smaller ones. The first vast space, the Outer Court, is traversed by the meandering Golden Water River, crossed by five stone bridges and lined with pale stone culminating in carved bosses. In the centre is the Hall of Supreme Harmony, 125 feet high. There are no trees, no plants, no shade, nothing green. The floor is brick.

The Inner Court is smaller and more complex, with more buildings and more subdivisions, but still no trees. It must be a punishing place in summer to parade and process, or go emperor-visiting.

You penetrate further, more marble steps and ramps, more pavilions: still no green. At last you come to the emperor’s residence. Behind it, cloistered and gated, lies his garden.

The impression it gives is that the intimacy and luxury of a garden are something private, reserved for family and friends. I have always found the freakish contorted rocks of important Chinese gardens hard to enjoy. Where the Japanese choose stones softened by the ages and deploy them (not always, but usually) in harmonious naturalistic groups, the Chinese try to evoke the crags of the Yangtze gorges that figure on so many painted scrolls. Without, it seems to me, much success.

But suddenly, in the palace garden, the pavilions grow gorgeous, their roofs elaborate, their eaves gilded. Beds of paeonies line the walks under ancient trees.

There are pots of flowers, and flowering trees, and trees sculpted to look like embroidery. There is joy in artifice, and joy in nature. In all the pomp of ultimate power, the garden is the ultimate pleasure.

Privacy: the Emperor's garden

What do you do when the local district council distributes daffodil bulbs to its parish councils, with the implied instruction to suburbanize the countryside? Braintree Council has spent taxpayers’ money on brazen varieties that are bad enough in a garden but a disaster along a country lane. And this is supposed to be a period of austerity.

Of course there are people who will like them, and want their country lanes cheered up. But we don’t plant flowering cherries in the place of oaks, and we shouldn’t plant nursery varieties of bulbs where there should be wild flowers – including, of course, our native daffodil.

The only recourse I can think of is a springtime spot of Round Up.

Box chickens at Palheiro

Not being able to grow azaleas, or not being able to grow roses, lets you off the hook. Your soil, or your climate, has already set you a gardening template before you start.

What hell, then, it must be to live and garden in Madeira, where the soil is absurdly fertile, the climate immoderately moderate, and all the decisions about what to grow are yours. That at least is how it seems on a February excursion when Essex is distinctly piano and Madeira just gearing up to bloom, with only the camellias and magnolias, plenty of azaleas, a whole lot of cherries, strelitzias, orchids, and twenty things quite beyond my ken in flower. The whole island is an invitation to garden. I’m told it’s too cool for dates or coconuts, and not great for alpines, but anything else is worth a go.

If you stay in Funchal there are two gardens, at least, that are virtually compulsory visits. The first is the destination of the glorious cable-car ride up from the seashore to Monte (the Portugese say ‘Mont’), the rather surprising final seat of the final Hapsburg emperor, the Blessed (another surprise) Karl I of Austria. The unfortunate inheritor was exiled to Madeira after the First World War and died at his villa at Monte in 1922.

The villa (which is no oil painting) now belongs to Joe Berardo, a tycoon with tastes for which eclectic is too mild a word. Its precipitous site, a forested ravine, contains a bewildering collection of plants, ponds, bridges, japaneseries, a history of Portugal in azulezos, magnificent trees and the church where the last emperor rests in peace. One would say more theme-park than garden,

Except that 20 gardeners labour to keep it ship-shape, from its sea of azaleas to its astonishing pond of coloured carp. Something for everyone.

Compulsory garden number two is a more sober affair, skilfully horticultural, quiet and private, full of wonderful things. Quinta do Palheiro has seen generations of Blandys come and go, each riding down the steep cobbled ways to the family wine lodge by the sea, where their strange brown aromatic wine sleeps the generations away.

Nothing could look more comfortable than the tall white villa among centenarian trees. Huge Canary Island pines, tulip trees, mighty gum trees rear up above lanes of magnolias in meadows of white asphodel. The wisterias were in bud, the box hedges bright green with their spring flush. There is always a worm in the bud, of course, even in such a paradise. Camellias the size of rooms were covered with flowers, but the flowers were turning brown in their prime with petal blight.

Madeira is supremely comfortable for human beings, never baking, never frosty, sprinkled year round with a reasonable ration of rain. In February last year the rain turned unreasonable. Funchal was flooded and fifty people lost their lives. Summer calls for irrigation, but irrigation is provided by the levadas (we would say ‘leets’) that thread and tunnel their way over from the rainy north side of the island. On balance humidity is the gardener’s problem. But who wouldn’t run the risk?

Here’s another of those ‘What sort of gardener are you?’ tests. How do you feel about plants seeding themselves in the gravel of your drive? I mean desirable plants, probably ones you put in the bed by the door or under the windows. One Essex neighbour of ours has the art to perfection. Annie Turner (She lives at Helions Bumpstead, and sometimes opens her immaculate garden for charity) has, to my mind, the world’s most alluring front door. You pick your way to it among plants you long to touch, scattered with artful abandon from under the windows to halfway across the drive. Cars? They take another route.

There are obvious candidates that enjoy the shelter of the wall: cistus (C. Silver Pink for one) and rosemaries, including the marginally tender ones. Euphorbia wulfenii in its best forms is almost too happy here; they need discipline – and echiums, their perfect companions, love the conditions. The variegated Sisyrinchium striatum stands up perkily in its pale fans. Hollyhocks can be overwhelming and block the house windows. Alstroemerias are not advised:
they eventually push up through and flop over everything else. Alliums are hard to control, too. Nerines for October, of course.

The prickly green-and-white-leaved Silybum, the far-spreading fretted leaves of Geranium palmatum (it has survived this winter unscathed), wallflowers in their element, seeded between the bricks and hanging down the wall,. Almost too much of the daisy-froth of Erigeron karvinskianus, some gracefully arching Dierama pulcherrimum …… the tide of twenty different plants flow over the gravel, seeding and rooting. In reality Annie is always editing it; most of the plants will come up with a simple pull (which means giving them to visitors is easy). My latest acquisition (I must be careful what I admire) is a knee-high weeping caryopteris. I called Annie to check a name. What had I forgotten? Only the Corsican hellebores, the white valerian (loved by hummingbird hawkmoths), the Verbena bonariensis, the saffron crocuses, the cerinthes, the pinks, the Daphne odora, the early dwarf irises …….. (you do reach the front door eventually).

I was first attracted to the idea of a drive swamped by seedlings at Keith Steadman’s Wickwar nursery near Chipping Sodbury, many years ago. But then his whole garden was swamped by plants too rampant for their space but too precious to touch. It was hard to find the garden walls themselves. When I let the tide advance too far at Saling I was firmly told that cars (it is a turning circle) have precedence. `Why can’t they share the space?’ was my question. The wheel tracks would look good where they discouraged the tapestry of growth. But I often claim that untidiness is interesting – and don’t always get away with it.

It’s been going on too long. It’s too long since a fashionable dress shop dared to put any other colour in its window – except black. And now I read that every one of the six five-star hotels opening in London this spring is settling on beige and brown as its colour theme.

What are hotels doing in Trad’s Diary? Eyes are eyes. A sense of visual appropriateness and stimulus is basic (or should be) to us gardeners. Where are the chintzes, the mad Indian floral hyperboles that tell you it’s England?

Chintzes come from the Far East, it’s true, but then so did half our favourite garden plants. What if the passion for plain beige should invade our flower borders, too? Too late, I’m afraid – it already has. Grasses are doing to our borders what beige curtains on taupe walls are doing to our rooms: condemning them and us to the tedium of good taste.

Yesterday was our grand-daughter’s first birthday. Her friends came to tea – dressed, I was thrilled to see, like wildflowers in a meadow, medleys of pink and red and blue. How long must we wait until Prada and Armani and Nicole Fahri wake up to the full spectrum of colour, and our hoteliers rediscover the orient?

PS  I just walked up Bond Street to check on the colours, and in fairness I should add grey, sand, drab, slub, grunge, mud….. and of course many more shops.

Last week we were contemplating a tedious task: raking up all the leaves that fell so tardily, from the oaks especially. In many places they hid the grass completely, threatening to kill it. Strange: usually the earthworms take care of them, hauling them down into the earth in bizarre little brown bunches that stand up rather like breast-pocket hankies. But of course when the ground froze the worms dived for cover, leaving the leaves unharvested.

It is over 50 Fahrenheit degrees now; growing temperature. Just in time to save the grass (or most of it) the worms have got going, working the soil like gardeners, breaking the panned surface into pimples and scars and casts, adding the leaves to a wonderful organic recipe underground. Thank heaven for worms.

The first shrub to recover its poise and perform, as though the ice and snow had never been, is the witch hazel. I have a bunch of its yellow octopus-flowers in front of me on the kitchen table now, filling the room with their unique smell, like a mixture of ranges and fish oil (just what I swallow at breakfast, indeed: orange juice and cod liver oil pills). The octopus tentacles (there are ten or so but so writhy it is hard to count. Why does my reference book say four?) emerge from a miniature red-brown flower with a gold-stamened centre on the tiniest scale. Which part, I wonder, issues the powerful smell? What insect is it they are hoping to attract at this time of year? I thought flies liked disgusting smells.

Iris stylosa is back in business in its granny purple after the freeze, and the earliest snowdrops, Galanthus elwesii, with their pale grey leaves and oversize flowers, altogether lacking the pixy charms of our natives. Mahonias are flowering again and Daphne bholua, its smart dark leaves destroyed, is starting to open flower buds at the tips of bare branches.

Viburnum bodnantense is taking up where it left off when the snow came, Lonicera fragrantissima is scenting the corner of the kitchen garden, and this morning the first winter aconites turned their yellow lights on.

The box parterre at Bodysgallen Hall

We tend to start the New Year with a few days walking in North Wales. The day’s are too short, but with luck the sun shines on Snowdon and its attendant Moels, a quarter the height of the Alps but almost as beautiful in their snowy robes. You can choose your foreground; a castle, a garden, a Telford bridge, the pier and the creamy Victorian parade of Llandudno ……..

We stayed at the hotel with perhaps the most distinguished garden of any; Bodysgallen on the Llandudno peninsula. (Another which rivals it is its sister-hotel, Middlethorpe Hall in York. Wonderful that any hotel should keep such an ambitious garden – and in thoroughly good order). Over tea by the fire I discovered Steven Anderton’s recent book, Discovering Welsh Gardens, with photographs by Charles Hawes. Steven moved to Wales from Essex not long ago and set about exploring his new country, both its long-established gardens and its often surprising new ones. I always enjoy his
writing. He has a proper journalists’s questioning mind, not avoiding tricky questions. I looked to see what he says about Bodysgallen first, of course. The rambling stone tower house, Tudor in aspect though largely Victorian in reality, looks down over a series of enclosures, of which the uppermost is the most memorable, in effect a large stone tank filled with an apparently ancient box parterre.

The garden was developed in the late nineteenth century by Lady Augusta Mostyn, by all accounts a lady of great energy and benevolence. The centre-piece of the existing garden bears her name, as Lady Augusta’s Rose Garden: a vast parterre of fine proportions but a pretty poor showing of roses, as Steven Anderton points out. Perhaps, he says, the soil needs changing. In each garden he discusses, or most, he is ready to be critical and points out what needs doing – something singularly lacking in most garden writing. Christopher Lloyd enjoyed using words like ‘dismal’ or ‘banal’, but writers, and particularly magazine editors, usually feel constrained to be perhaps a shade too polite.

For editors it is a particular quandary. I remember when I was in change of The Garden stepping gingerly, I’m sure too gingerly, around features that called for criticism. After all, thinks the editor, the owners don’t have to let me in to write about the apple of their eye, and if we say what we really think about their lawns perhaps no one else will.