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.

When the thaw, sudden and complete, gave us back our garden this morning and I walked on green grass again, I had a flashback to arriving in harbour one summer morning after a week at sea, when I could hardly believe that the earth and its plants have such an all-pervading smell. It was still cold and misty, very different from the balmy summer air that almost chokes you with the scent of hay and honey, but the green/brown scent of growth gave me a surge of joy, and the sight of leaf, twig and bud in all their intricacy, after the dull shroud of snow, made me rush to touch them.

This is what I garden for: the infinity of familiar forms, the sense of potent, complex life in every plant, even in winter-dormant twigs.

Already the elasticity of branches that were prone under snow is restoring their old posture. A few have snapped. The principal swooping bough of an old arbutus in the walled garden has split, and the weight of snow has levered its bole half out of the ground, so that six feet of its trunk is lying on the bare brown border. The cinnamon sheen of the trunk is the main attraction of this tree. Its leaves attract mould in spring and most of its flowers fall off. This is my invitation to do away with it. But no, in its truncated shape I can see the promise of a new tree, more compact and vigorous, possibly even layering itself and forming a splendid strawberry-bearing bush.

Can that be the smell of crown imperials already permeating the sodden soil, or did a fox brush by, or is it just the box hedges ? The cold air is sweet and heavy ; mist has risen from the grey ice covering the moat. Three pigeons clatter out from the grey flint church tower. The grey sky in the west is gashed to reveal its apricot silk lining.

‘The English landscape’, said Horace Walpole, ‘is best appreciated framed and glazed’ – a thought never more apt than when snow still covers the trees two weeks after the blizzard, and the ruts on the drive have frozen into unbreakable ridges. Only a long memory can bring to mind a freeze like this one.

The ground was frozen when the snow fell. The first covering, the transformation of green to ghostlike, the printless revelation of the first morning, was a theme for poetry. The magic doesn’t last long. Is there a more dismal subject for gardeners than the block on all activity while unknown damage is happening unseen?

Better unseen, some argue : at least the snow insulates plants and the ground from the lowest temperatures. But the thermometer dropped before the insulation arrived.What is trapped in there is not exactly snug. Winter closed in on an unconsummated autumn. There were so many leaves still on the trees that the snowy woods look strange : carpeted here, spotted there with leaves, some brown, some still green. Nor did the earthworms get even halfway through their work of gathering leaves and tugging them underground. They must have dived for cover in relative warmth when the soil first felt the chill.

It doesn’t do to count your losses prematurely – let alone to cut away plants that still lie half-buried. Spring is too soon to write plants off, too. There will be shoots from the base of things that will surprise you. The leaf-damage is evident enough – from abelia to yucca. I don’t like the look of ballota, camellias, drimys, embothrium, fuchsia, garrya, hoheria, indigofera, lavenders, myrtle, nerium, olearia, penstemons, rhamnus, salvias, trachycarpus,vitex… Some will surprise us, but I fear a lengthy list of disappointments.

And my aspidistra, the one I tried and failed to kill last winter ?

It is not only autumn colour that has got into a muddle this year. Pigments have not developed in leaves as we expect, but neither has the abscissic acid that seals off the stalks of leaves and lets them part company with their branch. I am looking out of the window at a Stachyurus praecox, which by now should have turned its special bright parchment yellow and dropped its leaves. They are still green, frost-rimmed but neither colouring nor falling. The only colour is below them where Iris foetidissima has opened its pods and bared its scarlet seeds, among prostrate bergenias, their prone leaves a mournful sight.

Last weekend we were in the New Forest for our son’s wedding in Beaulieu parish church, the converted factory of  the abbey destroyed by Henry VIII. Beaulieu is one of the loveliest spots in the south of England, isolated on its tidal river by the wilderness of the New Forest. Crossing Beaulieu Heath in deep frost (it was -7° centigrade) was like Hobbema’s Holland. They were skating on Hatchet Pond (and have been able to for the past three winters; a hat-trick without precedent, they tell me).

The road to Brockenhurst from Beaulieu winds through a grove of ancient oaks and beeches which were still full of leaf. Even the golden birches, sparkling with rime, were holding their leaves. A fine layer of snow on the upper side of every branch turned wide-spreading trees into dancers gesticulating with out-stretched arms. With such movement and such colour the forest became fantastical: a mythological tapestry, sparklingly clear in some places, veiled in others by patches of low mist, and stained, at sunset, with pink and purple light.

2 November - Acer mono behind left, A. koreana right

Having rashly forecast the chromatic choreography of Seiryu, my favourite Japanese maple (see my Tree of the Month), I must eat my words.

It has not caught fire as it did last year. Instead this slow-motion autumn, with no proper cold nights, although a fair amount of
sunshine, has had the results you see in these dated photos: a slow fade into yellow.

Yellow has been the season’s motif.
The field maples have been bulwarks
of bullion along roadsides. Elms, too,
where they still survive. Only oaks
around these fields are deepening in
colour to something approaching
marmalade.

Here is Seiryu over the course of the last
three weeks……..

7 November

11 November

16 November

15 November

At last the BBC is taking gardening seriously, applying to it the sort of production values that make programmes worth watching more than once – and making the most of Alan Titchmarsh.

His hands-on history of garden fashion that started two weeks ago, with Hatfield House representing the (early) 17th century, is the ideal use of his talents. No other presenter could handle these 90-minute entertainments.

The plan is ambitious but simple – and it works. Alan’s so-called ‘secrets’ are the fundamental vocabulary and grammar of garden design; hedges, parterres, topiary, orchards, eye-catchers, perspective, ha-has, ……. We are shown them in their original context, in macrocosm, in contrast in different settings, and in

microcosm, when Alan, with tongue characteristically in cheek, devises and builds a backyard version. The model for perspective may be Vaux-le-Vicomte, but the sample he constructs, with minimum fuss, is bit of trellis, a mirror and a bust taking up no more room than your recycling bins. By the time Alan has draped a bit of honeysuckle and ivy over it you could invite your friends round without shame.

It is far from being just a canter through the usual suspects. Among the designs for a parterre is Tom Stuart-Smith’s extraordinary idea of magnifying the venation of a beech leaf to provide a pattern – which in turn inspires Alan to do something similar at his normal express speed with thyme. In one programme he builds a mount, makes cubes of sedum, creates a ‘step-over’ apple tree hedge ……. and thoroughly enjoys himself.

It seemed odd, I thought, taking Hatfield as the model of a 17th century garden (with due obeisance to Tradescant) while admitting that the whole garden has been created (rather than recreated) in the past fifty years. But it emphasises the truth that a garden is an artefact. If you can’t start centuries ago these is no time like the present.