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.

By the pond

There was frost first thing, but after breakfast the temperature and the wind both started rising. The sheltering trees started to sigh, then hiss. The last yellow leaves parted from high branches and flew about the garden like bewildered birds. By the cascade, though, cupped in a hollow and protected by evergreens, the only movement was the steady tinkle of water into the shining pond and the arrival, fluttering to earth, of leaves from distant trees.

The cascade has two falls ; the first a mere forearm deep, pouring no faster than wine from a bottle into a little rocky trough. It slithers, then, down a twisting channel in the limestone to a beak of rock that parts it into two gleaming dribbles, to fall from shoulder height between mossy boulders. Two splashy sounds, therefore, in counterpoint.

The pond is crystal clear this morning, floored with the maple leaves that sift down to form a bright mosaic on the bottom. Yellow hosta leaves have melted over a rock into the mirror beside reflected ferns. A willow with leaves as fine as rosemary trails in the water. Drops condensing on the branches high above land portentously in crystal rings that overlap and merge and disappear before they reach the bank. How self-contained and secret this pond life seems ; how removed from the gusts shaking the real world. 

Spontaneity. Is it more than a positive gloss on indecision – or indeed on a mistake? Positive it certainly is; it suggests warm-hearted effusions. Spontaneous malice is just conceivable, I suppose, but Iago and the ugly sisters seem to have the monopoly. No: if spontaneity gets into a review it counts as a plus – even in gardening.

So how do you recognize it? There is no forethought in spontaneity, but nor is it a synonym for afterthought. Afterthought: you stand back, survey your handiwork, and decide that a splash of orange would set the blues and purples singing. Spontaneity can’t undo: to move something out of the picture would be an afterthought. But spontaneity implies more: it is self-created, like combustion in a haystack. The elements present reach a point in their relationship where equilibrium breaks down, or fizzes up, with surprising results. It is sudden, inevitable and unarguable. It is also a quality desired by the Dutch Wave school being celebrated at the moment in an exhibition at the Garden Museum.

Says its leader (or one of them), Piet Oudolf, ‘inside I want to be spontaneous.

But I know I must control.’ The resulting tension is the attraction of the Dutch Wave style – even if its influence on this country is still only recognized among the hortiscenti. And perhaps in the number of grasses offered in garden centres.

Christopher Woodward, the Garden Museum director, has published a fascinating little booklet to accompany the exhibition. While in this country, he writes, we ‘languidly elaborate on old patterns’, Oudolf and company ‘wash their eyes’ to see everything afresh.

Working as they mainly do on the modest scale of Dutch domestic gardens, their medium is usually restricted to herbaceous perennials – or indeed annuals – with hedges playing a vital structural role.. The essence is focus on plant details (they love, for instance, the structure of unbellifers) and above all colour. They evoke watercolours, with their transtional wash-passages – if there is such a term – and their interwoven patches and bands of grasses and astilbes and thistles and knotweeds. In his contribution to the booket Stephen Lacey says he originally found the new Dutch planting ‘wild and scruffy’ – before he realised it could be ‘revolutionary, highly refined’. “Scruffy’, ‘spontaneous’: could they amount to the same thing?

The style began in the 1980s in nurserymens’ gardens in Holland, inspired, at least in part, by the work of Jacques Wirtz ten years before in Belgium. Wirtz re-invented the hedge to make memorable, even monumental, landscapes for the Belgian haute bourgeoisie. He used grasses and massed perennials to powerful effect. But Wirtz gardens belong in Belgium’s most prosperous neighbourhoods. The Dutch school were humble nurserymen, starting with little money and working on a small scale – just as the Impressionists did. And it was the Impressionists’ little canvases that found a world-wide market.

There has hardly been a really dark night for a month. When I part the curtains after midnight the lawn has been painted in tiger stripes by the moon shining through the poplars and the Plough has been diamond-bright above the pond. So little or no cloud-cover – and yet no frost. There has been ground-frost on several mornings, but no cold enough air to crisp and brown the leaves of poplars, even, or ashes. Border flowers may be dying away, but their plants are standing green and unscathed, while roses keep offering limp efforts.

It is the slowest-moving autumn I remember, the fullest in volume of mellowing leaves and the brightest for the roadside hedges, as the maples move from green to a medley of yellows. Since the elms went, field maple has become our principal hedge-row tree, and nothing in the countryside holds more consistent and enduring gold. Norway maple is brighter yellow, and wild cherry glows with a pink-blushing light. The oaks are undecided; all the chromatic possibilities of slow decay still before them.

I always reckon on having the most candle-power in the first week of November – and always from the same trees. Japanese maples are the latest. First to turn are varieties of Acer japonicum: ‘Aconitifolium’ is reliably orange-scarlet, at its best now. A.j.’Vitifolium’ is following it hard in a paler set of colours; yellow, scarlet and pink. Acer koreana has turned an even pillarbox red with no variation, a little matt compared with the best. A. mono is quite different, taller with shiny three-lobed leaves (sometimes five-) rather like starfish, that hesitate between green, scarlet and purple. Osakazuki is celebrated as the best and brightest of all, starting green, now deep maroon, eventually traffic-light red with bulbs that are definitely not energy-saving.

But to me the ultimate performance is from the big bush of tiny fretted leaves called Acer palmatum ‘Seiryu’. It starts the autumn by fading from fresh green to a darker shade that modulates into purple and maroon, even within one tiny segmented leaf. Then current starts to run through it, the filaments heat up, glow and begin to burn. Scarlet brightens to orange, then flecks with gold. Eventually – and there is still two weeks to go, given fair weather – the bush becomes a burning fiery furnace, hottest of all, it seems, as dusk fills the garden.

Acer palmatum 'Sengokaku'

Mid-October and still no real sign of autumn. The last-minute salvias in their brilliant range of primary colours are as good as they are likely to get before they are stopped by frost. Most gardeners seem to agree that it’s hardly worth the trouble for something whose flowers you will only enjoy for two, three of maybe four weeks – but you wouldn’t say that about a spring bulb, would you?

The only trees that are clearly signalling their intention are the predictably early leaf-droppers: Prunus sargentiana is reddening, Fraxinus ‘Jaspidea’ yellowing (but Fraxinus ‘Raywood’ – see my Tree of the Month – only just starting to flush at the top). It was very different in Herefordshire last weekend, on a visit with the I.D.S. to one of England’s greatest maple collections, Hergest Croft, for a maple (or Acer, as we anoraks call them) study day. The climax is still some way off, but the many forms of Acer palmatum and japonicum are certainly firing up. Acer ‘Sengo-kaku’ (‘Senkaki’ to me, and probably you) has already reached its special pitch of delicate pale yellow. It was à propos of its name that Lord Ridley declared there is a special circle of hell for botanists who change long-honoured names.

We learned how to sow maple seed (as quickly as you can, complete with its wings, before it dries out and goes dormant, in any damp but open compost. Leave outside for the winter, keeping rodents at bay). How to do that? Aha: attend the Rodent Study Day.

Grafting came next – and is something I am going to try. A fascinating hour was passed contemplating (photos of) maple flowers. Does any family of trees have a comparable range of flower designs and colours (and seasons)? Far from their leaves in their extraordinary variety being the only attraction of maples, their flowers, fruits – and of course barks – make every other genus look positively pedestrian.

The stop after Hergest Croft was Llanover near Abergavenny, where Robin Herbert, former president of the R.H.S., has been collecting trees for 50 years or so. It was here that I photographed the coral-bark maple illustrated above. (Easier to call it that than to get back into the Sengo-kaku/Senkaki tangle).

I had never expected to see Quercus alba, the American ‘white oak’, as a big tree in Britain. The books all say it doesn’t work here. The Llanover specimen is not a monster, but large, handsome and vigorous. Among many marvels (one of them the rare American butternut, Carya cordiformis, a 60 foot tower of butter) we saw a huge Viburnum cylindricum from the Chinese Himalayas. The USP of V. cylindricum is its big ovate leaves, covered with a thin layer of wax that takes a signature perfectly. Hillier’s manual warns against hooligans signing them – which I suppose makes me a hooligan.

My recent Flower of the Week, Kirengeshoma palmata, struck a chord with a kind correspondent in Japan, who tells me that the name is an exact phonetic equivalent of what the Japanese call it. The first professor of botany at Tokyo University, in the nineteenth century, called it a yellow Anemonopsis macrophylla, (which it certainly resembles), coining a word that my correspondent describes as ‘soul-stirring; nice to see and to say’.

Kirengeshoma is an endangered plant in the mountains around Tokyo today, threatened with extinction by, among things, the deer. ‘Please look after your plant’, she says, ‘the muntjac kept far away. Yours in Essex might one day be the last survivor as Japan turns into a tropical island’. I love these notes from another culture. It is too easy to see our gardens and plants only through our own eyes. The common language of gardening and botany, though, can give us glimpses of a strange kind of poetry.

Every year at this time the hornets come into my study to die. I don’t know why, or even how they get in.

I sit down to work on a sunny morning, the anemones shining in at the window and the breeze scattering yellow poplar leaves on the lawn. Suddenly a buzz-bomb of a hornet whizzes by my head and lands with a slap on the table. They are huge; a good inch long.

They buzz around aimlessly, slamming into the windows or splatting down on my desk, in the bin, on the carpet ……. so far, happily, not on me.

There are four in the room now. I’ve opened the window in the hope they will discover the great outdoors again. Two did, a moment ago, but most of them stay, soon to be found dead on the floor. I pick up four or five a day. The chimney is closed by a sealed log-stove. The doors and windows are usually shut. Yet this morning the end of the runway at Martlesham would be a quieter place to work.