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.

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.