Short-lived but lovely: Amelanchier laevis at Saling

Surely it isn’t even legal, let alone customary, to have peach trees, pears and apples flowering at the same time. (Except, that is, at Chelsea.) What is ‘Star Wars’, that far from bashful magnolia, doing flowering alongside my peach tree? Indeed, why is my peach still at it, having started flowering in February? This is not season creep but season leap.

The cherries are all flowering together, bar the earliest. But so are the pears from my crusty old Bergamotte d’Automne, now a fifty-footer, to the designer -model Pyrus salicifolia, a ten-foot dome of aluminium leaves and beguiling cream flowers. The apple trees are showing a shy flower or two, the crabs (John Downie in particular) much more than that. Meanwhile the hedges are a foam-bath, dazzling white, of the blackthorn that proclaims bitter weather.

Whatever message the oaks and ashes bring has surely never been more emphatic. The oaks are showing the tender olive green of their emerging leaves while the ashes are still bare black tracery. I fervently hope they are in a muddle too. We have had no rain since the end of February: without a soak we are in trouble.

It is hard to say how much would have happened on the ground if it had rained: how far out should the roses be in the second week of April? Herbaceous plants are holding back. Early flowerers are flowering without growing; I am looking at a clump of perennial honesty that should be at least two feet high when it starts to flower. It is barely one foot. Weeds, on the other hand, are mercifully quiescent too.

Bulbs are in the same plight. Bluebell clumps are small and stunted, showing a few desultory flowers. As for daffodils, they have scarcely opened before they start to shrivel; the idea of an organized sequence has gone by the board. One of the last, and prettiest of all, my favourite ‘Thalia’, a duet of delicate white flowers on each stem, is already looking jaded.

Spring is always a hurry. I regularly complain I need more time to take it all in. But this year reminds me of New England: blink and you’ve missed it. Whatever am I doing sitting scribbling indoors?

It’s tempting, isn’t it, to poke around in and under a plant showing dead-parrot symptoms: leaves scorched or absent, scratched bark brown where green cambium should be, no incipient buds or shoots from the base? There are some, after the fierce blasts of December and days at -12° Centigrade. March days like summer have only emphasised how very brown and dead they look; all the more important to be patient; clear away unsightly wreckage but defer decisions about digging out the roots. Even plants you consider borderline for hardiness may yet surprise you.

As my favourite Francoa ramosa, the saxifrageous bridal wreath from Chile, did yesterday. My secateurs were poised, cutting away brown desiccated shoots, when a speck of pale green on the ground told me not to be so hasty. It feels like summer this afternoon, but March is early spring. I have gone back to dividing thriving green clumps, while wondering how much of the horrible-looking bay tree in the yard we will loose, and how much to chop off now for aesthetic reasons. Oddly, its south face (it is 30 feet high) is scorched while its north face is still green. A friend suggests that it is the paved surface of the yard under it that is to blame. It must have been a block of ice for three or four weeks.

There will be plenty of anomaly anecdotes when we come finally to count the losses. A nurseryman friend has lost almost every Chilean and Kiwi plant in his unheated tunnels. No hebes, abutilons, hoherias ……. it’s a long list. They may not be dead, but they are not fit for sale. Why was he smiling? ‘Just you wait’, he said. ‘Everybody’s lost them, but it won’t stop them coming back for replacements’.

The grainy old photo on the right appeared in The Radio Times in January 1974. The tree I am planting is a Monterey pine (it seems I was obsessed with pines, then as now) which, 37 years later, is a 60 foot monster with a similar wingspan. I found the cutting as I was clearing out old papers and reproduce it here in case anyone is still labouring under the delusion that it’s not worth planting small trees because you’ll never see them in maturity. Also as a warning: Pinus radiata is not a good choice for a garden of less than a couple of acres.

In the background on the left is one of the huge elms that started to die that very year.

Music permeates every television programme. It tinkles and swoons and crashes (often drowning the accompanying words) following some unknown law of appropriateness. What authority decrees what music, on what instruments, familiar or new-minted, jaunty or drowsy, is to colour our perception or guide our mood as we watch the pictures?

The twinkling galaxies and molten nebula of Wonders of the Universe come with properly portentous orchestral drama in one sequence; spooky pop in another. The modest share of teletime devoted to gardening calls for sweet airs or inconsequential doodling. My question? What background music do you envisage for your own garden? Is it Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or Whistle while you Work? Is it Greig or Gounod, Mozart or Mendelssohn?

I know what my choice is for mine: birdsong. I have been sadly inattentive to it in the past. I still worry whether it’s a robin or a wren, a blackbird or a thrush that raises my spirits and unites me with the morning. And now I realize that it’s getting late; I should have paid more attention while I could; age claims our hearing, and the dawn chorus no longer wakes me. I struggle to tell what birds are singing in what trees; where once their cheeps and trills and whistles penetrated my soul I struggle to follow them. When I get a hearing aid it will be to listen properly to my garden.

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?