Back to our old French property, after an absence of two years, to see how my trees are getting on. A tree you’ve planted yourself is always yours, whoever else may be its legal proprietor. I am always happy to take credit – and there was plenty to take in the ranks of pines – pale Scots and dark Corsicans – the fluttering files of poplars and the battalions of young oaks, wonderfully wayward in comparison, mobbed by brambles and wild roses: an impenetrable mass of prosperous native vegetation.

When you set out a new plantation and watch anxiously over its first few years every rabbit is a threat and a deer a disaster. Only fifteen years later do you realize that if one tree in four is spared to make serious growth your wood will be over-crowded.

In all our time in France I never saw a squirrel. Deer, boar, hares, badgers, foxes, martens (and once a wildcat), but no squirrels. This time, to my joy, I saw two red squirrels attacking ‘our’ walnuts. Can they be on the increase in France? At last Europe is waking up to the threat of greys spreading from Italy (where they are proliferating) through Piemonte into the Alps, and through the Alpine beech woods into France.

It is almost twenty years since we found our place in France: at exactly the same time as two Paris architects found an abandoned priory 25 miles away in the Cher and started what is now a famous garden (and enchanting small hotel), Le Prieuré de Notre Dame d’Orsan. (www.prieuredorsan.com).

Orsan today has an air of long establishment. Some of its visitors are convinced that it has always been like this, that it really was monks who planted and shaped the intricate hedges and espaliered apples and pears. We have nothing like this in England, and I wonder whether it has ever been in the English psyche to create a whole landscape on the theme of sustenance.

There is a vineyard in the middle, the vines trained on hurdles copied from the 1471 Augsburg edition of Petrus Crescentius. In the first compartment, surrounded by tunnels of hornbeam, the autumn crops are leeks and cabbages, all perfect, steely blue against the green-brown of the hedges. Beyond the vineyard, which has a simple stone fountain at its heart, are compartments of soft fruit, of roses (sustenance spiritual), of pumpkins in waist-high osier beds and of espaliered pear trees forming a circular maze. The next room has tall apples, the next pears, the next service trees…until finally you come to alleys of perfectly trimmed oaks, an archery ground, and coppiced woodland.

Calm vegetable geometry like this seems timeless. But then so does the forest. Neither takes as long as you think.

A few summers ago I proposed a competition to find France’s funniest rond point. It was the early days of a gardening fashion that has done nothing but expand. It started with concrete planters of the most durable shrubs wasting valuable space in shopping streets. It flourished in more and more exotic concoctions of the most emphatic flowers anywhere the municipality could find to perch them, seizing on roundabouts as empty spaces where excesses of horticulture could be committed in the fullest public view with little likely retribution.

We soon had golfers, astronauts, vignerons, fishermen and of course cyclists and their habitats represented, often on a huge scale and in unmissable materials. This year a mélange of banana plants, tall blue grasses, cannas and camphor plants and every brilliant daisy have been in play – and of course a gazillion petunias. No street lamp, meanwhile, has been without its hanging basket. Today a ville fleurie, to gain even one star, must mortgage the mayor’s chain to splurge on flowers.

All this is harmless, summer-seasonal, gaudy, potentially comic, and fun. Not so a newer tendency: to let the spirit of horticultural gaiety invade the sobre rhythm of an avenue.

The Avenue de Champagne in Epernay was once described by Winston Churchill as France’s greatest address. For a mile or so it is lined with the rather comely factory buildings labelled Perrier Jouet, Pol Roger, Moet et Chandon….. their courtyards protected by gilded gates. Now, in the spirit of the times, the street has been dug up and relaid at half the width as an anti-motor measure. On either side is a broad strip of granite setts to prevent smooth walking, and in the setts, instead of an avenue, is a sort of linear arboretum ; an omnium gatherum of the most ill-assorted trees you can imagine : maples, cherries, ginkgos, pines, oaks, larches…. There is nothing so unsuitable for street planting that they haven’t popped one in. The effect, young, is simply demented, like a building put together with whatever materials came to hand. Long term, if it is allowed to remain, it will become more and more grotesque as the habits and proportions of the trees become more assertive and more different.

What does this tell us about public taste in the country that invented the allée and gave us majestic gardens in harmony with majestic buildings? Do they really have to relearn the lesson that repetition is the essence of harmonious planting ? An avenue works by repeating the form and scale of a perfectly-chosen tree without hesitation or deviation.

Twenty years ago Westminster City Council committed the same solecism, putting planters with such trees as birches and spruces along Pall Mall and St James’s Street. Public ridicule got rid of them within half a year. The trees of the Avenue de Champagne are not in planters, though, and where is the ridicule to undo this ignorant and tasteless folly ?

‘What the eye don’t see the ‘eart don’t grieve over’ (for full effect, say it in an Aylesbury accent circa 1930). It was the first rule of life I remember nanny teaching me, as she wiped a bit of no-matter-what off the nursery floor with the hem of her apron.

I often repeat it as I go round the garden, rejoicing that a good percentage of it comes into the ‘eye don’t see’ category. Maybe 10 per cent, maybe 15. It lies under old shrubs, at the backs of borders, under the skirts of trees, or where ivy has covered the ground with an impenetrable carpet. Occasionally, and often in autumn when the need for hacking back is most obvious, I poke my nose in, hoping not to find a body, and peer through the gloomy tangle to see what’s going on. I have been rewarded with useful, even interesting, seedlings. But sometimes the reward is an idea for something better. Even for abolishing the ‘don’t see’ zone altogether.

There is a proper mean between a judicious mingling of plants and each one having its own space. We have a rather splendid old Judas tree, a good forty feet across, two of its branches supported by props. It was planted in 1959, in an enthusiastic fit of planting by our predecessor at Saling. Over fifty years many good trees and shrubs have united in one canopy, the Judas tree included. Once I had decided it was time to let the light in, the cutting back would have done credit to the Coalition and the piles of branches were prodigious.

An amelanchier has been cut down to the stump, a photinia the same, also a Chinese privet; a clerodendron abolished altogether and a score of bottom branches lopped from a Cryptomeria and one of those Lawson cypresses that seem to droop with exhaustion. We have taken perhaps ten feet off the diameter of the Judas tree, letting the light flood in to its handsome undercroft. At the same time we have de-ivied the adjacent tea house. The effect is revolutionary. I see the components of the scene as mature individuals framing delicious glimpses instead of a ‘don’t see’ zone. And there is a glorious bonfire waiting.

Salvia uliginosa mingles with Verbena bonariensis

Every gardener should go away on holiday from time to time to clear his vision. Familiarity breeds content – and content (or acquiescence) is not good for a garden. The end of summer is a good time to make a break, see different and foreign gardens, collect ideas and come home with resolutions. It worked perfectly this year. The first of September was the beginning of autumn, as clearly as if a bell had been rung. Three inches of rain in August had given plants a spurt in height and bulk until borders were bulging – not always with the right elements or in the right places. Suddenly it was the salvias and dahlias and big yellow daisies that had the limelight – and in the deep green grass the cyclamen.

alvias get more column inches in this diary than they should. I am captivated by their variety, their easiness in cultivation and the length of their flowering season. The snag, particularly it seems this year, is that many of the ones from subtropical parts are unconvinced by our summer and only really start to perform when it ends. Our September rentrée found some of them, notably my new South African recruit from Vergelegen, still growing rapidly but flowerless. S. splendens,

S. calcaliifolia (small flowers of brightest blue among lush green leaves), S. madrensis (yellow, on strong plants almost worth it for their foliage), even the sky-blue S. uliginosa are merely finding their places in the score and clearing their throats.

In Scotland, where they have less heat but more summer rain, salvias seem to get down to it earlier. But this year I have the feeling that half the plants in the garden were put on hold for almost a month in July; I don’t have the figures to prove it, but surely everything is happening late.

If I needed to turn my back for a while to see the garden clearly in focus again, I also needed inspiration from a fresh creative eye. Bang on cue landed a book I had been looking forward to for a year: a pictorial account of a famous weaver’s garden on Long Island by California’s most perceptive gardener, photographer and critic, Molly Chappellet.

The name of Jack Lenor Larsen is to fabrics what Armani, say, or Yves St Laurent is to couture. He has been growing his garden in East Hampton for forty years, integrating it with his airy house and astonishing collection of (mainly modern) sculpture. All his life he has worked with weavers in different cultures, from Africa to the Far East to Scandinavia and the Americas. He pulls all these threads together with a weaver’s eye, in which wit, it seems to me, plays a large part.

The Long House garden is on a big scale; flowing rather than episodic, full of big vistas and big events. Inevitably most of the trees are natives, from oaks and birches to the juniper (Juniperus virginiana) locally known as ‘cedar’. Part is sand-dunes, another part a monumental hornbeam alley, another an amphitheatre surrounded by strange monumental bronzes. One celebrated walk is through red azaleas along a colonnade of red lacquered wooden posts. Then suddenly there is a Buckminster Fuller dome. You are prepared for surprises, but surprise and shock are not the same and the wit behind each surprise prevents it being shocking.

I can say all this with confidence, never having visited Long House, because my friend Molly’s photographs are so precisely evocative and so comprehensive. They are allowed to cast their spell, mostly without explanation, through the body of the book. The effect is like an exploratory wander in the garden without a guide. Then at the back they are recapitulated with all your questions answered – an excellent formula.

It sent me out into my garden newly critical, ready for fresh beginnings – but newly appreciative, too, of things I had been taking for granted.

Jack Lenor Larsen’s Long House is published by www.chroniclebooks.com, ISBN No: 978-0-8118-7084-9

The old Barmouth road

A noble one-stone henge greets us as we descend into our wooded valley in North Wales. We extracted the thick slab of brown granite from the roadside and set it up at the entrance to the forest when we arrived 15 years ago. This time, though, we had a shock : some anonymous artist has defaced it with a huge white eagle – at least I think that’s what it is. At first sight it looked more like a swastika.

We have washed off what we can of the paint but the shape is still there. I’d like to know more about it, but no one seems to know. Is it the sign of some Welsh anti-English underground ? I’ve never seen it before, and neither have our Welsh friends and neighbours. Perhaps it is just the invention of the artist faced with a tempting blank stone surface ; in which case chapeau to him for an icon combining the Prussian eagle of the First World War with the swastika of the second. If we ever meet I’ll know him by his tattoo.

It won’t be too long, though, before the rain and the lichens erase his work. Speed of change is the thing that always strikes me most in the timeless sheltered world of the forest. Saplings double their height while your back is turned. Paths grow over in a season with grass, rushes, bracken, brambles, gorse and birch. Moss covers tree trunks and conceals rocks. Our latest contribution to the cycle of alteration is a new track to give us access to a steep part of the hill planted fifty years ago with a tree now considered pretty much a weed ; a strain of lodgepole pine from California that is neither fast, nor handsome, nor useful, but is unfailingly fertile with its seedlings.

There are ten acres or so of it interspersed with larch and spruce on the steep bank facing west towards Cardigan Bay. Before we made the track we had never seen either the trees or the view. Wyn and Arfon, the bulldozer brothers we rely on for heavy machine work, have contrived a route crossing the contours of the hill at the gentlest, most insinuating angles. When I first saw the prospect their work had revealed I wanted to live there, right there between the trees and the sea, for ever. Prospects here, though, are almost as evanescent as paths. Even on land left unplanted first birch blocks them, then rowan, then, faster than you would believe possible, the deep shining green native sessile oak.

The garden that welcomed us home had had a personality change in the week we were away. The borders are looking blurred compared with the rather stark, if bright, stressed-out look they wore: new growth has rounded and softened them, and new colours and new scents clearly mark the change of season.

Phlox, long delayed by lack of water, is now a major player. ‘White Admiral’ jostles with deep purple monkshood under a golden veil of the irreplaceable Stipa gigantea. Pink and white Japanese anemones are opening. Salvias bethellii (magenta) and Guanajuato (piercing blue) are clocking on for duty. Now it’s the turn of agapanthus, deep blue
and washed-out grey, Geranium wallichianum ‘Buxton’s Variety’, the slender spires of Veronicastrum and the flopping stems of willow gentians with their sumptuous sapphire flowers. A few rose hips are just turning colour, grapes have become smooth little green globes, Clematis flammula in white sheets has overwhelmed a Choisya and scents the corner by the garden door with sweet almond.

It is all potential and excitement again. Until it rained there seemed no future. Now autumn is on the horizon the garden has a point and a purpose – and the mower a job to do, though it will be a while before the burnt brown patches, the fairy rings and the eager suckers (above all from the cedrela, Toona sinensis) give way again to an even green.

So the sights and scents of mid-summer postponed and early autumn advanced paint the garden in unfamiliar combinations of colour. When we come home again – this time from Wales – there will be another change of regime.

I missed the moment the garden relaxed; when the tension of water-stress eased under proper penetrating rain. We were away for a week on a Solent salt marsh, in a garden under a different sort of stress – always. It is totally exposed to wind and salt sea-air; nothing but the grasses, gorse, brambles and goat willows can take the punishment.

I said ‘garden’ because it is the setting for a house and in summer the scene of endless entertaining; ball-games, races, dinghies on chocks, picnics, trampoline, barbecues. Oh, and golf croquet, where the rabbits make interesting bunkers in the sandy turf.

The house is a ‘thirties bungalow with iron windows and a big verandah overlooking a creek endlessly washed by the tide. The colourful clutter of boats at their moorings is almost at eye level one moment, only, when you look again, to have sunk below the seawall.

A gardener’s urge, of course, is to stick in a few plants that will survive, or even profit by, the unusual conditions. Escallonias, have been tried at some time, but just look tatty. Hydrangeas are the default decoration for the summer holidays. Their muddle of pale colours, like washing left too long on the line, expresses the time and place better, perhaps, than any other plant. Someone once planted a birch in the waving brown grass: the wind has made it aerodynamic; a vegetable slipstream as it were. (Willows, curiously, seem to grow upright despite the wind). We have planted two or three Scots pines, to join, or succeed, the couple that have become gnarled in the line of duty, but the wind and the rabbits will always prevent a gardener from doing anything so foolish as to garden here.