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.

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