Roz Ulph picks flowers for the church

They did. If you read this diary in backward sequence I am answering the question in the last instalment.

If no good deed ever goes unpunished perhaps no bad deed goes unrewarded. What else can account for two daughters’ weddings in the garden, seven years apart, being blessed with days of a perfection I didn’t dare imagine ?

What has conspired this year to deliver a garden greener, more full of flowers in first flush, at the point when sprays are still fresh, spires upright, leaves unblemished, than it has ever been before ? Did the seasons hit a magic sequence ; a royal flush of perfect measurement of temperature, sunshine and rain? Certainly after cleansing winter cold there was a good topping up in February
and March.Then no rain for two months meant (among other things) no slugs. And here (though not elsewhere) little damaging frost.

Elbow grease has not been wanting. We watered and dead-headed down to the wire, but the buds had to be there in the first place, and nothing but providence can explain the timing. The Monday before wedding day our showpiece climbing rose, Wickwar, 50 feet (no, just remeasured : 60 feet) into the trees, opened its first bud. On Saturday there were 10,000.

It’s true I cheated a little. I packed the beds with midsummer flowers. Thalictrums of various persuasions are important, along with the delphiniums and emerging campanulas (C.persicifolia the star, both blue and white, both herded into clumps and scattered where it seeded). The first daylilies are finishing; so, sadly are the Siberian irises, the most delicate of that tribe. It is the (slightly late) cusp of summer, with the main performers just finding their voices.

And what a list. The golden oats of Stipa gigantea are already waving in the sun with the cool blue leaves of Macleaya in contrast. White foxgloves and blue delphiniums. Clematis durandii, tied into hazel wigwams, in deep indigo (though not so deep as the neighbouring Baptisia). Salvia nemorosa repeats the dusky theme in purple against the greys of Artemisia ludoviciana, lychnis chalcedonica with bright magenta flowers and Phlomis italica with the gentlest pink. Nepeta sibirica and Tradescantia ‘Zwanenburg Blue’ are rather irrelevantly punctuated by the silver of Miss Willmott’s Ghost. Yucca flaccida is still just phallic spikes before its ivory bells appear. Lilium regale is raising its trumpets to blow. Allium are fading and penstemons preening, lavender a forest of pale green tentacles, alstromeria flecked with tentative colours.

Pale roses shine so bright at dusk that the others almost disappear. Iceberg above all, but also Buff Beauty and Penelope, with Paul’s Lemon Pillar, fading on the wall, filling up with a violet Clematis viticella. Euphorbia palustris is more important than ever as a bulwark of brilliant green. Geraniums, pale pink and Johnson’s Blue (an easy name to remember) surge over the grass. As for paeonies, a full frilly white and the absurdly formal Bowl of Beauty, I have never seen so many, let alone so many standing up straight.

The paths are frothing, here and there, with valerian, here white, there pink, and the unstoppable little paving (or Spanish) daisy (or fleabane), Erigeron karvinskianus. At dusk the honeysuckles breathe out (is Early Dutch the six o’clock one and Late Dutch the follow-on at seven ?)

Can a garden feel, and echo, the happiness of a wedding ? So it seems.

I have never known such a slow and steady build up to summer. Everything has conspired to slow the garden down. The cold winter, the welcome soak of February and March, the total drought of April and May (less than an inch of rain in four weeks) and a mild (ish) and rainy (so far) June seem to have answered every plant’s needs. There is a prodigious amount of leafage in the garden; ramparts of green in the borders with fat buds just beginning to open all around.

Some plants have got their timing wrong. What was a delphinium doing opening its first flowers at the end of April? Most have held back for a grand splurge in late June. And I know why. It’s Lucy’s wedding on the 26th.

Our first daughter’s wedding, on May 31st 2004 coincided with the warmest May day on record, after a cold month. We were congregating in what shade we could find in a garden with precious few flowers.

This time all the roses will be out at once. The forerunners, Maigold for example, may have finished, but the main battery, which in this garden is mainly hybrid musks and ramblers, will be firing salvo after salvo. On our sunniest wall Paul’s Lemon Pillar has joined Maigold, white after orange, with the orange Lonicera tellmanniana and the pale buds of Clematis Perle d’Azur scrambling over a philadelphus already smothered in white.

In the borders cream thalictrums and my favourite goat’s beard with its almost-white spikes (why goat’s beard?) are the main background to the erupting roses. The full-flowered French fire first: Comte de Chambord, Jaqueline Dupré, Baronne Prévost, Belle de Crécy; all tones of pink and purple. Best of all with Madame Alfred Carrière, just-blushing white, high in a holly tree.

Round two, just underway, includes Felicia, Iceberg, Cornelia (who should be kept away from Felicia – her coppery pink shouts at Felicia’s silvery pink), the custard-coloured Buff Beauty and the cooler, creamy Autumn Delight.

Round three looks perfectly timed for wedding day. Indeed it starts with Wedding Day, high in a pear tree, and Rambling Rector, covering a shed, and culminates in our fifty-foot Wickwar, occupying three Christmas trees – with Paul’s Himalayan Musk scattering pink bouquets through a rather jaded old Chinese pine. Treasure Trove and Mrs Honey Dyson are still alarming us with 12 foot shoots. Will they make it to the wedding?

I’m not sure what it would be called if you did it to a sentient being, but I’m certain it would be against the law. In so far as a plant has instincts and urges they are controlled and expressed by its hormones. Can it be legitimate to frustrate them?

At this time of year, when plants are in active growth, their messages are plain to see: the priorities of one bud growing before another, the rationing of vigour between one shoot and another; the election, as it were, of a leader (or the equal energy of several branches) are all determined by hormones.

And we, superior beings, seeing how they are programmed, can outwit and re-direct them as we please with our forefingers and thumbs.

If you wait until the plant has obeyed its hormonal instincts and grows its branch or its truss of flowers you call it pruning (a verb, oddly enough, with no apparent roots or relations). You then have the wasted effort, the amputated stems and leaves, on your hands, your compost heap or your bonfire. Better, surely, to take the initiative and preempt unwanted developments.

A florist disbuds to get bigger and better flowers, choosing to concentrate the available energy into one flower rather than two. I bully my young trees and shrubs in the same spirit, examining them to see what buds have opened, with what consequences, and what buds are next in line. If a new shoot has set off in a direction I don’t approve, I look for another with ideas that more nearly match my own and eliminate the first. At this early stage my thumbnail is usually the ideal tool.

There are plants with such simple and deliberate ways of branching that errors are obvious. Fir trees put up one leader surrounded by incipient branches like a ring of spokes. So strong is the hormonal drive to keep going north, as it were, that when a pigeon lands on and snaps a newly-grown and still green leader (its wood unripened and fragile) one of the spokes gets a hormonal command to take its place. How does this work? The growing cells on the underside of the chosen shoot (chosen by whatever mysterious form of election) begin to multiply further than the rest. The shoot bends upwards as result. Very soon its terminal bud becomes the highest point of the tree, the leader and hormonal dictator. It even develops buds all round in readiness for a new ring of spokes next year.

Intervention is pointless with such a clearly-programmed plant. When a rather splendid fir in the garden here lost its leader to a bird in the usual way I did try to help it, from a ladder, tying a light bamboo to the top of the trunk and hoisting one of the side branches into the leadership position, secured with string. When I came back two months later the tree had ignored my advice and produced a new leader from a spare top bud lurking among the needles.

There are deciduous trees that seem to share the fir’s philosophy. Alders often have the same simple spoke-like rings of branches; many poplars, too. You can count the age of trees of this persuasion: it is the number of rings of branches – up to the point where circumstances take over: breakage or uneven light and shade modify the simple pattern.

It is oaks that keep my thumbs busiest. Quercus is quirky. An English oak rarely leads with an end bud pointing straight ahead. It has buds in clusters that seem to leave all its options open, to grow into whatever space offers most sunlight. In a crowd of seedlings this will usually be straight up, but an oaklet with equal illumination all round will hesitate, first prefer one direction and then another, and soon become a tangle of zig-zag branches with buds pointing in all directions.

Welsh sessile oaks are worst; herding cats is straightforward compared with directing a vigorous little Welsh oak tree. It may seem obvious which branch or shoot is dominant and should be encouraged. There are never less than four buds on each shoot, though, ready to surprise you. I suppress three with my thumbnail, or snip little shoots with my secateurs, favouring the one nearest to vertical. I’ll come back weeks later, to find all the tree’s energy has gone into a bud I didn’t notice, heading for Machynlleth.

It’s a curious hobby for a grown man, I’ll grant you.

The most fragrant job in the garden today is pulling the goose grass out of the Scots briars. You have to stand chest-deep in them and their prickles to get a good straight pull, steady or they break off. The roses are right under your nose, and does any rose have a sweeter smell?

Scots briars are hardly the height of fashion today, but if they have ever grown in your ground they are probably still there. They are the roses of, among other places, the sort of sand dunes that become links; thrifty, low-growing with slender stems, advancing gradually by root-suckers to colonize new ground with soft hummocks of tiny leaves.

They are the prickliest of all roses. Their name of Rosa spinosissima describes the dense fuzz of spines and bristles up every stem, certainly calling for gloves but not quite substantial enough to wound you.

Their other name (do they really need two?) of R. pimpinellifolia points out the resemblance of their leaves to salad burnet; Sanguisorba major, or indeed minor.
Burnet is yet another old name for the rose which the French, incidentally, call pimprenelle (or sometimes pimpernelle); nothing to do with the scarlet pimpernel, which is Anagallis arvensis, or indeed Sir Percy Blakeney.

You smell the genes, as it were, of Scots briars in some excellent hybrids. The tallpale yellow Fruhlingsgold has a fragrance that seems related, and so does Stanwell Perpetual, a seedling of unknown parents that seems to have popped up in the 1830s at Stanwell in the outskirts of Colchester. Stanwell Perpetual is a soft pale bush with complex pale pink flowers and again that swooning-sweet smell just tinged with lemon.

At one point in the19th century, I read, there were many hundreds of Scots briars and their near relations listed in catalogues. Does anyone collect them now? The little white-flowering original in my photo (if that’s what it is) is good enough for me.

If weeding their thicket is a particular pleasure, guaranteed to be repeated every spring (how can you definitively clean the ground in a thicket of thorns?) it is not alone. The weeding season is going well. There was enough rain last week to loosen up the roots of many old adversaries. Deadnettle and goose grass have been surrendering with little struggle. Ground elder never surrenders, but a bunch of its fibrous roots at least feels like a minor trophy. One warm dry spell, though, and they will be locked down. Hard ground makes them unassailable.

I’m lucky enough (and that’s very lucky) to be intimately engaged with a garden on the Riviera. More precisely, looking down on the Riviera from a hillside called La Petite Afrique. In this mildest of climates, sheltered by the Alps and insulated by the sea, this plunging slope, below vertical limestone cliffs is the one to be compared with Africa.

We started work on the ancient terraces five years ago. They were originally farmed for olives and vines, and latterly, when the railway was laid along the route of the Roman Via Aurelia, for early flowers for the markets of Lyon and Paris. There are still flower-fields terraced up the hills at Villefranche, and many plastic tunnels once you cross the Italian border. Beaulieu-sur-Mer has no terraces wide enough; it was colonized as a fishing village by the late Victorian English. Prime Minister Salisbury had a villa here, the Duke of Connaught helped to build the Anglican church; there may be a reconquista by the French one day, but it hasn’t happened yet.

We have parts of the four top-most terraces before it becomes a steep scrub of Aleppo pines and wild olives, then cliffs. Across the bay, 500 feet below, we look down on the eastern cape of Cap Ferrat. From the western end of the top terrace the view takes in the whole garden, the cliffs above and the bluffs leading to Cap d’Ail and Monte Carlo, crowned by three perilously perched castles you only notice at night, when they are disneyfied by floodlights.

The terrace rises in steep steps to the western end, backed by high stone walls. We have given each step a corresponding cascade, so you walk up to follow the glinting water-spouts to their source under a monster olive tree. This is where the gazebo offers you the full view, after you have reached a platform of orange and lemon trees and another more severely furnished with a box parterre under an umbrella pine. The sea is hidden, until you reach the top, behind an iron pergola of roses and grape vines.

Then looking back you see that the uppermost terrace, or the central hundred feet of it, is a tunnel of grape vines and a wisteria, a cutting from one on Cap Ferrat that covers a quarter of an acre with flower-streamers that start above your head and almost reach the ground.

On this visit we were not lucky with the weather. The cold wet blast that had hit England two days before followed us there. There was plenty to do, weeding and trimming and planning future planting, but none of that contemplative lazing such pampered gardens are supposed to be for.

When something as exciting as this spring weather happens there is always the question: try to photograph it or just revel in it? There is no doubt that one detracts from the other. Either you see through a camera or with all your senses, and mind, and soul.

I’ve been taking pictures with my miraculous new camera, a tiny Cybershot that adjusts itself to any range – even a close-up at two inches – without pressing buttons. (It doesn’t really understand light, but you learn not to give it tricky problems). I’ll be glad to have the photos, automatically dated, as reminders of what was out with what – which is almost everything with everything. Magnolias have overtaken peaches, mid-season Japanese cherries are flowering with the autumn one. Tulips are sharp-elbowing the ‘February’ daffodils.

I only really see the garden, though, when I put my camera in my pocket and stop to contemplate. Scents tie up with flowers when you open all your senses. The chorus of birds reveals its soloists. You see the spent flowers, and the fallen petals, and the buds waiting to open, and the furry bracts shoved aside by the swelling fleshy cup of a magnolia.

The amelanchiers are passing that peak of open starry flowers jumbled in pinky-brown new leaves that only started two days ago. The pear trees are as white as the double-flowered cherries: what a crop we’re going to have this autumn. By my window scarlet ‘Japonica’ and wall flowers and orange tulips are burning away. Spurges are their thrilling yellow-green. Primroses and cowslips are all at it.

Yellow daffodils are the only flowers that refuse to fit in. Next year will I have the willpower to suppress them? With all this white and pink and a hundred shades of green the bulbs that really add are blue ones. Little grape hyacinths are nearly over, but camassias…… that’s what I’ll plant more of.

The blackthorns have never put up a braver show. They line the edges of the field and woods with frothing white blossom in heaps haystack high. What happened to its own winter? It missed the cold weather, delayed its flowering and connected with the same premature summer weather as the Iceland Volcano. It is an easy period of calm: the silent skies are blue from horizon to horizon. The garden is rushing as though it had missed its alarm clock and has a train to catch. Spring always unfolds too quickly to enjoy all the details, but this month is inducing panic.

Characteristically the weather forecast, morning after morning, proclaims anothernice day, temperatures struggling a bit perhaps, a touch of frost at dawn, but fine and dry. There is no one at Barometer House capable of making the connection between fine weather and cancelled flights. Like passengers in the 18th century, waiting at Dover for a westerly to fill the sails of the Channel Packet, we urgently need the Atlantic to reassert itself over the Continent, give us a gale and blow away the stubborn high pressure north east of us – and the ash with it.

Most springs we have the same; a couple of weeks, sometimes three, of a cutting east wind, no rain, and a general feeling that we’re ready to move on. We can’t this week; certainly not by air, until Zephyrus stirs his stumps.

But the Met Office thinks we’re only interested in the banality of sunshine.

You might think, if you followed my recent entries, that I was seldom at home. The truth is different; the trouble (my trouble, that is) is that home these last four months has meant desk and screen. I have been in the throes of composition. My books, down an awful lot of years, have been long, intricate, densely composed of text, pictures and captions. I promised Mrs Trad I wouldn’t go there again, not in this intensity. And yet here I am. It was tolerable (actually, very satisfying) while winter dragged on. Everything changed as the deadline came alarmingly close and spring suddenly tooted its horn.

April is when the conservatory goes wild. So many plants have been ticking over; some still dragging out last year’s achievements, most launching a whole new programme of growth and flowering. The list this morning is an intoxicating mixture of debuts and encores and long-running lists.

Oranges and lemons have the longest runs, fruiting and flowering together all through the cold weather – or do they? What about these salvias that slowed down but never gave up all winter? The dusky red brown ‘van Houttei’ has been going since mid summer last year; so has my old blue friend S. guaranitica. The extraordinary Pelargonium ‘Apple Blossom’ should be relabelled arborescens: it has reached eight feet by the door, flowering non-stop.

Camellias, of course, are at full blast. The soft purple of the Australian mint bush is a cloud behind the tiny oranges. Orange clivias are opening their trumpets like fledglings in green nests. Jasmine is crowding into the roof light and making the air almost too thick to breathe. My ancient potted rose ‘Maréchal Niel’ hangs its tired-looking (are they overweight?) flowers from the wall, and I am excited to see the wide pink blooms of ‘La Follette’ come out among its new red-stained leaves.

‘La Follette’ is the first rose out on the Côte d’Azur, scrambling through silver olive trees as though a great couturier had just ordained pink and silver for the season. (The designer was Lord Brougham’s gardener at Cannes). And the show-stoppers, the full-dress pelargoniums, are breaking open their heavy buds among leaves that proclaim much more vigour to come.