A weekend in North Wales (let’s say Merioneth, for the poetry) to see how the winter has treated the woods. Kindly, is the answer. The grass on the hills is still sere, snow hangs in the high gullies and dusts Cader Idris again in the night. The larches, pines and spruces stand impassive, a few leaning, a few prone, but no mass casualties in a winter with no strong gales. It is catkins that provide the excitement, close up where the hazels are clouds of yellow down-strokes and here and there pussy willows flash like shards of mirror, and in the distance where they begin to paint the hills.

The brilliant colours of massed twigs always surprise me: the oaks pale buff, the birches purple, ashes the colour of bone and hazels en masse, as their catkins ripen, bright orange. Spruces are dull green with silver flashes if the wind shows you their petticoats. European larches are pale custard colour, Japanese larches pinky-orange. In forest land the colours are laid on in random brush strokes. The silver slash of a waterfall (there is very little water after a long dry spell) hangs from a hill top.

The ponds and puddles are fecund with frogspawn and loud with froggy noises, sharp croaks above a long soft purr like a contented cat – the sound of spring warming its engine.

Home to a quite different scene from the one we left. What unit of energy do you use for a spring garden getting going? Kilojoules? Megatonnes? The energy driving the buds on every bush and tree, driving the crocuses and daffodils and fritillaries, driving every blade of grass (not to mention every weed and bramble) is immeasurable. If knotweed can split concrete, the concerted force of this garden could reach the moon.

The other day I caught myself putting on a tie to go out in the garden, and realised I was doing it simply for warmth. Things had come to a pretty pass …

Then I reflected, not for the first time, on how much hardier women are than men. A bare throat, at least, is de rigueur. Long stretches of leg are routine, clad in, at most, thin tights. A year or two ago the fashion was a bare midriff in all weathers.

True, there are builders who expose their lower backs to the cold, but men in general have the sense to put a bit of fabric between themselves and the elements. You warm up, of course, once you start gardening in earnest. Shedding layers, though, is quite different from venturing out to admire the indifference of buds to the East wind. ‘Overcoat plants’ (who coined the expression?) is all too applicable at the moment.

Crocus tommasinianus offers the only colour with any warmth (snowdrops have no calories) and this morning I discovered the crocuses are being neatly mown by unseen mouths by night. The flowers go, leaving just the white stalks; no sign of the petals and the no-doubt-sweet working parts. Rabbits? Voles? The moorhens would surely leave a mess.

It happened last year (a month earlier), and I said I would try watering them with a repellent product called Grazers and report back. This is the report back.

There is very little we can do about the two problems that beset our horse chestnuts, leaf miner, and possibly fatal canker, except insure against a future without them. It is by no means inevitable, but we should be prepared.

What to plant to succeed them depends, of course, on what part they are playing. An avenue presents the worst dilemma. There is scarcely ever space to plant another avenue for succession outside the root-zone and the shade of the incumbent

Fell alternative trees and replant in the gaps? It is hard to take such a radical long-term view, but it is probably the best answer. And replant with what? Limes are the safe choice.

To replace a screen of chestnuts, which is what I need to do (they are the only big trees between the house and the village street) I am planting beech under and around the chestnuts. Beech grows quite quickly when its young and demands less light than other candidates. By planting the trees small and quite thickly I hope they will be forming an almost hedge-like screen (though not cut as a hedge) by the time the horse chestnuts succumb – if they do. Then I shall be able to choose the best beeches – some may well be damaged by falling timber – and train them up as worthy successors.

It was a regular customer who suggested I should change my nom de terre to Treedescant. You’re always writing about them, she said.

Touché. But it’s largely a winter habit. At this time of year they are the only thing in the garden to look at – and this is the time when you really can see them; they’re not all covered with leaves. It is the intricacy of their frameworks that I love to see, and the intimacy of their just-swelling buds. The comparison with people, with and without clothes, did occur to me – but you never know where these things will lead.

Certainly there’s nothing outside the window so well worth study as the Siberian crab that rises like a wind-blown fountain a hundred yards down the drive. Its jet black silhouette perfectly expresses its experiences over 60 years or so; the constant shove of the west wind inclining it to the east, the perennial effort to find more light for its leaves ……

An artist who could draw such a telling design would be rightly celebrated. Every tree out there is a drawing of an autobiography, expressed in a different medium and a different style. Call me Treedescant if you like.

There will be plenty of time for post mortems after the winter has done its worst. Previous cold winters have taught us not to be hasty: miraculous resurrections are not unknown. What I am seeing now, though, is the survival (albeit in a battered state) of plants that the books say should be dead.

I only planted my old aspidistra outside as a joke; a sort of mock hosta to frighten visitors. Confirmed house-plant it may be, but it is very much alive under (and over) its blanket of mulch. Unmulched, left where it seeded itself, Geranium palmatum, both adult with its huge leaves and baby seedling, look perfectly happy. A seedling of Euphorbia mellifera is only a little brown at the edges. In fact I see hardly any obvious mortality so far. I am worried about my fish, though: what do last year’s little fry do under the ice: suspend animation?

I envy analytical gardeners; those who can (or instinctively do) say “A bold upright there and there, a clump to balance them there, something big and jagged like a yucca over in the corner and a screen of something filmy up here near the terrace”.

You have to be a professional, I’m afraid, with a deadline facing you. Decisions must be made. Experience has told you that there is no uniquely right answer to any garden-planning question. So off you go: if you choose good plants and have a clear idea about colour there will never be a Chilcott Enquiry into how you reached your decision.

An amateur like me needs help, not just in coming to a decision (it’s probably too late for that) but in seeing the building blocks for what they are. Why am I verbalizing this? Because an old friend has come up with a formula that (maybe) fills my need.

Linden Hawthorne and I used to play at bookends with The Garden magazine. I was the first editorial page, Lin was the last. We didn’t exactly consult – we sort of responded to each other’s columns.

Lin is a professional, directing operations on the ever-developing grounds of the Storey estate in North Yorkshire. Have you noticed how properly-trained gardeners do things in an organized way that easily-distracted dilettantes can never manage? Her column done (at about the same time as mine came to an end) Lin turned to serious writing – and here you have it, in her book titled Gardening with Shape, Line and Texture. (She wanted to call it Painting with Plants.)

After laying down some fairly alarming first principles (alarming to me because they involve maths) she categorizes the world of (mainly herbaceous) plants by their garden stature, their overall shape and feel. This provides the structure for a list of what we use as ingredients, in the voice of a long-practised chef. There are many ways a gardening writer can string his or her (don’t you hate ‘their’?) experience into narrative. Lin’s list works because she recounts, quite crisply, how she uses each plant and how it behaves in real life.

So I have all the tools at my disposal. Next excuse?

Nigel Colborn makes a powerful case in The Garden this month: that there is too much random plant-breeding going on and too many new cultivars are being sold. The gardening world has become a jungle of fancy flowers with fancy names and no one can keep track.
The standard response of course is that no one is obliged to buy or plant them, and that the laws of natural selection will ensure the survival of the prettiest, or the most pest-proof. The multiplication gives innocent pleasure to anoraks of different stripes. Where would galanthophiles be in the snowdrops-and-marmalade season without tiny green blotches to discuss?

Anything that sharpens observation, you could argue, has a merit. It has a de-merit, though, too. It baffles and confuses those who just want a straightforward answer, and the means to create a simple, strong and memorable garden effect.

Snowdrops aren’t the only thing; nor is horticulture alone in hair-splitting. Wine-lovers are prone to debating the merits of different patches of ground, different farmers on the same patch, the smell of oak from different forests, and whether a Belgian bottling doesn’t capture more of the essence than the domaine’s own efforts. A wine-lover, though, is not painting a picture or laying out ground. He/she is just reporting the messages from his/her taste-buds and olfactory nerves.

Is hair-splitting bad news for gardening? One answer is that it is not gardening at all.

Is moss friend or foe? I’m never sure whether to apologize for my apple trees or admit my pride in them. At the end of a wet winter their branches are thickly coated on their upper sides with an emerald-green fabric like baize crossed with velvet. It is thicker on the trees on the shadier side of the garden, and thickest, covering much of the trunk too, on the tree in the south west corner that gets the most shade from the house and the churchyard wall.

Our trees have been pruned for many years, perhaps always, into open goblet, or even parasol, shapes to let light into their canopies, cutting off the year’s new growth but leaving fists of old wood on snaking stems; hardly a classical method but wonderfully energizing to flowers and fruit. The combination of gnarled and writhing grey wood and the emerald moss gives me enormous pleasure. Visitors gasp and get their cameras out. Serious fruit growers give me recipes for moss removal. Should I be worried?

It was in Japan that I first appreciated moss as a plant that could transform a garden. Saiho-Ji, the monastic moss garden, is only the most notable of many where the moss on rocks, paths, on the banks of streams and the trunks of trees, feels like a spell cast by an old green witch. In winter it is almost lurid green, in summer shades of green and brown, but the muting, softening effect is permanent. There are no sharp edges: no ultimate focus except the textures, the (rather rare) shock of pure clean petals, and the contrasting polish of water.

In this garden moss has crept up on me. It must be cumulative in the whole garden, endemic (and increasing) in the lawns, overwhelming on the abandoned tennis court, and presumably finding its perfect perch on the apples.