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.

The garden has been hidden under snow and the ground frozen for a week now. The conservatory is the only place to see plants (and to how realise how much it means to see leaves and flowers). The days have been reasonably sunny but the nights regularly down to 27’ Fahrenheit or so. We rely on two little electric fan heaters to keep the frost out – with a Calor gas stove for emergencies. At breakfast time we are down to 40’; on one morning 36’, yet a surprisingly long list of plants are in flower – some only residually, but some making steady headway.

Pelargoniums are still providing most of the colour; ivy-leaved, pink, white and red, ‘Apple Blossom’ now seven feet

The garden has been hidden under snow and the ground frozen for a week now. The conservatory is the only place to see plants (and to how realise how much it means to see leaves and flowers). The days have been reasonably sunny but the nights regularly down to 27’ Fahrenheit or so. We rely on two little electric fan heaters to keep the frost out – with a Calor gas stove for emergencies. At breakfast time we are down to 40’; on one morning 36’, yet a surprisingly long list of plants are in flower – some only residually, but some making steady headway.

Pelargoniums are still providing most of the colour; ivy-leaved, pink, white and red, ‘Apple Blossom’ now seven feet

Snowed up, the sun painting sharp blue shadows on a ground of silvergilt between my window and the churchyard wall. It is too cold to enjoy being outdoors. Time to look through a drawer of old papers about the house and garden accumulated over nearly forty years. One is an inscription I never got round to putting in the garden temple (I couldn’t decide between a floor slab and a frieze).

Every man’s proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theatre of his Hospitality, the Seat of Self Fruition, the Comfortablest Part of his own Life, the Noblest of his Son’s Inheritance, a kind of Private Princedom, nay, to the Possessor thereof, an Epitomy of the whole World, may well deserve, by these Attributes, to be Decently and Delightfully Adorned.

This is Sir Henry Wotton, in 1624, introducing his Elements of Architecture in the manner of Bacon. He does not speak directly of gardening, but his lapidary language spoke strongly to me when I was younger. Does it sound absurd today? No more, I suppose, than the whole idea of a garden temple.

The great joy of the reading season is meeting people of like mind who have dedicated their thoughts, sometimes for whole lifetimes, to subjects that obsess you, too. There is a style of thinking and writing, focussed but unhurried, that you find in works of what I call field scholarship.

Having observed, read, travelled and thought, the writer has no intention of skipping any detailed information. Having mastered it, though, he or she can recount it as a story in a personal voice.

It is a style I associate with the New Yorker, in those sometimes improbably long pieces on seemingly inconsequential subjects. British magazines rarely dedicate the space. Do they not trust us to calm down and pay attention? It is the peculiar pleasure of little private magazines like Hortus to gather the family round, as it were, for a good story leaving out none of the details.

I catch glimpses of bloggers these days, as I trawl the web, indulging their studies and their passions without inhibition. The sum total of the plant-centred web, indeed, is massive and no doubt worth hours of exploration. It can’t compare, though, with the warm and fertile mind of a good author in full cry.

At the moment it is John Grimshaw I am enjoying, in his New Trees, a worthy successor to a long series of deep books on my favourite subject. It starts with John Evelyn’s Silva, the first paper ‘read’ to the newly-formed Royal Society, on October 15th, 1662, in response to ‘certain quaeries propounded to the illustrious assembly by the honourable the Principal Officers and Commissioners of the Navy. Rarely can quaeries have had such a resounding answer (or the bonus of an Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves.)

I possess an edition edited by John Hunter and annotated by A. Hunter, M.D., published in York in 1776 with a list of some 700 subscribers. The additional notes make it a compendium of the advancing knowledge of trees between the Restoration and the Age of Enlightenment – Diderot’s Encyclopedia was finished at the same time. Some of Evelyn’s observations seemed quaint, no doubt, by Hunter’s time. Now they seem to overflow with excitement and experience. He nips from Pliny to pruning tips, from weeding to Vitruvius, from friends to fables, sometimes in a single paragraph.

He describes trees in vivid phrases and their cultivation in earthy detail, founding, it seems to me, a school of writing that continues, through many forester’s manuals and such horticultural compendia as Loudon’s Arboretum at Fructicetum Britannicum (I have the abridged edition of 1842, shortened to 1162 pages), to the seven great volumes of Elwes and Henry.

Henry John Elwes and Augustine Henry set out to give a complete account to all the trees which grow naturally or are cultivated in Great Britain. Trees, that is, that reach timber size. It took them seven volumes. ‘We have the special qualification’, they wrote in their introduction, ‘that we have seen with our own eyes and studied on the spot, both at home and abroad, most of the trees which will be included in this book’. Not only did they visit every notable park, arboretum and forest in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (up to that time little studied); they travelled to see the trees ‘of every country in Europe, of nearly all the States of North America, of Canada, Japan, China, Western Siberia and Chile’.

Elwes and Henry, as a result, seem to hover over and dart about the tree world like Puck. In one paragraph they combine first-hand observations and measurements of trees in Oxford and Yunnan, or Idaho and Hokkaido. Their reading and acquaintance allows them to speak on every scientific and aesthetic aspect of their subjects, to cite records, letters and catalogues, to recall individual plantings, successful or failed, and to report on the health of specimens thousands of miles away. They also took photographs, with immense pains, and sometimes on several visits, to record hundreds of the best specimens – an undertaking never yet repeated (except in a small way, perhaps, by Thomas Pakenham for his Meetings with Remarkable Trees).

As a catalogue Elwes and Henry, published in 1907, was rapidly succeeded by Bean. It is Bean’s Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles which has stood unchallenged as the standard work since 1914. Bean was Kew-based. He was shown the proofs of Elwes and Henry but had a wider remit: all the woody plants that we can cultivate, after the example of Loudon.

Bean has remained incomparable but grown increasingly out of date. The last revision was started in 1970 and completed in 1980. Desmond Clarke, its editor, produced a supplement in 1988. Meanwhile plant introductions were arriving at a pace not seen since Edwardian times. The number of recognized species of oaks alone, to take one example, has almost doubled during this period. Enter the International Dendrology Society, and enter John Grimshaw, a scholarly botanist, a galanthophile if you please, who works for J H Elwes’s great grandson on the family estate at Colesbourne. . It was Giles Coode-Adams, as chairman of the Scientific Committee of the I.D.S, who determined that a new work was needed and found Grimshaw for the work. Like Bean, it was to be Kew-based.

Compilers of such books today have resources their forebears did not dream of. The greatest, of course, is access to and friendship with experts and explorers round the world. It still needs, however, a writer with a personal grasp of what is important, what to emphasize and how to make it interesting, to make a reference book come alive. I am enjoying New Trees because the chemistry works. John, with Ross Bayton, who wrote the botanical descriptions, and Hazel Wilks who did the beautiful drawings, has written a book in the Silva tradition, engaged and engaging, cheerful even. Best news of all, he is helping me update my own modest contribution to the genre, published in 1973, to offer you later this year.

The garden has been hidden by snow now for as long as I can remember in recent years. There is still snow frozen to the highest branches of tall trees. The only tree seriously damaged so far is, of course, one of my rarest, Quercus x warburgii, the semi-evergreen

‘Cambridge’ oak, wonderful in spring with its red emerging leaves and red catkins. It pulled down the too-pliant stem and snapped it three feet from the ground.

I leave the robin admiring himself in a mirror I have just hung on the woodshed wall, to travel to Switzerland for a white Christmas, and wish all my readers a happy one, and a happy new year.

Is there a difference between a glimpse and a glance? Or between a view and a vista? It is the sort of question I would have liked to put to the amiable philosophers who assembled for Christmas in 1814 or thereabouts at Headlong Hall in Wales. If Thomas Love Peacock was not part of your education, and if you have a taste for argument and a weakness for Wodehouse, or if you have just forgotten how he made you laugh, take Headlong Hall to bed with you.

The chapter that gardeners remember best begins thus: ‘I perceive’, said Mr Milestone, after they had walked a few paces, ‘these grounds have never been touched by the finger of taste’.

They begin to discuss the difference between the picturesque and the beautiful, Mr Milestone being an eminent landscaper of the picturesque persuasion. Mr Gall, the literary critic, joins in. ‘I distinguish’, says Mr Gall, ‘the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness’.

‘Pray, sir’, says Mr Milestone, ‘by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?’

Can you repeat a surprise? The question is central to the way we look at gardens. There is a difference between a glimpse and a glance – and it lies in the brain of the looker as much as the design of the gardener. A glimpse is a view frustrated; the inference is that you would have liked to have seen more; a glance says that curiosity is readily satisfied; the view is worth no more than a fleeting attention. What other units of looking are there? Examination (or scrutiny) is perhaps the most intense. A peep is faintly illicit – and all the more fun for it. An outlook is limited in scope. A view is the scene full-on and a vista or a prospect a long wide-ranging view. A panorama is the view from a height.

These may be a designer’s building blocks, but they don’t constitute a design. Where the designer’s intentions become clear is in the passage from one to another – the state of transition. Surprise is clearly one transitional idea; the most striking, perhaps, and certainly most obvious. But there are others, that might be expressed in such words as ‘consequently’ or ‘furthermore’, or ‘nevertheless’, or even ‘besides’. There is a nevertheless moment at Sissinghurst, and a consequently one at Hidcote, to name only two familiar transitions. Mr Gall might have had much to say on the subject, had not the Picturesque and the Beautiful, those unprofitable abstractions, monopolized the conversation.