The croquet lawn

The green woodpecker is on the lawn outside the window, immaculate in his army fatigues and red beret, concentrating hard on something tasty under the grass. I hope he hasn’t found chafer grubs. I had a nasty start last week in Cambridge when I saw the croquet lawn at King’s looking as though wild boars had been at it. The culprits in fact are crows. There is a serious infestation of chafer grubs in lawns along the Backs. The light soil and well-mown turf seem to give them just what they want. The crows find them, and peel back the turf to eat them. It is an emergency – if not quite a national one – and there is no quick cure.

There is a chemical treatment available, but you have to wait till spring, or even next summer, when the young grubs come up from their winter quarters. It also costs several thousand pounds, and has to be repeated each summer for three years.

Cambridge’s gardeners are deeply troubled; but not, I imagine, as troubled as the green keepers of golf-courses that become unplayable.

I’m a little confused, I confess, about what measurements are or are not legal tender in this country now. I am told by our local authority that I live 9 kilometres (or worse, ‘9K’) from our nearest town. It has been six miles throughout history: has there been an Act of Parliament to change it, or is it just the itch to modernize on the part of our public servants?

I suppose it doesn’t really matter much, and we shall scrub along with old and new together for many years to come. It does matter, though, at least to me, in my writing. Compose a readable sentence involving two measurement systems if you can; the brackets round the alternatives are always ugly and intrusive, interrupt the rhythm and confuse the sense.

The moment has come to decide which system, Imperial or metric, to use in the book I am writing: a new edition of my old International Book of Trees. (Very old: it was born in 1973.) My publisher naturally would like to go metric. I demur, on the basis that a metre is too big a unit to visualize with any accuracy, and a millimetre far too small. I see nothing wrong with a centimetre, but no advantage, either, over an inch.

The test is (or should be) how usable your measures are in practice, which depends on the scale of what you are measuring. A shrub which is four feet high, let’s say, is much less graphically described as 1200 millimetres, or 1.2 metres. You wear a foot, in case of doubt, on the end of each leg for ready reference, and your forearm is eighteen inches, or a foot and a half, long, more or less. You rarely need a tape-measure in an antique shop: old furniture is nearly always either one, two or three forearms (or cubits) wide.

Do bigger objects need bigger measures? A tree one hundred feet high is 30.48 metres – or call it 30 for tidiness. (Which is more important, a figure you can remember or one that is accurate to two decimal points?). Which sounds more interesting, as though it had reached a rather splendid height? It depends, I suppose, on where you were born and educated, but if you have a metric heart you have to be either very excitable (Great Scot! Thirty metres!) or very patient. Weather forecasters, you will have noticed, rarely forebear to mention when the temperature nears 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Do you detect me deciding on the old money solution? I don’t expect to get an easy ride.

One should never underestimate the power of an average. Cunning things they are, and patient, sometimes lurking for months or years, dawdling in the wings, before striding out to assert themselves and even the score.

Our rainfall this year, for example. At the end of October we were four inches below the figure for the first ten months of the past five years. So it tipped in November, with five inches of rain, setting December the easy task of making up the precise annual average figure. Q.E.D.

Quince, russet, olive, orange, squirrel, hazel, cashew, lemon, tawny, bay …….. What do I see on my daily walks that is turning all these colours, gradually and deliberately as this slow-motion season creeps along? Has there ever been a more gradual year? Spring started early, fattened, blossomed and ripened imperceptibly into summer. Summer took its time, dawdling from a fleetingly flaming June through idle dog days to a temperate September. Autumn made no fuss, kindling a bush here and a tree there while the borders grew plump and mellow and glistened with dew. Still in mid-November there has been no frost and two days of gales have still not stripped the trees.

The answer to my question is oaks, of course. There is no consensus among them. Most species of most plants are unanimous about their autumn colouring. Our most majestic tree, the most beautiful plant we grow, the emblem of our countryside, grows wilful as winter comes. It rages against the dying of the light. Oaks would be evergreen if they could, you feel. A few are, and some in this mild climate give it their best shot, hanging on to their leaves until March gales. Do we see an echo of this behaviour in their botanical cousins, the beeches, keeping their bright brown leaves all winter? These are no evergreen beeches (except of course among their southern-hemisphere relations, the nothofagi). But perhaps evergreenness, or reluctance to let go, is unconnected with botanical identity.

It has been nine months since the thermometer on the wall fell below freezing point. 280 days of almost absurdly temperate weather. If there has been stress in this tranquil time for plants it has been for lack of water. At the end of November we are four inches short of the year’s total rainfall at the same time last year and the year before. I am daily reminded of it by the fact that there is no water in my view: I have to go upstairs to see the duckpond.

The corollary of such gradual seasons is that the garden becomes too familiar. Morning after morning I draw the curtains on the same static state; flowers the same as yesterday and the day before, leaves ditto, or perhaps one or two more going yellow. I am not enamoured of rapid and violent change: I would hate New England’s two-day springs. But being lulled like this is not good for your focus. It de-energizes your vision. ‘What’s the urgency?’ you ask yourself when nature is idling in neutral.

Now the ground is too wet for working. I can tiptoe to the back of the border to prune plants on the wall, but they are certainly not asking for it, except where the wind has loosened a long spray of a well-armed rose to lash out at its neighbours. The time is ripe, on the other hand, for a good hard look at present imperfections and possible alterations. Christopher Lloyd and Fergus Garrett used to spend an hour a day, Fergus says, discussing the garden yard by yard, bandying alternatives and deciding on changes. Leaving well alone is of course one of the alternatives – but not just because you have lost focus.

I hadn’t been to Hong Kong for quite a while. There are plenty of shiny new buildings to marvel at, far too many shiny shopping malls, and the harbour gets narrower and narrower as they reclaim more land for building. (I always wonder where the ‘re’ comes in. ‘Claim’ is more like it. Or just ‘grab’. Soon the splendid old Star Ferries will be redundant; you’ll be able to jump to Kowloon).

What I hadn’t expected, and was thrilled to see, was the amount of gardening that is being incorporated in the midst of all this expansion. The Botanic Garden is well established, planted on the site of the old Victoria barracks and dotted with the dignified mansions of military top brass, one now the tea-ware museum, another the city’s wedding office, usually decorated with young brides and their attendants in candyfloss finery.

A really busy Botanic Garden, with appreciative crowds going about their business, taking photos and even reading tree-labels, is an energizing sight. There is a handsome waterfall into a rocky lake (the waterlilies are labelled, too); by the lake reclines a fat stone frog, legs akimbo, the very spirit of Chinese hedonism.

Fun with plants doesn’t end with the Botanic Garden, though. You can wander on through groves of trees and follow winding paths through beds of ferns, brushing your knees beside a rushing rocky stream – this at the foot of I.M. Pei’s gleaming Bank of China. Indeed the view inland, up towards the Peak from these many-storied glass palaces, could convince you that the forest was advancing on the city.

Most of Hong Kong Island is more or less wild country. If the city itself is like a shinier and more modern Monaco, the east, west and south coasts are a sub tropical Côte d’Azur; cliffs, capes and bays like deep green fretwork around the busy sea.

The Essex Bush

I wonder how many great gardens of the future are taking shape, unknown to most of us, in this age of plantsmanship and planting. More, I suspect, than at any time for a hundred years, the era of the Himalayan-inspired woodland gardens of the early 20th century that I call, collectively, Rhodoland.

Woodland ones are, of course, the slowest. The full achievement of some of today’s gardeners won’t be known until after their time. I have been visiting the most notable of those nearby since its inception some ten years ago and the sense of ambition gradually being fulfilled is thrilling. Few people know it yet, but Marks Hall, near Coggeshall in north Essex, already has an aura. Its splendid three-walled garden (the fourth side being a lake) is excitingly planned and cunningly planted; ready for photographers, indeed. But another hundred acres or more are only just emerging as a landscape with a unique sense of place.

It is an arboretum in a wood, in glades and rides surrounded by mature oak, pine and chestnut. But an arboretum of communities: not one Himalayan birch or dogwood or liquidambar or Koelreuteria but scores of them, the same species repeated again and again, merging with others at the edges of the group to give the impression of a natural population.

The most memorable section, at least for the moment, is ‘Gondwanaland’, where plants from the southern hemisphere, sundered by continental drift over millions of years, are reunited. Scores ofEucalyptus, but not a collection, just E. dalrympleana and E. debeuzevillei, cluster their pale trunks amongst New Zealand grasses against a dark wood of Andean nothofagus. If you want to see not a specimen but a wood of the Wollemi pine, the new celebrity survival from desert Australia, there are 60 or 70 here, dotted like forest seedlings. The colours and shapes, the smells and sounds, already make this the Essex bush, a garden like no other with, I’m sure, a famous future.

Do herons just stand patiently in the shallows in the hope that a fish will come within range? The odds, you would think, would be on them going hungry. No, Andrew Lawson told me, as we stood scanning a pond for the fry I told him were there. Herons, he had heard, attract fish with a substance secreted in their long thin legs. I can find no reference to this, but being on balance pro-fish and anti-heron, I would be fascinated to find out more.