The chives are up, and my spirits with them. Grass, I know, is just as handsome, and almost every plant at this moment more interesting, but chives represent a tasty turning-point: fresh herbs for fresh spring food. Scattering the fine cuttings on a salad, or on the yellow of eggs, gives me quite disproportionate pleasure.

To the French they constitute, with parsley, tarragon and chervil, ‘fines herbes’: an omelette made more vivid, green specks among the marbled yellow and brown. Chives alone make Sauce à la ciboulette, a delicate dressing for fish or a salad, whether in the richer form of a speckled mayonnaise or a pale and pourable cream. One of the chef’s star turns at the Garrick Club is a little smoked haddock soufflé: you dent the crisp brown crust with your spoon and pour in the cool white and green sauce, mingling fish and salt and smoke and hot and cold and the hint of onion.

Spain has a hairier-chested equivalent to the delicate French omelette: Huevos con ajos is scrambled eggs green-striped with fresh garlic shoots. These are dishes that spell spring, to follow with fresh spears of broccoli, and very soon asparagus. Here, I’m afraid, I take issue with the Spanish. They not only blanch the beautiful green shoots into gross white digits; they seem to think that canning them is a necessary step on the way to the table.

Snowdrops, of course. They signal the start of everything, in their chilly way. The warm feelings of spring, though, start with the first crocuses, which, in this garden, are C. tommasinianus.

A lugubrious friend told us, many years ago, that they were a pernicious weed. I saw them carpeting an orchard with their piercing purple and saw, absurdly, danger. The summer ground cover in this orchard was ground elder, so perhaps it was just the association of ideas. I didn’t take them seriously, in fact, until I saw a mighty river of them at Benington Lordship, a picture I can summon up in an instant: a great path of purples, darker and paler and intricately flecked with orange and gold.

I resolved to copy it, and four years ago planted 2000 in a band twelve feet wide along one side of the front drive. Now I’m reaping my reward.

Crocuses make you long for the sun to come out. They will stand patiently for days like little rockets on pale stems waiting for the clouds to pass. The moment the grass glows with sunlight their petals tremble, part and spread, eager for the bees. In no time, from nowhere, a working party arrives and forages every flower. The show is over then; the flowers are spent, sheaves of leaves take their place, not to be mowed (I have made this mistake) until they become invisible in the springtime grass. Next year you will have double the concentration, the beginnings of a proper rug, and cheeky adventurers for many yards around.

Catching the sunny day is of course the problem part. It will be your day in London, or taking the car for its service. It never occurred to me until last winter to plant a big shallow bowl of them and bring them into the kitchen when their pale points appear. Trustingly they took the (halogen) ceiling lights for sunshine, grew and opened, then shut again, repeating their performance, the kitchen being bee-free, over the space of two weeks. A second wave of smaller flowers followed the first so that we had an enchanted forest to admire at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The garden crop, meanwhile, only a few days later than those indoors, were suddenly and brutally depleted. One morning I saw that almost all the paler ones, more silvery lilac than purple, had been mown down. Or, on closer inspection, cropped off. Rabbits only nibble; this was grazing on a bigger scale. Muntjac were the felons.

Days later the Radio 4 Food programme considered the problem of the deer population; the highest, apparently since the last Ice Age. ‘Are they safe to eat?’ asked someone – of the food our forebears (or the fortunate ones) ate for centuries before they had cattle. No one, to my frustration, mentioned muntjac, or how their meat is sweetest of any deer.

Is there anything, short of warfare, that we can do to protect our crocuses? I am trying a new product called Grazers, a systemic spray that, once the plant has taken it up, reputedly gives it qualities that deer, rabbits, and even pigeons find repulsive. Do systemics work on bulbs? Is there time in their short growing season? I shall report my findings.

Menton, Grasse, Cap Ferrat……. plenty of places along the Côte d’Azur are famous as horticultural destinations. You don’t hear much about the gardens of Monte Carlo, though. Or about Monte Carlo, these days, at all. The romantic destination of gangsters and grannies seems to have lost its identity in the more business-like Monaco.

Tiny as it is, squeezed between cliffs and the Mediterranean, the principality seems too thickly planted with tower blocks to offer gardeners a chance. It is, on the other hand, one of the richest towns on earth, prinked up and garnished with flowers in all seasons, its streets swept day and night, its trees pruned with extreme daring (‘élagage acrobatique’ boasts one firm of arborists); no trouble too much; no shortage of labour. And its climate, sun-baked and sheltered from all but east winds, with spring in early March, positively provokes planting. Such full-dress public outbreaks as the gardens of Casino Square push gardenesque style to the limit, with the emphasis on palm trees.

There are two gardens, though, that are worth the detour and speak in garden languages about as distinct as they can be. The Jardin Exotique, clinging to the cliff tops as you come into town from Nice, is the prickliest display of xerophytes this side of Arizona, and in balmy, tranquil, seductive and oriental contrast, the other end of town on the way to Menton, is the Jardin Japonais.

The idea of cultivating cactus, and everything else rebarbative, on ledges and in niches in vertical bare rock, came to the same scientific prince as the oceanographic museum which is Monaco’s pride. His local gardener contrived a network of paths, steps and terraces that scale several hundred feet of rock fantastically eroded by the wind. Where the rock was missing, or not fantastic enough, he made artificial outcrops and overhangs.

For barriers and handrails to the knee-trembling paths he used concrete loggery. (I search in vain for a name for the faux-branch- and-twig-in-cement idiom). A more arid, exposed and uncomfortable site it is hard to imagine. And yet it is beautiful. It is wrapped, draped and studded with formidable plants in the peak of health; vegetable dinosaurs, scaly, armour-plated and above all prickly. They shoot, slither, squirm and threaten, light up with orange daisies or scarlet truncheons or suddenly rocket up twenty foot white plumes. It is brutalist botany; the principles of plant life spelt out in angry uncompromising terms. You couldn’t fail to be fascinated.

The Japanese Garden is more recent; part of the décor of a pampered and profitable beachfront, secluded behind tile-topped walls, demure, formal, teetering on the edge of tweeness and yet so disciplined, so precisely mannered that you surrender.

It is big enough to live its own life, even under tower blocks, and even beside the sea.

The day I first saw it the sea was furious. The Levante was tormenting it, whipping white horses out of sunlit sapphire rollers, flashing as they charged, bursting in silver explosions on the breakwaters and rocks. All right: that was an aberration. Water means tranquillity in the Kyoto code. To watch the racing waves, though, beyond the protecting wall and between the sculpted pines, only intensified the sense of courtly privilege, where brilliant carp navigate tiny stone islands and raked gravel represents an ocean. Camellias are absurdly luscious; maples fine-filigreed as lace.

Both these gardens, it occurred to me, however different in purpose and intention, are essays in stone. Rocks, the feelings they evoke and the conditions they impose, are at the heart of them both.

We can expect a spate of obituaries and post mortems in the months to come. How many rash acacias and imprudent olives will have let their proprietors down in the snow and ice? The final toll will not emerge until summer; plants that look like Monty Python’s parrot can have a chance of battling back.

The damage here has been, as far as I can yet see, simply physical – and fairly brutal. Snow can reveal all too clearly which trees come from regions with regular snowfalls and are equipped to survive it. One that doesn’t is the Monterey pine from California, Pinus radiata . Its branches are enormously heavy in any case. Add a hundredweight of snow and they are too apt to snap or tear away. They were the only pines to suffer at Saling.

Weight of snow, especially if it freezes or before you can reach it to knock it off, (and especially in the windless conditions we had this month) bends and crushes any evergreen. Our worst casualty to this force of nature is a big Phillyrea latifolia, one of my favourite trees of medium stature, much like its relation the olive in its pattern of growth but with dark lustrous green leaves. Freezing snow in its broad crown tore down a quarter of its branches. It will recover.

Our most serious casualty waited until the snow had melted before it happened. The cedar of Lebanon I planted in 1980, already a twenty foot tree, to replace our elms in screening the houses nearby, has become a key plant in the garden, slowly coming to dominate the front of the house.

Last week, after a night of heavy rain, I found a big branch from near the top lying on the ground. Looking up I could see that it had left a nasty tear on the main trunk. Sure enough, two nights later in more rain, but still hardly any wind, the top fifteen feet of the tree broke at the tear and fell, crushing a young tulip tree nearby. Cedars of Lebanon are famous for their flat tops. Now I’ve seen precisely how it happens, without violence. A design fault, you might call it.

There was a day, just before the snow, when I distinctly smelt that most spine-tingling smell of all, the smell of growth. It must provoke a hormone rush, endorphines or some chemical that sends well-being shooting through your system. There is no describing the essence of earth and plants in action. Does it emanate from some particular plants? Or from the soil? Is it a combination of many traces of scent? I know my reaction is like a gear change to lower revs, and a change of spectacles at the same time. I focus on different things.

At the snowdrop moment the ground come up to meet you anyway. Suddenly you are concentrating on plants three inches high whose flowers bashfully look the other way. I go down on my haunches (creak) and use my fingers to rake dead leaves aside, my forefinger and thumb to pull pine needles out of the pale clump, all my attention fixed on the microcosm at my feet.

Two days later there was no microcosm to be seen. The brilliant generalization of snow had obliterated detail. It held its perfection for 24 hours, reducing the garden to lumps and hollows, turning the apple trees to crystal chandeliers, then started to dissolve and pockmark, smudge and spoil. There is no pleasure in old snow, in shovelled piles that refuse to melt. In three days I was resenting it hiding the green and brown world where growth was carrying on unseen.

Disposing of packing materials gets harder and harder. Recycling them starts with the problem of identity: is this horrible white stuff that sticks to everything polythene, polyurethane, polypropylene, polystyrene? I think we should be told. And why can’t protective packaging be biodegradable? It’s bad enough with the space available in the country to handle it and store it while you figure out what to do with it, but in a city flat it is a serious problem.

Why this here? Because I have just received a parcel of handsome white hellebores from Woottens Plants in Suffolk www.woottensplants.co packed in what I first took, with chagrin, to be expanded polysomething, and quickly discovered is nothing of the kind, Michael Loftus of Woottens uses a product called Bionatura pellets made of corn and potato starch that dissolve in water. They are supplied in 75 litre bags by a company called Macfarlane Packaging. I give the details in the hope that everyone who sends fragile goods by carrier or post will consider them. Wine-merchants please note, too.

‘A fearsome maze of eerie crags’ is how one guidebook describes La Gomera. That phrase alone would have tempted me.

I keep hearing different accounts of the Canary Islands: their heaving airports, their lava landscapes, the smell of Ambre Solaire on black sand beaches …… Nobody had said that Spain’s highest mountain (admittedly no Mont Blanc) is on Tenerife, and only one friend, years ago, that La Gomera, 20 miles across the water, manages to include a rain forest in its astonishingly varied flora.

The mid-Atlantic tropics, when I thought about it, should have pretty special conditions. Trade Winds refreshing sun-baked soil – fertile, too, with ancient lava – it’s a promising recipe. For someone who avoids hot climates the idea of a misty mountain refuge from the coast was pretty attractive too. Breakfast in the garden, botanizing in the clouds (or, if no clouds, with distant views to other islands and the snow-capped Mount Teide), tea by the swimming pool and a late Spanish dinner sounded perfect. It was.

La Gomera has the islands’ biggest remaining area of the peculiar indigenous forest known as laurisilva: 10,000 jungly acres. To call it a rain forest is not quite accurate; strictly speaking it is cloud forest, meaning that the trees collect the moisture from the overladen air; the perpetual drip from their mossy branches, rather than conventional precipitation, doubles the measurable ‘rainfall’.

‘Laurel’, Laurus azorica, closely related to bay, is the main theme, supported by half a dozen superficially similar evergreens (the most recognizable being Viburnum rigidum) and the very different tree heather, Erica arborea. In certain exposures at a certain altitude in the hills you are in heather as dense as on a grouse moor – the difference being that it is 30 feet high. One should be there in March to smell it flowering.

Not much of the original forest, growing 60 or 70 feet high, is left: a few stands in precipitous north-facing gullies carpeted with moss or ferns, moss hanging in tresses from the trees. Among the ferns is the far-spreading Woodwardia radicans I remember from the oriel table in the hall at Great Dixter, where Lloyd once kept a specimen three yards across. Absurdly, high in these hills, and on slopes requiring, you would think, the farmers to abseil, smartly built stone walls support narrow terraces now abandoned, showing only traces of corn or overgrown vines. The bananas and tomatoes at lower levels still thrive, but the former athlete-farmers of the mountain now work in the hotels, or in Venezuela.

Ornamental gardening, of course, is a novelty on such an indigent (until recently) island. The style seems to have been set by an artist sometimes called the Picasso of the Canaries, Cesar Manrique. He created a spectacular mirador commanding a deep fertile valley, a terraced trench 2000 feet deep with the Atlantic at its foot, bristling with the Canaries native palm tree, singly or in groves, and stratified with green terraces like vegetative sedimentation.

The mirador grows from the cliffs. Its gardens merge imperceptibly with the mountain plants. Are these aloes, agaves, cistuses, euphorbias, echiums wildlings or horticulture? Bougainvillea gives the game way, but only when savage spikiness forms discernible patterns do you detect design.

We stayed in the parador at San Sebastian, the island capital (and launch-pad for Columbus: the courtyard of the Tourist Office contains the well where he drew the water to baptize America). Spain’s state hotels (or some of them) brilliantly project an image of long-settled aristocracy. You are a guest in a solid, slightly faded, country mansion – in this case with Manrique-inspired gardens rich with endemic plants, shaded by palms and the luxuriant deep green canopy of a pale-trunked ficus. Paths wind and steps climb between curving beds mulched with grey, rusty and pink volcanic gravel, setting off the strong domes and spikes of desert plants. I have not been an enthusiast for palm trees in the past, but Phoenix canariensis is a magnificent tree to have outside your bedroom window.

We have seen ‘gay’ appropriated. And ‘wicked’ and ‘cool’. It is all too easy to claim a word for a purpose, a cause or an occasion and to colour it, for the rest of us, and for good, with an association that puts its original meaning out of reach.

Sound-bites do the same with phrases. No one can link the words ‘wind’ and ‘change’ without Harold Macmillan’s drooping eyelids appearing momentarily in the corner of the frame. Of course there are coinages that enrich the language. Churchill gave us the Iron Curtain and Nelson ‘England expects’. But quotations need the protection of silent inverted commas, or they risk becoming clichés so embedded in the language that they no longer fulfil their function.

Freshness and toughness are two qualities essential in a memorable phrase. They are the spirit of the haiku; a verse form that must strike, surprise, resonate but remain faintly ambivalent and mysterious. They tend to feel fragile in translation. One of the master Basho’s most quoted is

‘old pond

a frog jumps in

the sound of water’.

I believe the sound of the Japanese (and perhaps the look of the characters) expresses more froggy thoughts than any English version. ‘Old pond ……’ nonetheless could make a pleasantly whimsical inscription beside the water in a garden.

Why all this? Ever since I started gardening here I have been tempted to caption, as it were, certain parts of the place with lapidary inscriptions. I love the look of letters carved in stone, and I want to share certain thoughts with visitors. We have a grove of young oaks I have deliberately pruned in the manner of a French forest: branchless boles to 30 feet or so supporting the leafy canopy. I tell every visitor that to me it represents and recalls the Fôret de Tronçais, the vast horn-echoing domain that produces France’s finest timber. Beside our Tronçais glade stands a splendid branchy veteran in the English style: a lion among gazelles.

Could I transmit these associations in a few words on stone? Could I or should I add a reflection on the reflection in the moat? There are gardens that lead parallel lives: a leafy one and a lapidary one. Stowe, for example, or Rousham, with their ‘worthies’. Little Sparta is a garden of stone-cut knotty thoughts that needs only their moorland setting to free your mind to follow them. ‘Language’, said its creator, Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘ambushes the visitor’. Unexpected language, monumentally inscribed, does more: it kidnaps his thoughts, contradicts his natural impulses and leaves him disquieted.

There are those who hold that modern gardens should do precisely this, disquiet, to have any claim to be considered art. They define art as a challenge. Its job is to remind us of the (miserable) ‘human condition’. The aggressive wit you feel in Little Sparta is thus its claim to be a work of art.

I could inscribe, at the entrance to my oak glade, ‘Forty cords of firewood’ or ‘Fifty thousand kilojoules (and rising)’. I could deconstruct the sum of nature and horticulture around us, or thread it with musical references or puff it up with poetry.

I won’t, though. Words are too potent, captured and cut, for the ambivalence of growth and light. Once we thought (or Keats did) Beauty is Truth. Even that, though, is too blunt a thought.