A shower Posted on July 25, 2015

I have never actually washed my garden before. It’s the ground you usually water, not the leaves. But the builders next door send over such a dust-storm that after weeks without rain every plant was grey with grime. I’m sure it was stopping them growing; flowers were fewer and fewer – and sadly dingy.

So I got out the hose and sprayed the whole place; drenched it all over – an hour’s work the other night. How effective my artificial rain was I shall never know; it’s been stair-rodding down all day.

Later: how does steady rain have a totally different effect from watering? You can fill pots to the brim regularly, but the day after a downpour they look quite different, more buoyant, ready to perform. Is it the atmosphere, the pressure, the humidity?

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Trad? Who’s he?

Trad’s Diary started as the editorial column of the RHS Journal when it was remodelled and relaunched as The Garden in 1975. I was responsible for the changes, wrote the column then, and still do when I have an idea, 45 years later. I am Hugh Johnson, author of Trees, The Principles of Gardening, and lots of stuff about wine.

Trad borrows his name from John Tradescant, gardener to Lord Cecil at Hatfield and to King James I, one of the first to introduce plants from abroad to England. His family name, having become extinct, seemed a fitting label for a column of garden jottings. It was adopted in 1977 by the new Trust for the Garden Museum in Lambeth, where John Tradescant (the accent is on the second syllable) lived and is buried. Today the museum is in full and exciting expansion mode. I urge you to visit its website, visit it personally, and support it as much as you can.

Trad took to the ether as a blog in 2008. There have been two anthologies, in 1993 and 2009, and since 2008 the text has been published quarterly in Hortus magazine. Scroll back, if you have time to waste, over hundreds of earlier entries. Better, use the Search button to look up things that might interest you. This index facility is priceless to the diarist; now he can see how often he repeats himself. Thanks to Simon Appleby and Bookswarm for making this happen.

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Trees was first published in 1973 as The International Book of Trees, two years after The World Atlas of Wine….

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I wrote my first Pocket Wine Book in 1977, was quite surprised to be asked to revise it in 1978,…

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