Lake or pond? Posted on February 28, 2017

Current residents of the Round Pond

Is our New Forest water (see my last entry) a pond or a lake? A reader has put me straight. It’s not just a question of size. A lake has a water surface big enough to allow a swan to take off. It’s an elegant solution, he suggests, bcause it involves the surroundings as well as the water. Quite a big pond in the middle of a wood would still be a pond; remove the trees and it would attract swans and become a lake. So it’s up to swans to decide.

The swan measure rates the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens a lake (they love it) – but can a lake have a hard bottom and masonry margins? And things are different again in America. On Golden Pond was a movie about a lake, and Menemsha Pond, where I remember dropping anchor once in the fog between ghostly buoys, each with its cormorant, is an arm of the sea.. But then Martha’s Vineyard is not a vineyard,

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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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Sitting in the Shade

This is the third anthology of Trad’s Diary, cherry-picking the past ten years. The previous two covered the years 1975…

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Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book

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

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