Robert Browning (who lived in Kensington for a while in the oddly austere de Vere Gardens, a street without a single tree) felt exiled in Italy. ‘Oh to be in England,’ he sighed, ‘now that April’s here. When the brushwood sheaf round the elm tree bole is in tiny leaf’. Rarely, alas, now. Those great elms have all but disappeared.
Elms apart, this April could have been his model; four weeks stolen from summer with all the adornments of spring. Few streets, it is true, are as lavishly adorned as those round us in Kensington. Wisteria reaches the eaves, cherries blizzard the pavements with petals, and the scent of wisteria, trapped between the houses, is like a warm bath. By the end of the month it is joined, and overwhelmed, by the smell of jasmine (‘smell’, because ‘scent’ is not a powerful enough word. There are moment when I’m tempted to call it a pong.). Jasmine, considered a tender treasure when I started to garden is now rampant, scrambling into the ivy on the walls, hanging in swags with its pretty little pink and white buds, reaching up to invade the Japanese maple next door – behaving, in fact, like Old Man’s Beard, the wild clematis that smothered the hedges where I was brought up on the North Downs. I caught it shinning up the ivy outside my dressing room window. ‘Down, sir’, as the zoo keeper said to the lion which was gobbling poor Jim (whose friends were very good to him).
