Gardening with Bob Dylan

A Promise Betrayed - Oh Sister

2012-02-17T01:31:00.000-08:00

Now, ivy. How few letters, what an odd collection, oddly ordered, oddly pronounced.

In this post-heavenly world ivy is better as clothing than a fig-leaf. For a start, somehow you have to attach that leaf. But ivy would be clinging and winding about you, following your contours, then billowing out, unexpectedly and concealingly. You couldn't rely on it of course. Just where you needed good cover you would find it had unaccountably avoided the area. Surprisingly intense sources of infuriation and disappointment lurk amongst the layered leaves.

The plant is invasive in North America; there can be no doubt it's overstepped the mark there. Here, in Europe, we have always lived with it but we can still get in a bit of a state about it; feeling it might tackle trees to the ground at any moment or enter our houses and be found eating our porridge and sleeping in our beds. But it's also familiar and friendly, a kindly blanket under trees, a haven for birds, a disguiser of miles of concrete and fencing, or worse, concrete fencing.

Here you see the snicket which leads to our door. I've just sheared the ivy back again - it's only really made good cover in the last two years. I promise you the ivy looks less squalid than the underlying combination fence, and it isn't as wide as it looks.

I think of ivy now because this is when you notice it everywhere. Up trees, it must be a little higher than last year, although if it's contentedly in its flowering and fruiting stage it may well have settled and slowed, like a happy relationship. On the ground, it will have advanced, or, if you managed to nip it back enough last year, it will have thickened. Here it is, neatly managed around the basis of sago plants in Nice, at the Chagall Museum.

A slightly strange marriage this. But it works, someone's looking after it.

So this is the time when I give all the ivy a good going over, checking growths and halting advances. I weed it out where I sincerely don't want it - on garden walls (rather than ugly fences), and houses. You can always see where it's about to make its next leap, just jump in first. Watch out for emerging hellebore heads and spring bulbs. The latter tend to pierce through OK, pointiness being a useful asset.

The birds are just beginning to think about nesting, and the old flowering and fruiting heads of the ivy are finished. Perfect timing, whip in there and knock the growths back. You'll have to have another go later this year, but I like to leave that till August when birds forget procreation and before it flowers. As a late pollen provider, it's a nicely-timed niche-filler. But of course, for flowering, you have to have been able to let it follow its desire to ramp up something. On the ground few cultivars flower - height and light is what they're looking for as they rush blindly about. You might imagine you could root a cutting from a piece that's already in it's flowering mode, and it would continue. Well you could, and it would. But it's not easy, they would simply rather perish.

In my own garden I glory in several different ivies, acquired here and there, over the course of 15 years. At least four of them came with me from a previous garden - I don't want any more or different ones; I have enough. How often do we say that and absolutely mean it. A couple could disappear and I'd be fine. But you know what ivy's like - when she comes, she stays.

And that's the good feeling about ivy; evergreen, capable of extraordinary obedience to the gardener's whim, loves dry shade, no apparent pests, a general look of health and shine, virtually unkillable. Ivy promises so much, a shiny, malleable, native. Surely she will always do what you want, as in the picture below from Morville Hall. What terrible sin would you have to commit to alienate an ivy?

I'm creeping up on the song here. Sending out my feelers, hoisting myself up around its feet. I look harmless and small but my plan is exponential growth within the next couple of years. Suddenly you won't be able to get me off it; I'll be so deeply connected and intertwined.

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So the song is Oh, Sister from Desire, and it has always seemed absolutely clear to me. My interpretation has not shifted over the years. But I would say that something else has - not quite compassion or understanding, more a kind of rueful acceptance that yes indeed, people can feel and think this way. Who hasn't lashed out with guilty rage, upset and arrogantly blaming? Do hurt feelings ever excuse wrongheadedness? We'll consider this troubling conjunction in a minute.

First a different conjunction, ivy and an old fence. Years ago, we called that a fedge. The idea was that the wood inside would rot away and the ivy would continue, like a hedgey fence, or a fencey hedge. Now I see that fedge has other new-fangled meanings, one of which is a living willow fence. Very nice I know but I see ivy has lost its cachet and had its party trick stolen. Never mind, potential ivy fedges are everywhere in suburban gardens. Just shear them over about twice a year, they seem to last for ever, so long as you stay alert and committed. Repeated cutting seems to slow some types down. This one is so-called parsley ivy - crinkly-edged leaves. Not necessarily an asset.

So I sincerely believe that ivy is a wonderful plant. Not perhaps the stripey yellow and green sort, with its big flabby leaves (colchica dentata variegata, Paddy's Pride). Not that one called Gold Child, with red stems and sharply marked little leaves. I like a dark green roundish leaf, shining with health, in the right spot, doing the right thing. Try hedera azorica Pico for real roundness of leaf. Can't show you mine properly, it's been dug up and lies sadly in pots.

The silver variegated kind merges into a rather charming grey, intricate close to, quietly abundant from afar. My own example swarms with birds and its host, a purple lilac, survives and just outgrows it enough. Above you see it in winter, and then from the side, with rosa mutabilis through it, in summer. This collection makes an excellent high screen in a difficult corner, with every attribute.

But perhaps I'm just wrong to be so complacent. I know that in one garden where I work the inexorable advance of ordinary ivy is smothering everything in its path, and a major blitz is needed. The removal of heavy overhead shade has robbed it of its shine and made it faster and more ferocious. Something Must Be Done, as I think Lenin may have said. Wrongheadedly?

Here's a garden where preparations have been made for the complete control of ivy. It's one of those little Dutch show gardens, offering education and example. Promises to stay attentive seem likely to be kept.

Well, that song. The protagonist speaks of his "sister". Surely a reference to the Song of Solomon, where the sister is the spouse. So this character is referring to his wife, who is also his sister in creation, through the eyes of a fatherly and powerful God. The couple were in Eden, their marriage vows created them anew there. Now it's all going wrong for she's breaking her promise and won't let him sleep with her. He's telling her that she's taking a big risk - if she carries on like that, he'll leave.

Now that's a bit brutal isn't it? Not just my account, or what the protagonist is saying to her, but brutal about the bottom line - marriage as a duty, not subject to changes of feeling or loss of affection. You can depend on your marriage to give you what you want, whatever bad thing you do, for promises have been made and God is the overseer.

Despite its assumption of power, the song is childlike in the depth of its sense of betrayal and hurt. "But, you promised." The singer's innocence about the true value of a promise between two people is touchingly, brutally fundamentalist.

This song is completely sealed, the singer tips no knowing wink and he seems to be as he says. So it feels like there is searing honesty in his account. Almost unacceptably so, for no-one comes out well, and there is no comfort. And I love it for its honesty. It blows the doors off.

But what has this to do with ivy? Well, ivy's not a plant, it's a relationship. Adapting to its host, depending and suffocating, it's loving grasp is a strain. The host may cope, growing strongly upwards, the ivy may slow down enough to allow the happy longevity of the couple. They're not symbiotic, or parasitic, they're closely involved independent entities. The ivy does not consider the ability of its host to endure. Like the protagonist of the song, it takes a lot for granted. Sometimes it can stand alone as its support crumbles; sometimes it, too, crashes to the ground.

The character in the song feels cornered and threatened. As he lashes out with threats that he will walk out, he is aware that his appeal to a higher authority is unlikely to work. He's close to absurd as he makes his clumsy bludgeoning attempts to control the situation. As gardeners we can be too, when plants elude our efforts to control them, betraying our hopes and expectations. And we can become excessively enraged and obsessed, hating a thing that is what it is. With ivy, it is up to us to stay close and observant, ready with attention. It's no good always dancing off with the bright beauties, have a care for the quiet background, which holds everything together.

Just to finish, here are two heaps of an ivy called Little Diamond. I planted them when we came here, tiny sprigs. Even now, no good for nectar in November, like the big one, but reliably covering a very ugly concrete edging. Ivy works just as well to disguise pond-liner. Ivy will cover stuff up - that's what it does. No good expecting it to behave against its nature, whatever promises you may have extracted.

Entropy - Everything Is Broken

2012-02-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

Not one of his very best, there's a befuddled, middle-aged innocence to the central conceit in this song, Everything Is Broken, from Dylan's album Oh Mercy. He pokes around, bothered by the crashing of china, the snapping of tools and furniture. Disorder and confusion everywhere. He cannot turn round without something else hitting the floor. Just what it feels like when you're trying to tidy up.

The world is as he says; everything is broken, not destroyed, just a bit broken. It's all a matter of time, if it's not broken now, it will be in the future; if it's repaired, it will be broken again.

Dylan's song is the testament of a puzzled, but cheerfully up-tempo Cassandra. He doesn't like things crashing about and the sound of breaking glass. Man-made objects shatter into rubbish. Rocks crumble into sand and timber into humus. That's entropy, isn't it? I speak with equal befuddlement. But it's all running down, falling to bits, flying apart, isn't it?

How can we extract an enlightenment value out of this idea? For I see that as a reasonable purpose in life, and in these pieces. I used to believe in something I called "splitting and clumping - the music of the spheres". It seemed to me to sum up a sort of heavy breathing of the universe, in, out, together, apart. That process is as evident in human affairs, where things are broken, then re-organised in new units, as in the carbon cycle. But now I see that that's just part of the advance towards eventual destruction. Splitting looks like what will win in the end.

Well, I've started heavily, time to lighten up. As we race back to England through the vast prairies of South Eastern France, most things look complete and continuous. Ploughed stretches of gently curving soil, extending to the horizon. I could beg for breakages here - shards of woodland, scraps of farm buildings, ragged trees and copses. I exaggerate their lack; all these things are here, but nothing is messy or confused, agriculture dominates, reason and confidence speed the plough. No pictures, our train is too fast; accidenti, as Italians say, my camera is broken.

We've had our Italian roof repaired and the tractor tyres and endless broken garage impedimenta are mostly gone. Equally the soaked and rotting furniture from the bedroom, the plastic bags of detritus and history, the old fur coat and bike. The cellar is still full, dozens of bottles of old peaches and tomatoes, some of those nice wide glass bottles, an old freezer, believed empty.

What remains is not very comforting yet, if you're looking for the serenity of an ordered and clean environment. But we'll get there. Reparations and renovations are our purpose and desire. We're not going to be long about it, as we are not architectural perfectionists and entropy will eventually get us anyhow. Plus, I prefer gardening.

The fierce winter weather has left shattered branches and scorched leaves in its wake. The vast conifers prove their worth in the snow, holding the snow beautifully, letting it go gracefully. We have none in our garden however, and I'm grateful not to have to put up with gigantic dark presences all year. Funny how they have to be half covered up before they look nice.

Broad-leaved evergreens however - there's another story. Laurel is drunkenly splayed, the leaves scorched brown. More than a reproach, they're a positive smiting.

Elsewhere quite thick branches have sheered away from deciduous trees. So now I understand some of the reasons behind the extraordinarily heavy pruning and pollarding that seems to be considered necessary here. Look how harshly some trees are beaten into submission. If it's not broken yet, break it before it will be seems to be the motto.

And yet look at how lovely the fruit and nut trees are. Darkly drawn against the snow in their ordered formations, they're multiplied quincunxes shaped by care and mathematics.

I could almost regret those apricots trees we have to lose, because of death and disintegration. But a local farmer has planted hazelnuts in a broad swathe above our house. Those measured twigs are an excellent discovery. It does seem to me that mature hazelnuts which have been well-pruned don't hold the snow - here are some which don't seem to have been as prepared as well as others.

Before we leave Italy, here's a vision of entropy set in the middle of nowhere. Nature is doing its best, but perhaps it's just a concrete abstraction - a tax-break of some kind? An art-work? The countryside round here is mostly practical. Time is not wasted on the follies of beauty or elegance unless the church plays its part. But everything more or less works, and so many people are charming and kind.

In the song, Dylan has again hit some sort of nail neatly on its damaged head. The song expands into broken hearts, broken promises, broken rules and laws. It's an idea of endless application and fertility. If you have had the pleasure of reading Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, you may agree with me that the eyes that observed all those people and events, all those rooms, all those closely described furnishings and woodwork, they seem to be the eyes of Everything Is Broken. Out of the smashing and the falling, something is always rescued, for a little longer. Renewal is possible, for a time. But it's a bit of a battle, for all of us.

The Gift - Boots of Spanish Leather

2012-02-03T06:33:00.000-08:00

Let me start today in an unoriginal but contrarian spirit - cockroaches, rats, bindweed; precious sources of hope in this human-infested world. They have neither delicacy nor fear. With reproductive drive to burn, they resist some of the worst we can do, leaping back a thousandfold, and seeming to draw greater strength from the battle.

On the other hand I find the precious, the rare, the endangered and the fragile unbearably sad. Wrong-headed and sadly pessimistic, I mourn their passing even while they are still here, in fewer, more threatened places. This is absurd and unhelpful, I acknowledge it. So, gratitude and admiration to those who fight to preserve the white rhino, the franklinia and the stag-beetle; a plague on the ignorant and careless.

I still cannot watch those documentaries though - the sad, wise faces of threatened animals going about their doomed business, the exquisite complex harmonies of migrations and fruitions - natureporn, I could call it carelessly. Is there something odd about how intensely we love it all against the background of the current great extinction? Or maybe that's just the mature, middling British.

Ancient church doorway in Saluzzo -strange little humanoids

Well, unless you'd prefer to hang on to to some poorly-focussed, impotent anxiety, let's move on. What can I bring you? As I set off for Italy, what I seem to be able to call our Italian house, that seems to be the thing to ask. A delicious little something? A statue? A 1000 year old olive tree? Or would you rather have an unimpeachable sense of style? Or a fierce localism? What d'you want?

Let's stick with a sense of movement - I'm thinking about the shifting of stuff, from there to here, and I'm thinking about sorrow - the two things together. Here's a rather clumsy Italianate pot at Cliveden, famous venue of the louche and wealthy. In the rain, it was cheerless - sin and sadness hand in hand.

Our train journey here affords us the luxury of change and time together, the one in the other. We arrive refreshed, bit by bit we've left ourselves behind only to find ourselves again in Italy, subtly different. Here is our house in the dead centre of the picture, buried in snow.

We all know about invasive plants, refreshed and stimulated by travel, ramping across continents, dominating and elbowing fragile native rarities aside. They are the gardener's secret shame and the colonisers' unwitting curse. I won't list them, we all know their identities, though some pass unnoticed, settling into use or ornament.

Invasive plants make gardeners very anxious, some of us are convinced that bio-diversity lies in our hands. We pay for our pleasures with self-denying ordinances. We worry and proselytize. But the genies are out, some damage is done, some will follow, as night day. The tramp of invasion will continue. Here's a slant on this complex set of problems, from a book called The Demon in Eden by Jonathon W. Silvertown.

Briefly, it explores an evolutionary paradox. How is it that species have not simplified over the generations? After all, evolutionary adaptations have led to ever sleeker, fiercer, more multi-purpose versions, plants that can cope with varied conditions and resist most limitations. More or less iron-clad voracious replicants like Japanese knotweed or water-hyacinths appear to confound bio-diversity, striding destructively about, taking territory, repeating, repeating.

Well, apparently no, the reverse is true; plants like these have stimulated variation. The word here is "niche". Adapt to a moment or a space around the central swathe cut by the dominator and there you are - dependent on your special niche, diversity and fragility in action. Variety and specialism follow apparent supremacy.

How about this rather etiolated cornucopia? Consider it a gift.

This explanation is no good as a sop to the gardener's conscience for we don't have space. We don't have time. We can't help but love those plants which seem both beautiful and easy; few people want to depend on miffy or demanding plants for their outside spaces. No, give us spireas, photinias, certain grasses, liriopes, rudbeckias, daffodils and hydrangeas and we'll rush about, spreading them everywhere, cockles warmed by their healthy compliance to our needs.

But repetition, repetition. One of the least showy sins at the bottom of Pandora's box. Staleness to the eye is a sort of badness perhaps. Balanced by variation, it is redeemeable, even essential. But I don't like seeing the same plants everywhere in the temperate zones - I don't think I ever will. When I move I want things to change. But I know that cannot be; too late, too late. All we can do is keep on with the niches.

Nandina domestica in Turin, under the snow

So what about this song, Boots of Spanish Leather from The Times They Are A'changing. It strikes me as a rare and delicate flower never replicating itself clumsily, never springing newly from its joints and junctions, identical and coarse. We have a complex architecture of the exchanges between two lovers, from confidence to loss. The girl departs on a ship offering gifts for her love on her return. She offers them too many times, sinning by repetition, and gradually her intention to stay away becomes clear. The departure strengthens, the chance of return weakens and the offered gifts become a substitution for her own self.

Finally the singer, who has been as poetic and convincing as he could, realises his impotence against forces that are outside of him, far away. Wryly, with exquisite sorrow, he suggests what he will have instead of her - those Spanish boots of Spanish leather. The repetition underlines his failure and disappointment, in this song saying something twice is never good. His resignation is so accurately acheived and the song so extraordinarily deft - it springs forth like a natural event. I praise it as I will the meadows hereabouts in Spring, complex but simple, ancient but young, evolved in paradox, and guileless.

And the use of that "a" before the verb, as in "a'roamin'", "a'wishin'", "a'feelin'"? It's so clever, that feel of innocence and unsophistication. The knowingness of artistry sweetens the loss of real hope and the injuring of true innocence. How he sings that last line! Enough to break your heart, but kindly. If only such gentle resignation could soften other extinctions.

In the meantime we have the restful snow, two months late here but present at last. Not a gift but a necessary return. No gift could ever substitute, for here is the source of moisture for next year.

Something to say - Ballad Of A Thin Man

2012-01-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

"But what does it mean? Oh, what's it trying to say, surely it means something?" Hear the petulant wails as people whack through the flourless chocolate cake and Earl Grey tea. They've just visited a garden, they're the new breed, they're trying to make sense of it all.

Can you imagine such a scene? And the vibrant conversation that ensues: are gardens art? What was the creator's brief? How to judge, whether to judge? Was it beautiful? Was it right? Does it matter? Was this the point? Was that the point?

Ephrussi De Rothschild, Nice, France.

No, that's not really how it works.  Gardens don't seem to invite artistic or philosophical discussion with any ease. That's not to say they don't sometimes get it, and there are many who feel an aesthetic of gardens should be encouraged, helping us all to develop better gardens and better understanding of them. I sometimes feel this too. And then I turn round and feel the exact opposite. So I'm not to be trusted, but, as ever, I'm willing to toss a few opinions about.

In any case, a garden mostly means itself. Like a landscape, it means that here was considered a good place to grow this or that.   It means that the people who made it thought this thing or that thing were worth doing. It means society, history, fashion, art, money, labour, aspiration and practicality. It can mean leisure, class and memory. These things can be read in it, but they may not be intended as meaning.

The Pursuit of Paradise by Jane Brown gives us the complete low-down on the social history of gardens in the UK. I highly recommend it, if you enjoy detail and illumination. Few pictures but lots of evidence for interesting assertions. Threads of influence and expectation woven through our understanding of what a garden is or ought to be.

A garden often represents some pretty simple aims; pleasurable control of nature and contact with beauty.  It might also present a point of view, or a set of thoughts, it might mean an insult, or a dream. But it means all these things in a rather gardeny way - it can never really be free of being a garden, it's hard to understand why one would want it to.

The Garden House, Devon

The website thinkinGardens.co.uk urges us, in its manifesto, "to promote productive and pleasureable debate through gardens and to foster gardens that offer deeper artistic expression". That's fine, I'll give it a whirl. But I don't know, not at the expense of what we have taken for granted in gardening. That everyone can do it, that it's a kindly balm, that it's a humanist endeavour at its heart. And that we should create and encourage, not the reverse.

Proper art, whatever that is, has greater freedom. It's chains are self-imposed by the creator's desires and capacities. A wild and irritating generalisation, of course; nothing is free, or all that easy.

The gardener's volatile materials are growth, place and weather; prone to tempers and unreasonable behaviour, they demand deference. The Wicked Fairy of fashion steps through, just as exigeant and forceful. Time tarnishes and then, with luck, softens.

But there are routes to beauty. Effective placing of lovely plants only emphasises their inherent charms and interest; a sense of scale and all the other design mantras all look like the absolutely obvious when they're right. The decisions of the garden-maker disappear as the branches spread.

Naumkeag in Massachusets.

Not true of a combination with striking architectural elements, like the steps above, of course. That's the way to make your mark.

There's another thing that happens. As a garden-visitor, you create your own experience, because it's a whole environment, you're in it and part of it, seeing what is visible and meaningful to you. The garden-maker may focus your gaze, but not your active attention. Gardens are often sociable baths of sensual leisure, thinking seems out of place and criticism mean-spirited.

Guess who can shed a little acrid light on the role of the critic, it's Dylan of course, singing Ballad Of A Thin Man. I chose this next photograph because of the slightly weak, disconnected look on the defensive, but defenceless face. And there he was thinking he was the Emperor Tiberius.

We all know the song surely, the singer mockingly accuses the subject of his ballad, Mr Jones, of not knowing what's " happening". "Do you, Mr Jones?" You've heard that cawing, sneering tone of voice. It's charismatic but frankly not that attractive. Difficult to enjoy even if you are not the target and even if you think the target deserves it.

But this target doesn't seem seriously offensive, his biggest crimes seem to be his appearance, his weak attempts at asking questions and the way he moves, holding a pencil, being a bit like a camel. This doesn't add up to much, but he's an uncomprehending, ignorant outsider, with an educated veneer. Lovely to sneer at, with all the pleasures of bullying and being superior. Indeed he's beset by aggressive questions from an enraged circus troupe, who relish their own more exotic flaws.

Mr Jones is very uncomfortable, like a toad who's flopped unwarily into a hairdresser's. He's puzzled and harried, lost for a response and faced with confusing forces who seem to know more about him than he knows himself. They scream together in coded language. He has no idea what to do and that seems to madden his interlocutor further. All this you learn, not from him but from the unrelenting attack.

It's a pretty horrible situation, one I instinctively wish to avoid. My sympathy for Mr Jones is reluctant, because he has got things wrong, but I hope to have nothing but distaste for the ganging up and the superiority. I've seen that frozen, defensive look on the faces of garden visitors when their opinion is sought. They sometimes have no clue what they're supposed to be looking at or for, even as I enthuse or criticise with others. I'm sure I sometimes have that look myself. Taste is not simple, condemnation circles in the air. Try Germanicus for the hard look on the singer/protagonist's face as he directs proceedings.

In the song, Mr Jones probably represents the press, who have to turn out a story, even though they completely misunderstand the nature of the culture they're looking at. He doesn't understand its anarchic reality, or its revolutionary possibilities and he doesn't understand that he'd better be a part of it. There's an underlying gay sex theme, implicating Mr Jones in further hypocrisy which he hasn't begun to come to terms with. He doesn't even know about himself, let alone the subjects of his interview.

But is ignorance and fear best dealt with by mockery and exclusion? Rhetorical question of course. The song speaks of the piercing truth of the situation, from both sides. Dylan nails it, and he manages to do that from a one-sided perspective. He leaves you questioning how you too are implicated. If it's unfair criticism of an unfair critic, whose side are you on?

The alternative to harsh criticism cannot be universal tolerance and misty-eyed acceptance of everything. That would never work. How we rate and what we perceive in the work of others needs expression and exploration. And that's where thinkinGardens comes in, but confusingly. Try it and see.

I'll finish with this very influential garden, Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent, UK which completely "got" the zeitgeist about 10 or 15 years ago and seemed to speak to the hearts of most people. But not me, I don't know if it's contrariness or a dislike of too much self-conscious bric-a-brac, however "found" and place-specific. I could see it was clever, and artily done, but it left me cold, almost like this week's song. This picture does it no justice at all; you might like to search for something better. There's plenty under both its name and Derek Jarman's.

It's only fair to say that the garden's focus on the simple, the natural and the wild is no longer so new and different as it seemed then. Time passes, impact is lost as repetition dulls.

But if I ever met the current caretaker, or had ever met Derek Jarman before his untimely death, I would have found something I could honestly admire and I would have remained silent about my cold heart and the reasons for it. Is that cowardly and dishonest? Voicing it would have seemed churlish and wrong. There are those who think they've spotted a naked Emporer and you really need to be both absolutely positive and correct. Is that possible about this sort of thing?

You don't pay to enter this garden, you can go any time - doesn't that make it worse to criticise? If you go to a private garden through the National Gardens Scheme or others, part of the small price, usually paid to a charity, is reasonable tolerant enthusiasm and acceptance. That's because you're an honorary friend and it's why so very many people in this country open their gardens to the public. You're never far from a garden to visit and it's a marvellous thing on the whole.

My dishonesty would not matter a straw under those conditions of course, but if I had been an influential person writing a published review I think I would still have focussed on the positive. Would my hypocrisy have made me unreliable, to the point of uselessness? There's a good tradition of constructive criticism, which involves balancing a good thing with a bad, suggesting a way forward. Any mentoring or management tome will help us with that.

If I had been honest, I would have had to do more than simply "not like " it, I think. And that's the challenge of the thinkinGardens reviews. Harshness must be justified. Gardens set a high bar on that, precisely because they're gardens, with all that that means. We couldn't give Mr Jones this much credit, but some sort of paradise is always being pursued in a garden.

Quietly Excited - Visions of Johanna

2012-01-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

There is a central paradox at the heart of the garden, which is created for human use and pleasure. To fulfil its purpose it needs to bring you a sense of peace. Simultaneously, because human beings love complexity and novelty, it would be best if it could also excite, entertain, or stimulate. Perhaps beauty lies where these two poles intersect.

Here's the entrance to Penelope Hobhouse's The Coachhouse, now sadly closed. I remember breathing more quickly as I approached this green promise; is it just me?

An overwrought garden lacks the harmony and peace we have the gall to demand of our outside spaces, and a garden with nothing interesting in it is probably also dull. But a complex garden can also feel tedious and an empty one can be deeply stirring. So we're exploring the two fighting arms of this contradiction in terms, hoping not to have to resort to chemicals in order to get the calm excitement which will draw us out to explore and relax.

Here's another lost garden, Magnolia House in Yoxford - it was open for many years, smallish, imperfect, but in my view nicely placed on the calm/stimulation axis. You need both to be piqued and pulled through a garden. It's nice to be fascinated and hopeful about what lies beyond, enchanted by detail and soothed by distance. Interested, not mindlessly zonked out in some kind of flowery cloud of unknowing. Better to be alert and pleased.

Enter the song - Visions of Johanna, on the Blonde on Blonde album. It retains an air of mystery; each following verse holding the promise of greater clarity. But it always recedes, you never quite get there. Your journey accumulates more images, some startling; casting different lights on what lies behind or before, never truly illuminating the whole. But you turn and turn about, looking round, never quite able to leave the enclosed space. I don't hear the horror, or the despair, or even the acute loneliness that others seem to; to me it's a striving for creative transcendence, stuck in a room, stuck in a city, surrounded by what I can only call weirdos.

From East Ruston - below

And we do have the quiet/excitement axis. The slippery protagonist traces alternative ideals, Louise and Johanna,"concise and clear" versus repeated "visions". Of Johanna, obviously. I'm thinking of Louise as the calm, and the inexpressible visions as the excitement. Sometimes they seem to change places, sometimes Johanna even changes places with the singer, who dissolves into his own visions.

To succeed, the song, like a garden, needs to stay aloft, tensed between the contrasted forces. And this is where the music helps - there's an organ making horizontal lines of sound in the background and there are both sharp and gentle beats and tricklings of sound tying everything together, reinforcing the calm, amplifying the gradual crescendo of excitement towards the end.

So let's consider a particular rather extraordinary garden. East Ruston Vicarage garden in Norfolk, UK, created by Alan Gray and Graham Robeson. My photographs date from at least a couple of years ago, taken hastily, not that flattering but let's hope, illustrative.

The garden is a tour de force, containing tours de force, stimulating, exhausting, huge, complicated, probably over-designed, but triumphantly horticultural in intent. The enormous palette of plants and the density of variety need every peaceful trick in the book to help you stay interested. Firm structure or clarity is the tool of choice, holding everything down. Concisely put, clarity becomes calm.

If you can detect anything in the somewhat reflective photograph of the plan above, you will see that the garden around the buildings is a honeycomb of enclosed hedged compartments, all interconnected with tunnels and arches, filled with symmetrically patterned arrangements of topiary and flowers. Symmetry seen sideways becomes repetition, a lesson you can learn over and over again in this garden.

Here a tree fern compartment could be a glamorous suburban garden, without the very long complex view at either end obviously. It's very calm, but rather out of this world. Ladies playing in an empty lot?

Long straight walks, other axes, stretch across the flat space. They are varied longitudinally and horizontally with crosswalks. The whole garden is enclosed with impenetrable shelter belts, probably much greater now than on the plan. The main lines are straight, but the woodland and the desert gardens are "informal", i.e. twiddly, or curvy. Your eye is rarely free to wander; its movement is controlled by enclosure, though the spaces may be large. There is a sense of looking for something, never quite finding it, but seeing extraordinary things on the way.

Here's a calm centre - the main axis away from the buildings. Here there is width and horizontality from the retreating steps and lawn. Horizontal lines are an excellent way to achieve visual stability. But we have a few other soothing elements. Tidiness, smoothness, work all done. These are prosaic qualities but, for the sake of peace, you can settle for them. And pattern, our brains crave pattern, which seems to help them relax.

If you know the song, you can build your own connections. I find them infinite, but simultaneously, not there at all. The excitement of realising the self in creativity is the driving motor of this garden, and of the song. For the singer, it seems to be better than sex, better than love; why wouldn't he be excited? You hear it in the last verse. His conscience explodes, he's breaking new ground. He fears what it will cost him, and loss and failure of this creativity even as he celebrates it.

Try this next one for hallways and little boy lost - don't be too literal; it's all atmosphere, atmosphere. Anyway, perhaps she's really Alice.

Let's get out of these tighter enclosures. The garden flirts with danger in the stony desert area where agaves, yuccas and cacti have gathered, presumably wondering how on earth that happened. Pictures and visions of strangeness in Norfolk - a bridge like an upended dinosaur, endless twirly lines of bigger stones on a groundwork of smaller stones. Jewels and binoculars on the heads of mules perhaps?

This is an entirely created world, but there's no visual reason to say it's out of place, for the internal connections are reasonably convincing and beyond the boundaries of the garden the flat agricultural land is invisible. The stones and the repeated shapes make a unity, which is calming, but we're on the farther end of our conceptual axis and we can only hope the excitement feels good. I'm not certain Johanna's to be found here.

Without doubt, this is a garden that strives. I feel I have not begun to do it justice, there is just so much, and much is interesting. Some is lovely and takes off. Here are two simpler moments, with another way of telegraphing peace, somewhere to sit.

For a deeper contrast, on the margins of the garden, true otherness. A mirage of the garden that is not. And perhaps a release from all that creative self-expression. Louise is definitely here.

And finally, a sort of companion piece to Penelope Hobhouse's entrance courtyard at the top. Compare and contrast, as the topiary does with the free growth. Binary systems, oppositions and similarities, inside and out; these seem to be where we've arrived. A crescendo to the beginning again.

Looking for Comfort - When The Deal Goes Down

2012-01-12T10:16:00.000-08:00

Over the years, various friends have asked, in concerned and puzzled tones "But what do you find to do in the garden in winter?" and I have found it hard to answer. Running about with oil and sharpeners for my tools, tidying the shed, disinfecting the greenhouse, dismantling and remantling the mower - these are excellent ideas. But you can imagine already, they're not what I do. I'm not that practical. Me and my equipment, we have a non-aggression pact. I use it, and it struggles on.

But I'm ready to answer. This winter is barely winter however - we have shot from October to late March without pausing for lowered temperatures. People keep saying lugubriously "We shall pay for it later". I think we will, but not in the way they expect. Climate change is a huge preoccupation for me, helpless and eaten up by anxiety, I'm in a hyper-vigilant state, tensely checking whether my breath shows in the air - and it almost never does. So I need help from gardening.

Contact with plants is a prop and a stay, an even keel, a hope and a promise. It doesn't always work in drought or high winds, when the stress they suffer is painful. But a warm winter shows no teeth; we're suffering from excessive comfort.

So I'm mostly to be found bent over or kneeling, extracting the bad, expanding the good, removing what will prevent or disfigure new spring growth, checking for seedlings, disrupting excessive growth, making space, filling space. I'm restoring edges, spreading leaf-mould and compost, firming unsteady plants and replanting according to my own wild wishes.

Winter is the time to search for promises of beauty and try to be of service to what will come, balancing the human longing for order against the needs of nature. That is to say, time for a good tidy up, secateurs, plastic rake and broom at the ready. This isn't the moment to talk of the building site at the end of the garden and all the displaced plants. We'll deal with the possible, not the entirely out of our hands.

The scent of sarcococca fills the garden. These are wonderful plants, growing in every situation I have tried, a neat background in summer and a lusty outpouring of perfume in January.

Here's one, near our old gate.

Now is the time to start working on ferns if you have them. Or perhaps you've considered them uninteresting, polysyllabically confusing and over-similar. I hope to persuade you of an unexpected charm, their rusty knuckles. By this I mean that many of them benefit from being cut back to their tightly curled bases, every tatty end neatly trimmed.

You will be left with a sculptural bronze heap, from which new fronds will emerge in April, pristine and thrilling as they unwind and stretch. I saw a magnificent example at Great Dixter last year, three times the size of the one I show, rising over a foot from the ground and in a proud position. It was a natural art-work, created with oriental care and, probably, sharp pointed scissors. I firmly believe it to have been a polystichum setiferum, but you know how these things are.

Here's another - a polypodium I think, before and after.

Don't give all ferns the same treatment at the same time however, unless it really makes sense to you. Most polystichums are ready as soon as they begin to brown from the inside. Matteuccia strutheropteris is desperate for attention (and for curbing if it's running about hysterically) but orangey dryopteris erythosora can be left until much later; I'm not sure it offers such a nice base anyway. But last years fronds go more lemony and can glisten against the darkness. Wait till it starts to look messy, or you really need the space.

Truly evergreen ferns, such as aspleniums, blechnums and cyrtomiums perhaps need individual fronds selecting and removing as they brown off. I would use my eyes and hands first to get the feel of the plant and how it grows. The benefit of the treatment I suggest is that it's a lot easier to remove the old guard before the new opens, when you will undoubtedly cause damage. Over time a fern will benefit, staying tight and attractive. The erythoniums and snowdrops you have around it will have space to flower before they disappear beneath the glamour of those fronds.

In my view it's right to be careful about what you plant with ferns. They need complementing with compliments. Hostas don't cut it for me, see what you think.

To me, the big simple leaves defeat the structured frilly laciness, especially when they're coloured. Asarum, ajugas, small green hostas and ivies seem more successful. Here's another, matteuccia strutheropteris, with a comparison.

And here's one where they just look at home.

I've swamped you with photographs; and of course you need a bit of damp and shade to grow most ferns successfully. And time. We all need time.

I'm turning to my song now, the ferns are calming me, but I need more. Today we're listening to When The Deal Goes Down on the album Modern Times.

Imagine you're a stately old couple gently waltzing together in a dim polished hall, or perhaps it's a parlour. The song is a promise of sustainment in times of trouble, even the worst of troubles. So many possibilities about who or what is the sustainer to whom, some of them multiplying as the song unfolds. It's slow and sedate, the difficulties of life that the singer alludes to seem greater because the music is so gentle, though a bit maudlin, and the voice is so fragile.

I have to admit, one of the qualities I value in Dylan's voice is the tremendous humanity; the failings and the warmth combine in a way I find, oh what's the word, yes, comforting. It's a comfort to feel that someone else feels the same and in this song, that's exactly what I hear for "We all wear the same thorny crown." We're all in the same boat, we'll all be there "when the deal goes down", the singer too. How comforting is that? A real question perhaps.

The singer does not mention tidying up a garden as way of dealing with fear and anxiety. It's likely that a more spiritual solution is closer. Extraordinarily, he does point out that his prayers rise up like clouds in the air - the very clouds I've been longing to see, in the frost I've been longing to feel. He regrets words he has said and hurts he has committed. He comments on transient joys and their ultimate valuelessness. Maybe excessive plant love comes under the heading of transient joys; he mentions a rose that pokes through his clothes, but we all know what roses mean.

Whereas I really mean plants of course. And there are a few more vegetable loves to mention at this time, especially if the spring is to continue rushing headlong at us, breaking flowers untimely through the ground.
So on to hellebores and epimediums.

The pictures above show a fern and a hellebore before and after being readied for spring. I do the same thing to epimediums always removing the old leaves before the flowers come through.

If you've ever seen hellebores smitten by that black spotty fungus, which makes them pointless and ugly, you would accept the need for this, because it genuinely helps clean them up. Just cut the leaf stems to the ground, leaving the flowers ready to come through in good condition. Epimediums don't get the spots, but if you are to enjoy the flowers and attractive leaves throughout the rest of the year, you should cut the old batch off before the fragile flowers stems lengthen. It's very difficult to sort them out once those delicate heads are rising. You can leave them, feel free, but they'll look tired and tarnished from the get-go, as they do in the first picture on the lower right.

And the tenderness of those unfurling flowers brings me back to the song. Dylan gives us a lovely phrase

"More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
that keep us so tightly bound"

The hesitant melody slightly confuses the sense, which needs to reverse - these precious hours are more frailer than the flowers. And we are tightly bound to that doubly intensified frailty: it is such a true contradiction, for we cannot argue with time and it passes like dropping petals. Like these precocious camellias, which will pass early, as they have opened early.

Were there a bargain to be had I would sacrifice my camellias to some real winter, without regret. But the deals with the earth have been done, stored carbon rises in the air. I seek comfort, but not at the expense of knowing that the deal is indeed going down.

But let's lift our hearts together and end with an exquisite fern, taken at Rosemoor, a magnificent paradise of plants in North Devon UK, an RHS garden of delights. It's pteris wallichiana and was new to me. I don't long for it, it would not survive here, but it's a triumph of elegance.

Round and Round - Eternal Circle

2012-01-05T10:14:00.000-08:00

A simple shape, the circle, and I'm not about to go into one of those new-age frenzies about magic and power. But the shape of the space we are in surely affects the way we feel; strolling past or plumping ourselves right down inside there.

Garden-making is an opportunity to draw shapes on the ground and in the air; what a pleasure it is to fashion mass and space as you carve excess from shrubs and trees. Even mowing the grass is a form of sculpture and creating a round of green laid flat is far from artless. But there are many meanings to such a circular space and only some of them are what we really want.

The example above, set in the Welsh border counties, a garden called The Nurtons, seems almost like perfection. It draws you down, holding you connected to those murkey hills, but doing so kindly. That's what gardens should be about, cultivation hovering on the edge of the wilderness, holding humans in balance, not teetering, but dancing, or resting.

There's often a feeling of a stage in a circular space. The hills and the trees are the audience, we're looking out from the circle, not inwards to nothing.

The next photo is a very poor representation of Sticky Wicket, a garden in Dorset, UK, sadly now closed to the public, but revolutionary and influential in its time. A garden that is returning to wildness, beautifully and naturally. Its centrepiece was a huge planted circle, flatter in the centre, where a stone rippled outwards in waves of planting, all encircled by further ripples of grasses, shrubs and wildflowers. Perhaps you could not dance comfortably there, but some could sing. I look through my photographs of this garden and I could weep for the beauty of what they show, the huge soft complexity and the blessed unity. I so wish this one was better but I'm trying to make a point here.

Circles higher than yourself, closer to you, have a very different feel. The strength of the shape intensifies towards the dark perimeter, the centre is a vacuum. In the example below, that accounts for the terracotta umbilicus, which holds it all in place.

If you cannot look out easily, you might feel like a frightened rat, such as I once found in my tall round compost heap. It (the heap) had plastic snap-together uprights as walls. I had indeed snapped a lot of these uprights together, creating a small arena. I was in there with the rat, to our mutual surprise, doing a little light clearing and turning. It raced round and round the perimeter and I eventually threw myself over the top to freedom, equally desperate to leave - it was like one of us was the toreador, we just didn't know which.

This structure could make one feel the same way, that relentless sense of enclosure is apparent, amplified by the height and circularity. It's all about focus of course, whirling round and round in here would make anyone panic. Such structures are supposed to act as breathing spaces in packed gardens, but you'll find very few people standing around in them breathing.

The photograph above is of Sissinghurst, with its own famous circular pivot-point, connecting different garden rooms. You see it on the right-hand side, hedged with yew. You cannot see out, except along the escape routes. You don't panic, but you could feel a moment of tedium as you pass quickly through.

Over to Dylan. An unfamiliar song, simple to understand but densely apposite to our subject; it's Eternal Circle on the The Bootleg Series vols. 1 - 3. Now in this song, the singer does an interesting thing, he speaks of himself, as the singer, of this very song, in the very act of singing. We find ourselves standing with him, on a stage, really quite circular, like the passing of time as he sings. His eyes "dance a circle", round the perimeter and a woman catches his eye.

There's a to and fro in the next few verses, an unspoken calling back and forth between them. But he gamely continues almost trudging round his song, which is long, telling us how far he's got through it, how long there is to go. And at the end, he can no longer find her, so starts the next song; the circle of time begins again. From that to the circle in space, to the circle in time, to the circle in space and so on.

What matters though is the detail. The singer is alert, observant and self-aware. He knows exactly what the woman is doing, even to how she is breathing. He takes us though his own thoughts and movements. From the round space, his heightened perception becomes our own, we're in the centre of the circle of his consciousness with him.

If you successfully place a circle in your garden I think you can get the same feeling; focussed from the centre of your own self, you relate more strongly to details beyond the perimeter. The above example, taken at Burrow Farm Garden in Devon, shows that even a low semi-circle of hedge can draw things together and throw individual elements into relief.

And I don't think you even need to be inside the circle to get this feeling. And it doesn't even need to be a complete circle.

Perhaps we can even do away with the hedge. I wonder if a pot, well-placed and in scale, can give the same sense. I'll excude the one in the photograph above, which doesn't seem quite right. Have a look at this one though. From the same garden. Does it work in the same way?

And while we're in the smaller scale, here's a garden I work in, where the circle pulls the details round it into focus. I could almost imagine one of the plants on the far side was ready to give me a wave. The circle was here when I started the replanting, but it's a pleasure to work within such a framework, as it must have been for Dylan to compose such a clever, careful "artless" song.

Tearing Up - You're a Big Girl Now

2011-12-29T09:31:00.000-08:00

I have devised a new practical education course for gardeners. Unfortunately, all it needs for true benefit is that time should run backwards. Pull apart a piece of planting you did 10 years ago and you'll learn an awful lot which I'm sure will help you when you come to plant that same piece of ground.

I have this week unmade my own bed, deconstructed my own plot, picked apart my own underplanting, wrenched out and destroyed shrubs and trees. It has taught me more than I expected and cost me more pain. I see that my educational plan is also a perfect horticultural curse- may you dismantle your own garden.

It has been hard, distressing work - despite the assistance of a small digger and quite a few helpers. We have been able to replant a lot of the bigger items, to form a screen between ourselves and our neighbours, but I insist on the right to feel sorry for myself. All pleasures should be given a chance.

Here you see the trunk of the mulberry. We're just beginning the work here, moving the smaller stuff.

You may recall that the purpose of this ghastly exercise is not just to teach me a lesson, or offer me a go at a perverse enjoyment. We are clearing the lower half of the garden ready to build a small house on it, with a planted courtyard mainly for winter use. It's about 70 square metres, and wedge-shaped. That's about one of the most difficult shapes to render inviting when the pointed end is furthest from the house. There was my first error, not my fault at all.

But I crammed it so full, of so many different things. In the centre of the pointed end they mostly had an orangey tone, to their stems, flowers, leaves or trunks. There was a bit of bluey purple from catalpa erubescens purpurea and hebe Amy. The most orange was from chionochloa rubra, epimedium Ellen Wilmott, oriental poppies, crocosmias George Davison and masonorum, cornus Midwinter Fire, viburnum Onondaga, gold roses and the beautiful bright multistems of luma apiculata, shaped that way over 15 years.
Here it was in March this year.

Bronze fennel and chrysanthemums, anthriscus Ravenswing, iris innominata, purple leaved celandine Brazen Hussy and various species tulips joined in, along with aster Calliope with its purplish stems and leaves and the double hemerocallis for solid packaging.

The whole collection went pretty well together, there was a harmony about the colouring and the evergreens were a raphiolepsis umbellata and three pittosporums, one big, rounded and subtly variegated, resulting in a strong greyish presence to point up the oranges. The oldish, but small apple tree started me off in that direction, showing an orangey glow to its trunk one year, which then promptly disappeared. Its apples were always a bright pretty red, fairly tasteless I'm afraid. I was very fond of it.

In the photograph above, you can see the white flowers of heptacodium miconoides below the apples.

Sometimes as with the big black mulberry tree, you only become aware of an underlying orange tone when you see the roots - here they are, barked like branches above ground, and the strongest orange with purple flakes. Unexpected. Worse than that, the roots were hugely extensive and very shallow. Enormous amounts were hacked off by the digger - there was no root ball, no evident fibrous feeder roots at any point.

The mulberry is in its new home next door. You can see it at the very back in the photograph at the end of this piece. I don't know if you can imagine how I can barely look at it as I pass it there, so close to my garden and yet so stonily unlike where it's come from. I can't imagine it will live. I feel utterly, repellently, disloyal. The luma apiculata suffered in the same way and has gone to another garden, where at least I can't see it. Enough already.

So now is the right moment to turn to our Dylan song, just when I've given myself a good kicking. It's one I consider truly great - You're a Big Girl Now - and it's in a version which I consider quite shatteringly brilliant - the one on Hard Rain, the live album. No more superlatives - they can be wearing, so we'll take them as read.

The thing about this song is that it's about pain that stops and starts. The arrangement does too, it's like slowly pulling off a plaster, or, to take it to surreal limits, wrenching off your own arm. Or it's like dragging a big plant out of the ground. It's about splitting and separating. Ending a relationship because there's no other way, yearning for there to be another way, regretting past happiness, longing for it all to feel the same, knowing it can't - it's honest, even to the point of acknowledging the competitiveness between parting partners about who's going to be OK.

To me, the trajectory of the song is straightforward. Man is told by long term partner (or "wife") that they must part, she's had enough. Man is shocked to the core - he was dissatisfied and unhappy but believed relationship was forever and that he was the one resisting ending it. This is an "extreme...... change in the weather". He realises what he's contributed to it and grapples with his grief, sadly suggesting alternatives and reasons to stay together.

The title may have worried women who heard it I suppose. Could it be patronising? Or sarcastic? To me, the words become absolutely empty as the song proceeds, meaning nothing more than that they are lost to each other.

I imagine most people have experienced this end of the line feeling about someone who has been central to their lives and who they thought would always be there. That awful feeling of being carried on a tide you cannot stop, you're part of the inevitability. As you count the cost and regret the price, you know your own sad acts of accountancy prove the loss must happen. It's a devastation described in the acutest, most accurate detail.

I chose this song for my garden unmaking experience because of the wrenching, yanking, breaking feeling. Plus the blameworthy inevitability. There's no sense of relief yet, although I think there should be; the overplanting meant the plants needed release.

I know that mulberry trees can be propagated with "truncheons". Which I think are long straight unbranched branches, stuck in the ground. My hope is that this means there's a chance the tree will be able to regenerate roots, but I have no real faith in it. I find it hard to believe any of the bigger plants will survive, the trauma has been so great and they were all so unprepared. Here's where we are now.

An awful thing to find out was that deep down - at about 60 centimetres, the reasonable topsoil gave way to the hardest and driest of clayey, stony pans. This dryness was startling, we blithely assume there is moisture deep down but it was more like desert.

This area is really suffering from a lack of real rain, though there has been drizzle and dampness, illusory irrigation for the very top layers. Heavy planting traps moisture in those layers, but the roots had not gone down, the plants were all struggling along together, woven and interlaced. It's only with the deconstruction that the full complexity of the entire wobbly edifice became clear.

As you would expect, the song is a bit like that too, even as he suggests in the last verse that they might be able to change, you know it's hopeless, despite the entangled roots, they must rip apart. It wouldn't have been hopeless in my garden but there would have been such poor growth in the future that I would have been forced to make sacrificial changes.

It's surprising, how like investing yourself in a supposedly permanent relationship garden-making is. And now, on a slightly flippant note, I'm even finding my plants in somebody else's room! Oh please let them be happy!

It's winter, dude - Winterlude

2011-12-23T03:08:00.000-08:00

Excuse my title, I've stolen that familiar form of address direct from the song, where Dylan places it as an insouciant internal rhyme. And the word Winterlude is itself a piece of verbal self-indulgence, one I can easily forgive, as I like a bit of wordplay, but not really, truly cool. But it completely suits this innocently charming and affectionate song. That's what I hear, and it's going to stand in for my Christmas wish to all who are sweet-natured enough to read these posts. A happy winterlude to you all.

I have always enjoyed a bit of British winter gardening. There's no urgency. The moments when the air is soft, damp and gentle, and the light a delicate, filtered glow are more frequent than you might imagine if you don't spend a lot of time outside, pottering about and gazing round you like a daydreaming teenager, longing for seduction.

I know bright blue skies and icicles are appreciated, and I wouldn't throw such a day back at you, but it seems to me that mild, moist air and quiet grey skies are at least as desireable. British winters move in and out of cold weather, usually between close to freezing, or just under, right up to pleasantly warm, around 12 degrees centigrade, which could be considered the perfect temperature for easy working. You get the odd sunny day; sucking the juice out of those has given me some of my most perfect gardening moments. Sometimes however, against a gentle grey sky, the light seems to gleam directly from the greenness of the grass. Such a light is miraculous. But it needs a pale bright green to perform that exquisite trick.

Snow, you may note, does not figure too highly. I've always disliked the deadened, muffled disguise; that shining white doesn't fool me. Where are all the plants, oh my god, where are all the plants? Even though I know in my head that they're quite comfortable under there, I can't be absolutely sure. The gardener's rage to control I suppose.

This is fairly typical half-hearted British snow, neither one thing nor the other, not long for this world and incomplete. We're unlikely to be skating on the river here.

So that brings us to the song - Winterlude, on the album New Morning. Contrary to what you may have thought, this song is only a very little bit over-sweet and sentimental, just enough to make you wonder how close to the edge it's possible to go. The singer seduces his lover in the cold, cold winter. He offers her a warm fire, moonlight, skating, a meal and bold love. He doesn't really claim to love her, she's a "winterlude" after all, but he doesn't need to. Anyone who can use such tender, funny epithets as "my little apple" and "my little daisy" will soon have her dropping her defences. In a way, he's dropped his own - the writer of Desolation Row is coming up with something not far from baby-talk.

I see his little apple as the pale bright green I talked of earlier, the daisy in white and yellow; the colours of freshness and innocence, almost a gardener's imagination at work. And then we have the lilting, dancing melody, and the feeling of youth. We're almost floating through the snowy landscape, down the road, by the telephone wire, over the crossroads and then back to the physical comfort of the warm fire. So intimate, this song, all about touching and pulling close.

And yet I know this song is not considered quite the thing. Perhaps it's a little bit embarrassing, the flimsiness, that choir in the background, some of the images - especially that bit about going down to the chapel. Strangely the rhymes offend by being both slick (in pattern) and haphazard (in banality and slightly off the point meaning). But, you know, I don't care too much, the song wins out for me, the apple and the daisy are worth it. His voice is warm and humorous, he's playing as well as seducing. It's all so........beguiling.

Here's a plant that beguiles me in winter. It started flowering about a fortnight ago, and although it might baulk at a truly cold snap, it's likely to continue until April. Sweetly scented, lemony and vetch-like, it likes to grow in a reasonably sheltered position, with comfortable drainage. It won't put up with being torn about by strong winds, or being lain over in the summer. I don't think it's crazy about being cut back hard, but you have to keep it tidy or it will make too much top-hamper and pull itself away from its moorings. It's called coronilla glauca citrina and has that lovely harmony between leaf and flower-colour that is so satisfying to the eye.

This one is about 3 years old; a graceful but ramshackle structure and makeshift stems suggest it is in a kind of halfway house between a shrub and a weed, despite the aforesaid harmony. No real substance, like our song. But proper little flowers like this, flowering properly in their season, not just the dribs and drabs untimely left over, or over-prompt, like annoying guests - these are the teeth of the hen of the garden.

To pair with this, another reputably tender plant, although I have done nothing but curb it for the last 10 years, including a couple of fiercer colder winter periods. It's vinca difformis, marvellous under a hedge or at the back of a border, just stay alert as it fingers forward. I forgive it for its masses of greyish blue (but the early ones are white) propeller flowers, blooming and blooming from every node from November to May. Far more than any other vinca and for far longer.

But leaves are what I rely on to make me feel whole and happy, even in winter. Skimmias, pittosporums, griselinias (as in the photograph taken at Wisley below) - bright paler greens that look so elegant against the blacker greens of yew and ivy, with the emeralds of box and holly, the silvers and whites of variegated versions pointing it all up. Without the pale greens, the whole of winter is darkly Christmassy. In this country, I want the cheerful green light, I suppose it indicates growth to the atavistic brain, responding to signals below the radar.

Odd about plants that really have it in them to make leafy growth in winter. Arums for example, glamorous pictum with its remarkable expensive-looking variegation or the plainer creticum which will have pale yellow spathes of flower in February, these make luxurious pointed leaves in the colder months.

Then there's geranium malviflorum which develops it's lacy leaves from tubers in November. They grow on until April when you get these delicate, complex flowers. Then the whole thing disappears completely, back underground. You can see the leaves beginning to turn yellow and die off here.

One other - tulip Bakeri Lilac Wonder. Utterly reliable in this climate, it's a lilac bowl of a tulip, with a bright yellow centre and black stamens. It creates stoloniferous roots, and bright green leaves which shoot up about now, the flowers following in March. I wouldn't grow it for its leaves alone, but they are bright and purposeful. Something has to keep us going.

But let me end these heartening thoughts about green leaves in winter with my best brightener - another that's taken a fashion back-seat, but makes me happy anyway; it's my own little green apple, hebe rakaensis. Some people use the word "tump" to talk about a sturdy rounded little plant. I'm not going to in case you think I'm being twee, as some think of today's song. But it is sturdy, and rounded, with no help from the knife, just quite naturally and innocently growing that way. And it is the very best source of the pale green glow, shining and glimmering in the cool air, illuminating other colours.

So that's it, we can round off our winter plants with a glass of something by the fire. Goodwill, comfort and joy, all round!

Leafy architecture - Hard Times in New York Town

2011-12-16T15:36:00.000-08:00

The first time I went to Turin I was a little alarmed. This is a city we must pass through regularly on our train trips to and from our prospective home in Mondovi. It seemed gilded yet martial. Glance sideways and you could imagine Savoyard armies clattering through the squares, almost see their sabres glinting. I saw a cluster of young soldiers in Piazza Madama, everywhere we saw statues of fierce soldiers and generals. The endless porticoes seemed dark, the park at the Giardini Reali was disappointing and I took no photographs.

But things have changed a bit. A friend explained to me that Turin is "the Prussia of Italy", so I felt vindicated. And I started to recognise some of the particular realities, the history and the successes of this city. Then, on my last visit, where I had time to walk about and do what I do, which is check out the trees and the plantings, I almost fell in love with it. Of course I was lucky - it was the Feast of the Immacolata - we had an evening of the most charming celebratory bustle in the streets and finally cracked this apericena business ( aperitif and bits to eat thrown in). Now, still warlike but more chocolatey, Turin holds no fears for me, although I'm sure it would if I was 18 years old and had to make a life and a beginning.

Before I start on that theme, let's go back to the trees and the plantings. It's always fascinating to see how trees cope in the apparently impossible conditions of the city. There are so many problems, below the ground, above the ground, in the air, survival seems impossible, and yet, they struggle on, flattering the architecture as nothing else can do.

Turin has a particularly beautiful street tree to offer - it's celtis australis, an elm relative, also known, oddly enough, as nettle tree. There has to be a reason. I have a weakness for elms of course, we all do. They combine a sweeping elegance with intricately disposed leaves; they're airy but majestic. But they've met their doom, both in this country (UK) and America, where I know their loss from cities is still deeply mourned by those who remember their graceful height and delicate foliage. This celtis is so far unthreatened by Dutch elm disease, I'm almost afraid to point it out, so keep it quiet.

To support such loveliness the nettle tree has trunks of silky grey smoothness. Sculptural pillars, uninterrupted by burgeoning growth from the base like limes and immaculate, like the festival. The wonderful plane trees of London, and so many other cities bear multi-coloured plaques. The bark of the nettle tree is a simple grey, with a slight sheen. I would say that these were pollarded at a certain height, and then let go. Not all have these masses of equal branches.

And. to complete my paeans of praise, here they are in winter, silhouetted supermodels. Supermodels who cope with exhausting hot summers, droughts and freezing winters.

It seems to me that city trees are worth their weight in gold. City farms, parks, community gardens, acres of bright flowers, whether bedding or in the new bee-friendly annual mode - all these are worth a lot. But it's the street trees with their stored time that can challenge the city and lift us out of ourselves, just as we walk about. Even the robinia can look fantastic, with its tiny leaves and complex branching against the sky. Ginkgoes are good, as are silver limes, liquidambers and sophora japonica, in continental climates. Here's that robinia, in Turin again.

Hard Times in New York Town is a very early Bob Dylan song and I've been listening to it on the Bootleg Series 1 -3. I've seen it described as tongue-in-cheek. He does call New York "a friendly old town" which may be sarcasm or the triumph of hope over experience but, apart from that and some pointed comments about the wealthy and powerful, he seems to draw a concrete and accurate picture of a complex place and its effect on him. The exaggerated intonation of the country in his voice and the youthful, emphatic energy make light of the difficulties of moneyless city life; he's got his hope and self-belief to see him through.

The verse about the smog of Cali-forn-i-ay and the dust of Oklahoma, the repeated "from the country" or "in the country" - these make me think of the sweetness of trees in the city, their offering of comfort and kindness, the way they can seem like tall, brave friendly humans amongst the traffic. Dylan is too excited by his city life to yearn for the country, but the whole song is imbued with it and its contrast to the city. I salute his cheerfulness and optimism, people move to cities all over the world longing for so much - I wish they could all find what they want and surmount their hard times.

There are few flowers in Turin and not many shrubs. Bedding out is undertaken but France is a better place to find successful and amazing public plantings, practised by experienced gardeners. Here's an example from Turin which struck me as a contrast filled with bathos. Hoping I've used that word appropriately, don't often get the chance.

And here's another, much more successful, but just as unlikely. I think it's a cloud-pruned camellia Spring Festival. Quite a horticultural feat, and I saw a few of them outside various monuments. Piquant contrasts with the warlike gentleman on the horse.

Turin has much more in the way of parks; there is the Parco Valentino down by the river, full of trees and as busy as any beautifully designed and planted central city park could be. But there's not as much underplanting as I would like to see and the stress of overuse by the massed writhing life of the city shows. I've caught my photographs unpeopled at lunchtime, when everyone in Italy disappears. As Dylan sings, endearingly, or affectedly - take your choice - "There's a mighty many people all millin' all around". I hope at least some of them draw strength from the trees, living exemplars of coping with hard times.

Keen to commit - Love Minus Zero/No Limit

2011-12-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

We're getting ready to leave our new house and prospective garden in Italy. Both are still uninhabitable and more or less unuseable. Winter is gathering strength, despite the fortunate, sunny, seemingly endless late autumn. - perfect weather for roofing; ten more days should see it done, they tell us.

They have already finished the garage which now just requires new doors and digging out the earth banks and scrub around it. A huge orange campsis - the only strictly ornamental plant in the garden - has had to be sacrificed. Strangely, the garage looks better without it, especially with its new roof.

There is fresh snow on the mountains which curve round our town. The quality of light today gives me the chance to brandish the word "pellucid"; our shadows are long, the air still, and frost lay over the hills till ten this morning.

I feel that strange sensation of new attachments growing, out of my legs and my brain, filaments and synapses connecting and tethering me here. We have to see this person and that, go here and there, busying about like real inhabitants. It's all so happy as we pay our debts to pleasure and to ourselves. I hate to think what new debts we might be accumulating in the circle of hell reserved for the too lucky and the over-blessed. We're fending off environmental guilt with photovoltaic panels and trains rather than planes, but I don't think that can possibly cover all the glories of our lives, at this point anyway.

My thinking today is about that wilful act of commitment to a particular place and garden. If we have the chance to make such choices, we carefully weigh the odds, almost like rational beings. Then we defang the negatives and close our eyes until only the pink light gets in. That's what I'm up to at the moment - propaganda for my own consumption.

Whether it's love, babies, jobs, gardens or countries, the first rule of a sensible life is to be content with what you have personally chosen for yourself. Fail at that and it is hard to recover your confidence. Our geese must be swan to us at least. Perhaps you think Dylan has little help to offer here. Partly right, but he can show us how to settle our own choices most comfortably in the mind. Try Love Minus Zero - No Limit. You could even try it as a fraction; the minus zero over the no limit, as he intended for this supposed love song; suggesting, in my mind at least, a calculating and glacial infinity, not quite the protagonist at the mercy of the tender heat of his emotions.

I'm surprised to discover I only have the Budokan version of the song with me, but it strikes me as pretty good, clear as a bell and attentively, conscientiously sung, although the flute may add too much fairy gaiety. The poetic paradoxes are frequent and effective, the images potent and the melody successful. Can you hear the restraint in my praise?

It's because I'm having to hold back years, literally years, of hearing this song and feeling breathless with rage at the absolute cheek of the man. How dare he say that line: - "She knows too much to argue or to judge". Of course I speak with forked tongue here, I know that the earth would have to spin off its axis before I could restrain myself in a similar fashion, but even so. Surely all women feel compromised and at least irritated by it. Surely it means, she knows enough to keep her mouth shut. Ah no, I see it means she's reached some plane of calm wisdom where arguing and judging can only diminish. And I know that can be true. Bother.

It would be hard to gainsay the obvious attractions of a life-partner who will neither argue or judge. The comfort and permission inherent in such characteristics! We should none of us have to put up with arguing and judging, it's obvious. So I can run myself round a complete circle here.

Well I hope I've made that bit clear. It only adds substance to what I wanted to convey - that the song is about a person who's describing his own choice to himself in a way that reassures him that he has chosen well. He's not really saying he loves her, he's saying she has the right characteristics. Seeing her like that allows him to gloss over what else might be true of her.

It's as if I said my new garden was "natural" "wild"and "a blank canvas". Reasssuring but not really true. It's got that inimitable view of the town, underground springs that make the ground slump and is in parts, very steep indeed. There is no ease in the walking, it's hard work to get down to the woodland. Boar come and plough about with their noses, quite close to the house. I'd be fooling myself if I thought I couldn't get the garden wrong, it being so natural and forgiving and all.

Here's one way I've laid a tentative, nervous hand on the land, so early in the proceedings, whilst all is chaos as the building proceeds. I've planted some species tulips, muscari, erythoniums and camassia here and there; just to see how they do. We've scattered some bricks about on the top because we hope they'll discourage any passing boar snout. But I suspect small bulbs will be favourite boar food. There won't be any arguments anyway. So that's another way of assuring myself of my commitment, imagining patches of bulbs in sping and trying to make them start. If they grow I will spread them thankfully, believing in my own perspicacity.

The work of the song in confirming the correct choice and commitment of the protagonist never stops. The woman he believes he can love doesn't make promises, her faithfulness is beyond the foolishness of those who "carry roses". She can't be bought with valentines, she knows strange riddles about failure and success, in a world of sour intellectualism and pointless chit-chat she holds the keys to wisdom. This is to compare her with those he has not chosen and it is to her benefit. It's like me looking at the gardens we didn't buy, and picking holes in them. It's what we do to commit to the thing we want. We make comparisons that cast a better light.

At the end of the song, we get the coup de grace, his love is like some raven at his window with a broken wing. Apart from being exquisitely ambiguous and revolutionary as a description of a loved one, this line tells you even more of what he's telling himself about why he's choosing her. Her similarity to a raven makes her inexorable (Poe's raven is too) so he's not absolutely responsible for his choice, she has in some way required it. Her broken wing; ah there we have it - she needs him, she is not whole.

Well my garden is only inexorable now because we've already bought it. But I can fully identify with the needs I perceive the house and garden to have, they are visible wounds and will require all my energy and effort. What else could improve a choice so well as a bit of reciprocation? There's the beginning of a vision in my mind, of a happy garden, smiling in the sun, the possibility of easy strolls up and down along mown paths amongst trees in meadows and shrubs clothing the steeper banks. A seat or two under the trees, some glades at the woodland edge, vines on a pergola near the house, loquats, quinces, pomegranates and elegantly thin tall hedgerows such as are common, but beautiful here. All this will be the rewards for my commitment. Let's hope my particular raven is a swan after all. Let's hope I'm only fooling myself as much as I must to settle in and attach myself.

Quite a lot is revealed - The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest

2011-12-02T05:30:00.000-08:00

So I was gazing out at my garden in Kent, only days ago. It’s facing Armageddon. A revolution has to happen within the next few weeks; big shrubs and small trees will be wrenched from the soil and some transplanted at my neighbours. Others will be sent on journeys elsewhere. A small house will replace them and a winter-blooming courtyard will be the garden. Around the older house a lot of garden will remain for the discerning buyer.

In autumn there is often a bit of elective moving about of plants in every garden. I can never resist trying for a different effect - grouping, contrasting or just plain fussing. But it’s not usually as frightful as this. It all seemed so much smaller and easier at a distance. Close up, the work and the risks seem alarmingly big. My heart almost fails me.

The rewards are going to be immense. We have acquired a wrecked farmhouse in a hilly bit of Piemonte in Italy. We’re supremely fortunate, far more than we have any right to be. But the project is rather big – to reconstruct the house where it needs it and somehow find a way of developing a garden. Today I want to think about gardening here in Northern Italy– in what is partly abandoned farmland, near the charming town of Mondovi, about 400 metres above sea-level, about 80 kilometres inland from the Ligurian coast.

So here’s a simple take on an Italian town garden, taken in Turin. It gives us some interesting clues to what will grow around here, between Mediterranean and Continental climates. The large evergreen is laurel, the small trees are field maple, the ground cover is liriope, the background is ivy and the yellow tree is a gingko. So we’re not in a world of olives and lemon trees, with scented herbs underfoot. Slender Italian cypresses,figs and oleanders are not for us. We have chosen an area surprisingly rich in kiwi fruit, hazelnuts, escaped robinia, nameless poplars and enormous abounding conifers. Nearby in the Langhe some of the best wine in Italy is produced, - Barolo, Nebbiolo and Barbera, so not every preconception is doomed. Truffles of course – you can barely move for them.

Nonethelesss it would be unwise to mistake this place for somewhere that it is not. My gardening will be fraught with confusion and discovery. Heavy snow is normal in winters which are longer and colder than I am used to. These snows break plants. As for the rest of the year, I don’t really know yet. The soil is creamy-grey when dry, and heavy, and I’ve got rather a lot of it. Something like 5 acres of burdock plus a considerable amount of steep woodland.

Here’s a delightful tree, beautiful in shape, bark, leaf and fruit. It’s the kaki, diospyros lotus sometimes known as Sharon fruit or persimmon. This is the one reasonably healthy domestic fruit tree which we seem to have inherited. I have always adored the fruit, which I remember ripening on Roman balconies when I was a wild young student. They’re like the golden apples of Hesperides, wondrously hanging till Christmas.

On his mysterious and adored album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan offers us a funny, troubling story of concealed conflict and fear in ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’. It’s a tale of two friends parted by money. What on earth can this have to do with our innocent Italian adventure, where we have been greeted with nothing but charm, kindness and good cheer? As usual it’s all happening inside – a sense of fearful, over-exciteable panic about my gardening here. Like Frankie Lee, I’m taking a “soulful bounding leap” into an unknown horticultural area, through which I dread to rave, not knowing what to do and misunderstanding how to save myself.

Straightening out the soil will be difficult, managing the slopes, the drainage, the roe-deer, the infestations of wild plum and robinia......I see I’m starting to tremble and foam at the mouth. And that’s without even thinking about the major issues of Design; how on earth to fit the garden nicely round the house when we’re dominated by the view of the town. In the picture above, where a sloping wooded ravine (ours on this side) separates us from that town, you might get some sense of our view from the end of the house. How to add definition, a sense of garden and shape whilst retaining naturalness, how to make it interesting close to but restful in ambient; what to plant; where to begin, how not to feel guilty about such opportunities and thrills – so many troubling thoughts; Frankie Lee would be right at home.

Here are some of our dying apricots, set on slightly terraced land. There is little live wood, and what there is is errant, rising from the rootstock, inadequate and confused. I’m informed that enormous amounts of fungicide are necessary to keep these particular shows on the road. I don’t think I’ll do that.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that of a garden being “where it does not belong” just as Dylan tells us is the moral for the protagonist in his strange ballad. In the photograph above you may be able to see that the farming around is often of fruit trees and hazelnuts set out in grid patterns, right up to the old farmhouses. Where even small gardens are created, they often follow this pattern, with a collection of trees or bushes set at regular intervals from each other, no borders or strong open spaces, or paths to lead you round and about to view the plantings. This is farming, not the domestic orchard, with spaces set for tea.

So I’m in a foreign land, it’s not what I’m used to – oh the clashing preconceptions; oh the visions we carry in our heads, oh the difficulties inherent in mistaking paradise for that house somewhere else down the road. From the town everything we do will be obvious, nothing will be concealed. Feel the terror mount.

From the song, I’ve left out the perfect image of a stormy relationship which develops between the two characters; and it is both alarming and hilarious. Poor Frankie Lee, he seems to be at the absolute mercy of his emotions. But his errors are his own, only his own. So perhaps the other moral ought to be: calm down, observe and consider. Clarity will emerge, we hope and believe. I’m sure we will fall into error but it need not be fatal, like some other irresistible temptations.

Glittery depths - I Shall Be Released

2011-11-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

You might be thinking I'm going to talk about water in the garden and, having spent the last week dividing water lilies and hooking out dreck you're not a million miles away. However the glitter and the depths I'm referring to lie mainly in the song I'd like us all to listen to, one of admirable economy despite its shimmery layers. It's I Shall Be Released, ubiquitous and familiar, perhaps taken for granted. There are many versions and covers. I don't know the best one and would welcome suggestions. The song itself seems robust enough to cope with whatever gets thrown at it. Pick one and listen to it. You could think about what you would welcome release from. And what that would really mean. So much of what we yearn to escape from is actually the stuff of life.

But it's the strength of the song that is our gardening platform. Resilience and a bit of beauty. I'm going to reveal some of my dearest old friends in the plant field - ones I turn to with confidence and love shining in my eyes, knowing they will always fulfil my needs, and that when I turn to them in their season, I will, once again, feel that interest and admiration that first proved they had captured my attention. They, at least, shall not be released, not from my garden anyway.

The thing is, the glitter is not a surface shine. It lies within, these plants don't sock you in the eye, they're gentle, kindly offering their support with hidden charms. Unless you want constant upheaval or have light, rich moist soil, sunshine from all sides and no slugs, you might as well learn to love a couple of stalwarts. Dry shade and heavy soil will always support bindweed and ground elder. These plants won't oust them on their own, but they are stable and hold their own ground. I would not count really prolific rampers and seeders alongside them for those plants create other problems which need attention. These require one cut a year, no more, no less. I'm sure they wouldn't throw mulches and division back in your face if you wanted to pay the extra attention, but they won't peevishly demand them every time you pass either.

Here's my first, still flowering in this weird warm November, having started in July. It's a very quiet colour, greyish-blue, and you could almost use the word dimity about its patterning. It's called calamintha nepetoides, sorry about that, we could paraphrase it as "relative of the mints with nepeta-like characteristics". Perhaps it has a common name like "lady's lacings". If so I'm not familiar with it. Don't be misled - we can just make them up but no-one will know what we're talking about.

Anyway, it's lovely and enhances most things it's put with, demonstrating how big and bright they are. Against a green background it shows up better than you might expect. Turgid dankness or sunny concrete, it seems to be happy just to get the chance to please you. If you touch it or brush past it, you get a gust of mint on the air, not quite culinary in quality but fragrant and exciting.

You increase this by digging it up and breaking it into small pieces, each with roots and shoots, in the spring, or you can take spring cuttings from the new growth. That is also your last chance to cut the whole thing to the ground. I have done it at different times - late autumn, winter, very early spring, it has never reproached me. Calamintha grandiflora is nothing like as good so don't go off at a tangent.

Next one: tellima grandiflora rubra. Very well-known this one, but many have given up on it, seduced by heucheras. I cannot find pictures of its flowers, that tells you something of course. They are a forest of pale spires, with tiny greenish fringed florets decorating them, from top to bottom. They appear in May and sometimes emit a scent, even in this reddish form which is supposed to lack it. The leaves have a high-quality finish, appearing more substantial than most, without bearing the plasticky shine we have all learned to dislike. It's high-grade material, tweed, not acrylic and shot through with subtle colours that amplify to purply red in the winter. Here are two and a tiny one centre-stage, which will join up slowly and inexorably.

The cut to the ground takes place after the flowers in May. Be uncompromising. The whole plant then renews itself, looking smart and finished under and behind other things till they die away. It will be untouched by trouble, slugs or drought.  A mild winter will see it looking attractive throughout. I don't find it heaves itself out of the ground, or that it dies out in the middle, or that vine-weevils love it.

These are the characteristics we're looking for in this group. Membership is only granted if the plant does not easily surrender to weeds, does not need attention other than the one cut, is attractive and will cope with heavy soil, drought and a degree of shade. The ability to flower and produce a little nectar for early or late bees is also a desireable attribute.  Naturally enough, in your garden, you might make a completely different list, adapted to your difficult but prevalent conditions. Without going on about them, I'm going to add a few more at this point - two grasses (not deep shade); carex Frosted Curls and chionochloa rubra, a hosta; plantaginea grandiflora and that old familiar day-lily, which flowers intermittently here but has very pretty foliage in shade, Stella D'Oro. Also ballota acetabulosa, at the dry shady base of a hedge. Any epimedium, making sure to cut all the leaves off before the flowers come in early spring. In harshly cold areas, that wouldn't work, the flowers would collapse.

Some traditional ground-covers could come into this category but not all: the one I would go for is geranium macrorrhizum album, not the brighter pinky one, which can look a bit spotty, but the beautiful pale version.  Girly-looking, but iron-clad, like so many girls. It will cope in an unwatered pot for a year or two till it chokes itself, but no such worries in the open ground. Once its flowers are over some people would run a strimmer over it; I just use shears. It's a good example of what happens to so many ebullient plants - if you leave them without the post-flowering cut, they try to rush off and find fresh ground, their middles collapse, long stringy bits extend, the plants waste themselves seeding and you end up with a bit of a mess. Keep them fresh and bright with early surgery!

What a useless photograph. See that pinkish glow behind the short hedge mid-picture? Well, that's the geranium - about a square metre of it. And my only picture.

Time for a break and a think about the song. You're bound to know it and its muted anthemic feel. Years ago, I believed it to be about unfair imprisonment and of course it still is. But the expected release has such a ring of sadness. That can't be the only thing it means. So it might be about a prisoner awaiting capital punishment, his release will be from life as well as from prison.

We're talking about another near-perfect song here, one that is able to balance, with great conviction, on the tips of the meanings that it seems to hold, never falling and never losing its mysterious completeness. But it's not one that carries you somewhere else, and its imagery is not astonishing. So it's easy to overlook.

Here's one of its simple charms - the expression "any day now". Not a cliche, but ordinary. However in the song these three homely words, repeated, and the significant position they take create a sort of verbal pivot. Listen to them freshly -they mean the release will happen in the future, or immediately, or never. They express huge uncertainty, a longing for the release and a focus on it which also might be anxiety or dread. Perhaps they do all that in ordinary conversation, and I've just never noticed. Anyway, here they are carrying the weight of the song.

Perhaps you don't think we can expect the plants I'm mentioning to take a pivotal place in the garden. You might be right; they're not stars, they're support acts. But what they can do is be the engine of your own release, and unless your garden is truly tiny, you will relish the peace of mind they can offer, especially if you use the quieter ones in broader sweeps.

How about giving rue (ruta graveolens) another try? It has rather dropped off the radar since people discovered it could give you a rash if you rolled in it in the hot sun. Don't do that. Plus it's really no use as a herb, having a ghastly taste. You need to touch it just once a year, use gloves and cut it right back (I have in mind a cabbage stalk) just before growth really begins in spring. So that's about late March these days but a little alertness will mean you get it right. It doesn't like to stand about naked like that in the cold. I use it quite a lot, it doesn't usually flower with my treatment but does offer a rather fabulous tight blue glow.

So one more plant, about which I have absolutely no complaints - omphalodes cappadocica. Bright, bright blue flowers in spring - no reason to mess about with the stripey version. Brightish green leaves, so well-behaved, just a little angel.

Once again not a very useful picture. But you see the blueness. And this one just needs a tidy up, not the complete cut to the base. It will then just quietly tick over, till next spring.

There are more, I'll save them till another occasion. Let's now go out on a final thought about this song, releasing us from the prison of struggle and care, or freeing us from the very things that make us who we are. We see our lights come shining and perhaps, like me, you feel you know what that means, without being able to put your finger on it. We are our own lights surely - can it be that? Without the shine from our own selves, there's nothing. So many ways of seeing it, this is a song where the depths glitter like mirages.

Mastery, mystery - Copper Kettle

2011-11-18T01:35:00.000-08:00

Funny thing about conifers. They have a slightly humanoid aspect. When they're big they lower over you like pointy giants, when they're small they tend to "people" a garden and if you get a lot of them they look a bit like a small crowd. I think many of them are problematic in gardens, not just because of fashion but because there is something intransigent in the strength of their shapes and colours.

Here they look a bit like an advancing army. And yet it's Scone in Scotland, where they have both the space and the informality to accommodate their magnificent specimens of Douglas fir. But I don't feel tempted to wander amongst them. I think it's the regularity of their branch-spacing as well as the darkness and pointiness.

It's peculiar that a plant with such useful qualities of architecture and personality, evergreen, easy, quick and tough, can impose so heavily on the landscape as to leave us feeling dominated and depressed. Perhaps many of you are shouting "Speak for yourself". Well, that's quite fair.

One of the things I wanted to do in this post is draw your attention, or redraw it, to one of the most beautiful songs Dylan ever sang and never wrote. It's Copper Kettle, on the despised Self Portrait album. It is the perfect camping song. I feel the sun on my face and the bite of the mosquito, discomfort and pleasure mixed. Suddenly I'm a rufty-tufty semi-outlaw, glorying in the filling of jugs with home-made whiskey, loving the moonlight, and the firelight, chatting about the burning qualities of different woods. The song gets you there very quickly, you can hear the dripping of the amber liquid even before it starts.

Pines I think, and no camping debris

The only person I really ever knew well who had been brought up in this harsh woodland way of life was from a family who made their living by charcoal- burning. He was apparently and unnervingly deferential but actually hard as nails. Would rip out his own teeth with pliers, and be at work on a scrapyard within the hour. Strangely, amongst the charm of the evocation in the song, you also hear the relentless toughness.

Now listen to how Dylan sings the word "juniper" - the first time anyway. He does it with a mixture of hilarity and benevolence. It is indeed a beautiful word, as Donovan reminded us later. Botanically, as juniperus, one never knows which syllable to stress, but juniper has every quality a lovely word needs; rhythm, attack and the bonus of enfolding a couple of classical gods.

This name almost transcends what is essentially such a wild and scruffy plant. And a bit of a chameleon too, differing in its mature and juvenile foliage, endlessly producing new versions of itself, looking very different too according to the conditions it finds itself in. And it produces those other-worldly berries, which turn out to be cones which have become berries, despite their own spikey coniferous little hearts. Aromatic fruitlets, that's what they are.

I did a little research to see which kinds would be best for a home-grown source of those very fruitlets, but lost heart in the midst of irrelevant detail and the inability to tell one conifer from another. This is particularly noticeable once you get to the selected garden forms, bright yellow, blue-green, flat, thin and pointy, swirly. After a bit you feel you've got lost in a vast old peoples home, full of gaudily dressed residents. Introductions have got you nowhere, they're all different, but all somehow the same. That's a little harsh, but we'll all get there, so I allow myself.

The overweeningness of individual conifers is specifically a gardening phenomenon, for in the wild or in those awful plantations, the sense of mass makes it all feel different. And at least we're not responsible. In British gardens, best stick to Scots pine, yew and Italian cypresses or other very slim conifers. Cupressus sempervirens Totem is a good one and a little hardier. But maybe it will end up a giant and I will have to eat my own words.

The garden above is Plas Brondanw, Gwynedd, North Wales, the home of Clough Williams Ellis, who designed Portmerion. Interesting differences in style from that extraordinary place.

Yew is itself a strange paradox, the most malleable and flexible of plants, yet also the most architectural and formal. We're totally in control so we use it to shape, divide and define. It's an uncompromising colour and does not seem to have developed dozens of princeling sports which people would be tempted to let grow freely. Thank goodness. Be a little careful of the Irish yew, which becomes a tight inky block of uprights in the landscape as it ages. And it thickens unacceptably, the opposite of the slenderness it first meant to embody.

To me, Gresgarth Hall, an otherwise mostly stupendous garden, suffers from a multiplicity of disruptive Irish yews.   Some surprise me, being quite recently planted. I can see the big ones would be hard to remove, but that's true of all really large conifers. We are vanquished by them, it's hard to imagine having that space again and the screening provided in small gardens seems indispensable, even when they've shot off into the sky. The Irish yew is not used for that purpose, its slimmer upright form when young is a subsitute for the Italian cypress in cold areas. But do think again if considering it, for those who will follow us.

A lot of our submissiveness towards the suburban conifer has to do with too many quick-growers (chamaecyparis fletcheri, lawsonii etc.) having been planted 30 or 40 years ago, when they seemed so satisfactory and multi-purpose.  It seems to be easier to take out a whole screen of them than the occasional enormous individual. Look around at the gardens near you and imagine fewer of those strong, jaggedy shapes, replaced perhaps with puffier, gentler trees. I think it would be nicer, nearly always. But do not feel criticised. This is but a thought, not a fatwah. And I too have done the same thing; left two conifers at either end of a row, because they seemed so intrinsic to the garden's privacy. Holly or holm oak, that's what I should have done. Or phillyrea latifolia, beautiful and too little known.

So, we gardeners, so bent on our own pleasure, have underestimated the conifer on the whole. Like addicts, we have enjoyed the sense of mastery as we, or our parents, first used them to achieve our own purposes. Our tolerance has grown, and we haven't realised, they've defeated us. Poor little artist cultivators, our gardens are governed by dinosaur cuckoos.

The owner of the next garden has been defeated, but doesn't yet realise it. And is still planting other conifers.

The achievement of mastery (or mistery - its female equivalent), is a significant driver of human behaviour. To surmount the odds boosts us at the deepest level. Often the very next thing we do is look for another set of odds to surmount. On Copper Kettle I think you can hear Dylan rejoicing in his own ability to nail the song and his triumphant happiness illuminates it along with the moonlight.

Ironic that the song itself is about such a hard life, for which the family's refusal to pay tax on the whiskey since 1792 is victorious recompense. I hope you will listen to it if you don't know it. Just so you know Dylan can sing.

Here is a picture of Innisfree in Milbrook, New York - a supremely beautiful garden round a lake, every element manicured and considered. So this conifer must have been deemed acceptable.

I turn to more mastery. Russell Page could be called the doyenne of garden designers if I had a really clear idea of what a doyenne was.  Well anyway, he's very grand, designed an enormous number of grand gardens for rich landowners in many parts of the world earlier last century, and wrote a wonderful, much-admired book called The Education of a Gardener. It's quite a read, dense with experience and accumulated knowledge, not much quoted these days perhaps, but I never pick it up without becoming absorbed in his thinking and ability to extract the essence of a garden design issue. So I turned to him on conifers, wanting a little masterful support for my views, and was delighted to find this;

         " I find many of the hardy cypresses (he means chamaecyparis species) extremely hard to place in the garden. I know them to be valuable as a windbreak and useful as a background; but their spikes break the skyline into such ungainly silhouettes that they seem to me only tolerable when growing amongst other trees at least as high as themselves. Like spruce and fir, they too may well be impressive in mass in their native forests, but I can seldom recall seeing a garden improved by their presence."

And now for the coup de grace;

         "Taste varies in gardens as in most other matters. I can respect another's predilection for them without understanding it. I hope that one day I will see them successfully used."

And here's a final photograph, following Mr Page's strictures on fountains in flower gardens, which he thought a bit much - "like a wedding cake waltzing"

But, you know what, I think I can cope with the flowers and the fountains. It's in the South of France after all. What disturbs me more is those two blue cedars in the background, which even have the cheek to differ rather radically from each other. There's a private war for mastery going on out there.

The real mundane - Highlands

2011-11-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

OK, time to break it to you. Not all gardening is enjoyable. Here's a bit I don't enjoy but require myself to do, not in a self-flagellating way, more as another way of stepping onwards. It is time to Take The Cuttings.

A pall of ennui, possibly even accidie, drops over me even as I say these words. I know I waxed reasonably enthusiastic back in October when talking about Christopher Lloyd, but that was when I was younger. Now it's all just part of the same old same old, a rat-race, a cage. Nothing matters much to me anymore you see. There's nothing special about taking cuttings - it's just exactly what it seems to be. No more, no less. If I could turn back the clock maybe I could see where I went wrong and how to tell the true from the fake. Maybe I'd know what things mean again.

So you'll be wondering why I'm getting so down about it all. The answer is that I'm trying it on. That is, I'm trying on the worn-out, nearly extinguished persona that Dylan explores in his song Highlands. He's not completely wrong when it comes to this particular gardening practice. You know those bits on gardening television programmes when they start to take cuttings? That's when I run out of the room. I'd rather take them myself than watch someone else going on and on about it. But he may be overstating it when he talks about "insanity smashing up against my soul". That seems excessive.

Because it's not complicated. Let's sum it up as painlessly as possible, reducing the matter to its basic utilitarian essence. I take a batch about now every year. They're for economy and replacement of future possible losses. I should think about 80 to 90 percent are successful. Try not to yawn. Try thinking about being somewhere else, far from here - with the twang of the arrow and the snap of the bow perhaps.

OK - a bit more commitment. I take two types at this time of year - first, grey and evergreen shrubs. They are the backbone of many of my plantings and gardens, quite expensive to buy and very easy. Not easy enough to stop me feeling like a prisoner in a world of mystery though.

First step for the first type - run round the garden gathering pieces of all the things you want more of next year. Look for plants that retain their leaves and branches, however small; this is not the time to take cuttings of herbaceous perennials. Things like hebes, santolinas, cistus, sages, shrubby phlomis and salvias, rue, helianthemums, lavenders, helichrysums, euonymus, skimmias and euphorbias. You might need a heel on some of them. Next - get a bucket half full of potting compost and mix it with half a bucket of grit or sharp sand.

Put the mixture in small pots, press it down well. Now make small holes with a stick, and insert the cuttings, which you have divided into short, firm, unflowered, unbranched pieces and from which you have removed the bottom few leaves, up to the point where they will be in the soil in pot.

I hope that doesn't sound complicated. Now all you have to do is use your fingers to really press the soil firmly round each cutting. I remember my mother stamping on peas she had just sown, looking meaningfully at me, age twelve, and pointing out "they're like children, they need resistance". And these are the things that cuttings need: small pots, gritty compost, and that same resistance, best achieved by pressure. You want them to develop a conscience and then some nice little roots from the callouses that will form.

The protagonist in the song would take that conscience straight to the pawn shop, seeing no point in anything any more and thinking that as he's lost most of his humanity, he might as well sell a little more off. Of course, I don't really believe him, the elderly, irritable person in the song is struggling with his predicament. He's pretty fed up and nothing has any zest or flavour, now his powers are gone. He has nowhere specific to go but walks about. There's a hypnotic riff in the background with a beat for every soft-soled step.

So water your cuttings, then put them in something transparent but closed, like a cold-frame, or an old upturned fishtank. I tend to give them (especially the hebes) a single blast with a systemic fungicide. Then all you need do, throughout the winter, is check them occasionally for grey mould. If some are rotting off, pull them out and dispose of them. In the race between rooting and rotting, the greys need to get to the finishing post reasonably quickly. If a lot are rotting off, let more air in. Be casual, but determined.

In the spring you might be lucky enough to feel a little excitement again. The cuttings may straighten up and look like they're taking an interest, they may start to make new shoots and leaves. When they do, check they've made roots by upending the pot in your hand. Then you can joyfully and thankfully, knowing it was all just a bad dream, pot them off separately and grow them on until they're big enough to plant out.

This part of my garden is full of the sort of shrub we have been increasing. It's very winter-populated and weed-resistant.

That was a long detour after the first type of cutting, we almost had time to have an argument with a waitress in an empty restaurant. Now we'll get back to the second kind of cutting - roses and deciduous shrubs.

Dig a bit of sharp sand into a shaded but not densely dark spot, cut straight, unbranched unflowered pieces off the bushes, take the bottom few leaves off, stick them in the sandy bit, press down hard around, water, walk away. Do not disturb till you see good new growth much later next year. Then move them to where you want them. So simple - it's a shame not to do it really.
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The advantages of taking both kinds of cuttings now, so late, is that you don't have to contend with managing the shading and watering demands, which can be super-sensitive. They won't stand drying out. You'll barely need to water either type, as water is not being sucked away by the sun and the air is damp. Plus you do it all in one go and get it out of the way.

So we're on a knife-edge, tired of gardening, perhaps, or even tired of life. And Highlands, on the album Time Out Of Mind, is a song where the singer, regretting his age, tries to work out a way forward. Michael Gray showed me how to love this song; have a look at his Encyclopedia entry if you have yet to be seduced.

Highlands is, to me, relentlessly real, telling and asking how it feels to be older and barely visible, mapping the mundane seconds and moments. The singer is hunting for an escape from his own indecisive, powerless, sorry self. He has less and less to say, less and less to want or wish for.

Strangely enough, the way out seems to be in Scotland. Or somewhere with Highlands. The song is punctuated with evocations of those gentle but fair Northern lands. Here's a picture of the Burns monument in Edinburgh, distantly behind a variegated, evergreen border - Burns of course wrote a rather trite poem called My Heart's in the Highlands. Dylan uses his own song to call him on it. Your heart's in the Highlands.... really?

The singer pretends to rely on hunting amongst blazing bluebells, honeysuckle and buckeyed trees to lift him out of his misanthropic depression. He talks away for a few verses about how pointless and tasteless life is, then has another go at thinking about his Scottish escape. It's like Nirvana, perhaps it's even a fountain of youth.

I wish I had a decent photograph of our British bluebells. There are just a few in the photograph above, and it's not a wild setting. They are our best wild flower, you can get sheets and sheets of them in hazel coppice woodland, blazing away and scenting the air, like low-lying celestial mist. Nowhere else in the world has so many, we should be proud and happy every May. I'd like to believe they'd brighten the loneliest,saddest person's life, but the reality may be that that's simply not true.

Although he's mainly lost interest in life, the singer gives himself away when he goes into a restaurant. He's clearly hoping for some sort of connection, if not something to eat. Legs, eggs, or just a chat. He attempts a conversation, a bit of banter would pick him up. Look round any supermarket, you can nearly always see someone feeling the same real need. Sometimes indeed, it might be you, or me.

There are good jokes in the song. They're wry, sly, delicately allusive. It's a pleasure to hear the words so clearly and pick out their multiple meanings and intricate echoes. The interaction is prickly. It is sub-flirtatious, aslant, suspicious, challenging, and sublimely, infinitely, ordinary. This is a song that seems slight, if long, to begin with, but with attention, turns into Godot.

This charged, fragile and unsatisfactory encounter seems to have helped. As he steps into the busy street he seems lifted out of himself, just enough to face the truth of his own feelings. You can follow the movements of his body, and the movements of his mind, moment by moment. He states the truth, the party's over, he'd change places with anyone young if he could. It's real.

He thinks again about those Highlands, but decides he doesn't quite need them now, his new eyes mean he's got them in his mind and can get to them if he needs to. Life is mundane. And that little chat, which asked for nothing and got nothing in the end, well it still helped, he's still alive, still walking about. My take on the song differs from Michael Gray's at this point. I know they argued, and she gave him no comfort, but she took him for what he was and she made him feel alive. And they discussed food, art and feminist literature - what more do you want? Mr Gray thinks the lift at the end comes from the phrase "over the hills and far away". It is lovely, and beautifully sung, but it's not where things change.

I didn't enjoy taking those cuttings, but I'm pleased I have. They were mundane, but I think they'll be real. And the song reminds me that gardening should not really be a misanthropic escape from life and other people. We may not be brilliant, and we may not be in love, but we can always make each other feel real for a moment.

Ready for revelation - The Changing Of The Guards

2011-11-03T03:12:00.000-07:00

The season of elegies is upon us. We have had balmy temperatures by day, still air and little rain so the British of the South East have felt the warm hands of a colourful autumn. We have lacked celestial blue skies and the sweet kick of frost. Nonetheless, it's felt like a blessing. Never unmitigated though - we're only human, not mad, and there's much to worry about.

Autumn is a season of mysteries and confusion. Do we love it? That yearning thing that we all feel as the days shorten, loss mixed with longing for future happy fireside evenings. That thing about colour and texture: warm knits in scarlet and gold, snuggling, a good long sleep. That's all going on, but there are plenty of tasks to do in the garden and they will give you an excellent feeling of merit and deservedness at the end of the day.

The mysteries of autumn in the garden are these:

           Should I cut down all the perennials that look so messy?

           Why is it all so colourful?

           Is this birth or death?

The song we will listen to as we think about the season is The Changing of The Guards on the album Street Legal. It's full of other mysteries.

            What on earth is he on about?

            What are those girls doing there?

            Is it irritating, to repeat the last few words of every line?

            Is this birth or death?


Let's dispose of that last one. In both season and song it's neither birth nor death; it's change. The main mystery is what's going to happen next. Will it be a bad winter? Where's he going with this? We're getting ready for revelations all round.

Remembrance of autumns past is sharp, soft and sweet.  As a child, walking across the town with my sister to a shared Bonfire Night (November 5th for transatlantics), I remember countless front gardens where the only flower left blooming, for weeks beforehand, was a tall goldy chrysanthemum. I say goldy because it opened from dark tan buds, flowered in decreasing harvest colours, ending fully blown and lemon-coloured, wide open.  Elaborate for a daisy, simple for a chrysanthemum. November 5th was roughly its final hurrah every year. And I never see it any more.

I thought I'd tracked it down a couple of years ago, requested a bit and planted it. It didn't understand what it meant to me and disappeared. As a child, I thought it was indestructible, a wonderful flower that carried on when all green had gone and other blooms could not be imagined.   Gardens by then were mainly brown, apart from the privet and some mangy grass. Otherwise it was frosty breath, mittens, scratchy woolly hats and the sad bewilderments of childhood. An aromatic bitterness hung in the air.

What this proves to me is that autumn is not what it was - our gardens are still full of blossoms amongst the lurid leaves. They do this now nearly every year, unless of course we get the exact opposite, heavy snowfalls before the leaves are off. But it is nearly Bonfire Night and the chrysanthemum of beloved memory would make little impact, there is so much colour from late flowers and turning leaves together. Not an easy conjunction, more of a collapsing riot.

I'm rather fond of this next little chrysanthemum. It's utterly reliable in my garden, turning up every year with small sparkly blooms, cutting through some of the rusts and bronzes. It spreads quietly but firmly, nearly unnoticed till the time comes when it can clear its throat and makes its remarks. It cares nothing for mildew or slugs and its name is Nantyderry Sunshine.

Let's have a go at the autumn conundrums I started with.  Cutting things down, or not - well, there are things it is beyond me to leave. Phlox springs to mind, it becomes the picture of dejection, hanging on to its old leaves which look like very old brown flannels. Crocosmia Lucifer, lying about on top of things, old peony leaves, which need actual cutting off, big old acanthus spikes.   Japanese anemones. Big persicarias. Some I don't want seeding around, like alchemilla, which may have bloomed again, and lots of geraniums. Some just make me miserable, quite wrongly, but I must have my own way.

For some it is possible that there's a wildlife which would be pleased to have a supply of damp and shattered seed-heads, but I don't always know about it. Give me a specific detail and I may be able to access some ancient radical non-interventionist DNA. A friend told me blue-tits eat buddleia seeds the other day. OK, I'll leave them as long as I can bear, and I'll suffer the little buddleia seedlings to come to me, where I shall slaughter them.

Another point about cutting down perennials - it is my experience that many people cut too high. If you're going to cut down a phlox for example, don't leave a forest of stubs, it looks awful and they'll harden and jab you in the spring. Cut down as far as you can go, neatly and assuredly. Don't cut, chop or deadhead into the middle of a stem. Always go back to a junction with other shoots, stems or branches, even just the next leaf junction.

Of course many people nowadays do something completely different, whacking along with a hedge-cutter in the spring. But that's not really for the smaller garden. I sentimentally think I would regret the lost intimacies.

So here's my game-plan: leave as much as you can as long as you can, be selective. Picking out the messiest may make other things look more palatable, choose the worst first.

Consider the lily beetles, they love a lot of cover and if you fiddle around, amongst and under plants, where lilies perhaps were, you may find huge numbers of the small scarlet soldiers, so keep your eyes open. Remove them and perennial seedling weeds at the same time. I can't resist pointing out that in the Dylan song, whoever he's addressing has to "get brave for elimination".  Lily beetles look as though they've done just that, looking both smart and nonchalant.

I wanted a photograph here, of the vaunted lily beetle. Rushed out, scrabbled around - nothing, not one. But there were battallions a week or two ago around the dying lily stems in another garden. So, yet another mystery, worse, an enigma of impossibility. They'll be there next year, I'd stake my own life.

So, I've laid my cards down; take them or leave them. Now let's turn to the next problematic area - why is it all so colourful?   British natives mostly turn yellowish and that is the natural look for our woodlands; what we have in our parks and gardens is the hectic flush of the alien - liquidambers, acers, sumachs, cherries from Japan, magenta spindles.

To be honest, it's all a bit much. I love to stand beneath a yellow tree, feeling that unearthly glow in my bones, but these elaborate oranges and crimsons almost knock the stuffing out of me. I understand they're to do with toxins and sugars left as the leaf is cut off from its hydraulic source of supply, that's fine, but why so bright and pretty? I cannot understand the greater evolutionary purpose.

It's almost like they're inarticulately semaphoring a message, an urgent tree message, imperceptible to the human understanding. Here's one - not waving but................what?

And this is what ties the season and the song together. Bright colours vying for attention in the landscape, bright competing images in the song. A feeling of urgency and a desire to transmit something. But the message is corrupted; it cannot be read or understood.

Try and see what you can hear the song. Every parameter shifts: characters, places, events, times, nothing stays the same from verse to verse. OK, it seems there's something about a series of devastating events and betrayals, something else about fortune-telling and a kind of final having out of things, some kind of plain-speaking. But we absolutely don't know what all this is about, what happens, what conclusions to draw or what will happen in consequence.

And so it goes on. Dylan's voice is forceful and confident. The rhythmic push of the song is insistent. The gospelly repetitions of the last phrases intensify the sense of conviction, although hovering on the edge of something else - is it eccentric to be so certain about the ends of disconnected sentences? It all seems so clear in a totally foggy way. Flares on a battlefield, hot-coloured trees in a landscape, urgent gesturing and calling.

There are words or rhymes that stand out, falling into sharp focus for a few seconds. One depends on a rhyme; "ditches" and "stitches still mending". In my mind that's a scene of near horror, the protagonist struggling to his feet, out of a ditch, recent surgery on his wounds. In another, beginning a verse out of nowhere, "'Gentlemen' he said 'I don't need your organization, I've shined your shoes'" and we're slightly startled by the immediacy of the picture. You can hear a Civil War resonance, the rebellion of the underdog and the entrance of a Messiah figure all in a few words.

The sound of this song is unexpected. It swings along but it's not cheerful. Something keeps pulling you into the next line - something desirous and emphatic. It's not elegaic, it's about courage and change. Cruel death surrenders in the penultimate line.

Perhaps that's a good way to look at autumn too. May we have courage for the winter to come, may we bravely continue to garden. May we change everything, if we must, as the hectic colours fade and the sky darkens. "Peace and tranquillity will come". Let's hope, bravely, that that is so, in all our gardens and cities, in all our countries.

Somewhere else - Isis

2011-10-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

Dylan is not quite Edith Piaf, someone I thought a lot of until I saw That Film; he is not so dramatic, nor so needily demanding. But he is interested in creating a bit of drama and atmosphere and sometimes he does this by taking you somewhere else. An exotic setting, in time or space, is a quick route to excitements of every kind. Sometimes I think he sees all women as exotica, but perhaps I've just got a letter wrong.

I've been thinking about how gardens, sometimes, weirdly, try to take you somewhere else. To be in one place and yet perversely intend to make it seem to be another - how can that make sense? Well that's a dumb question: fantasy under control, travel without movement and change without adjustment - of course they are things we would like. We can be carried away, somewhere else, anywhere but here; in this featureless suburb, this nameless backwater of a nameless town, in a country so familiar as to be invisible.

So we can see why people do it - recreate a bit of a Caribbean island, Kyoto or Morocco. There is nothing new in this, nor is it specific to the UK, although I fear our penchant for incontinent plant-collecting, plants which we then have to put together somehow, makes us particularly prone.

In France they have Le jardin anglais - a phrase still in current use. Here's an interpretation on the grand scale.

The interesting thing about this version, and I'm afraid I cannot remember the name of the chateau, is that nothing but the stream curves. We would normally expect all the component parts to bend whimsically about, where an English garden is intended. Here is discretion, a curving stream replacing the usual huge rectangular plank of water laid out into the countryside. I think it's both beautiful and different. And that's the trick, don't adhere myopically to the rules of an exotic formula - choose elements and make resonance and beauty the aim rather than slavishness. None of it looks the least bit natural of course, but fair enough.

Let me cut to the chase here. Wouldn't Japanese gardens ( unless they're in Japan) look a lot better if you left the lanterns out? See what you think.

It's from Pine Lodge in Cornwall. To me it's what makes the whole thing, which is much bigger than you see, a pastiche, which sounds rather liked a baked good, which I would love. What we want, I think, is a reference, cleverly and subtly placed. So easy to say of course. Let me try this one on you:

Ridiculous, I know, but it looks a bit Japanesey to me. And it's not clamouring for recognition, just a little hint, a slight surprise, a freshening of the eye. It's from Ken Caro in Cornwall. The scale is extended but the elements are few.

Gardens that try to be somewhere else than the country where they're found, with a different culture, different plants and different weather are not usually trying to convey a deeper meaning. They're saying " let's pretend we're different people and we're somewhere else, perhaps having a better time". I begin to think a hinting inaccuracy might be the most telling way to do it.

So, now to the exotic garden proper - the one with all the leaves. Now I wish I didn't have to turn to Great Dixter again for this, but it's the one I know. Yew hedges and a garden building surround partitioned beds full to bursting with large leaved jungle plants, bamboos and hot-coloured flowers. Everything seems enormous. You feel short, overwhelmed and quite keen to get out of there. It's hard to see, everything's very close and rather fleshy. Is it exciting or oppressive?

But I think the problem is actually that nothing is big enough to dominate and create a little space around itself. We're trapped in a cage with fierce plants, cheek to leaf. That's fine for a while, but the meadow outside seems to be calling. Hard to think in here. My discomfort is not because it's particularly unconvincing, indeed it's jolly clever to get them all growing so well and looking so tropical. I must admit though, that the eucalyptus strike a slightly odd note, in with the jungle.

So that won't be one I'll try to emulate, I'm sure it must be possible to calm the banana and relax the tetrapanax, but in the end, I doubt I really want to, the resonances are not compelling enough for me.

This is what I like, a Mediterranean theme, expressed mainly in plants. It's from Mount Edgecombe; it's very subtle and could take an appropriate artifact. Note that many of the plants are actually Antipodean. I love these kindly natural topiaries, with resinous smells and bulgy shapes.

You'll be wondering which of Dylan's many songs of elsewhere I'll be referring to. Let's have Isis, from Desire, an album where most things are foreign. I should not fail to mention that he wrote it with Jacques Levy so he cannot take all the credit.

He sings it a bit strangely, mouthing the words as though they're in an unknown language. It's a strong narrative, featuring an estranged marriage and the singer, a wandering husband looking for some kind of way back. After a bit of laundry he teams up with a mysterious stranger and they speak oddly to each other about a bargain and a quest.

They end up in trouble amongst "pyramids embedded in ice", the companion dies of contagion, the singer fails to find the jewels and necklaces, disposes of the body and sets off back to his rather Egyptian wife Isis, who seems to have been waiting patiently for him. She is ready to accept him again, despite his angry remarks. We have cold, high Northern mountains and an incessant driving back and forth rhythm, like a Mexican rider lololloping along on a horse. A little way away, a slightly Spanish violin gnaws away. In the hullabaloo of internationalism you might pick up mythic resonances, Homer's Odyssey say, or The Hobbit.

I define these elements partly to show how incomplete and at odds to each other they are. The coherence is all in the sound, and it is total. The song is extraordinary and unusual: there's not a cliche in it. I do enjoy the singer's indignation about how "the snow was outrageous".

Here's something else that's fairly outrageous - in a different way

It looks like a golden calf to me but seems to be in an oriental setting. Surreal and surprising anyway, in a garden which is a picaresque journey, with some Sphinx, a Swiss cottage, Italianate topiary and the biggest pot you ever saw at the end of a trek to the end of the world. It has the Great Wall of China and many other delights. It's not sensible, it's very flashy entertainment. Biddulph Grange of course- late Victorian fun and games. Almost Isis in its confusion of references.

So where have we got to? A notion that slavish cliches are not the best way of bringing a feel of elsewhere into a garden, however charmed you are by foreign ways. A subtle suggestiveness might work better. Or you can go all out for clashes of cultures and end up with a theme park.

The protagonist in Isis discovered something alarming, his trust in his companion was misplaced, his quest misconceived. No place like home, as I don't think Odysseus ever said. The journey to foreign parts has to be taken, but its value is the fresh light it can cast on what we left behind. And I wonder how many more times we'll have to hear that. And will it ever be completely convincing?

For the triumphant reconciliation that is achieved in the marriage at the end of the song is rather one-sided. The dialogue is so conditional and the focus so centred on the husband's experience. Perhaps he has only come back because he couldn't find the treasure he was looking for. Little seems to have changed and the disappointment of the traveller cannot be the spur to happy home-making. It seems unlikely that his longing for alien shores has been quenched and the music continues to ring flamboyantly and exotically in your ears.

I'll end with a very subtle garden reference to another country, like a little piece of lace. It's from Claverton Manor, near Bath in the UK and it is the seat of The American Museum. There is a recreation of Mount Vernon and some other rather limited elements of Americana. But this is the one I have chosen, eliminating clutter.

Just a long string of white picket fence set in the green. Almost a thought, or a piece of writing across the landscape. Somewhere else, conjured in the imagination. I doubt that it could ever quell raging wanderlust, but it is, to my eye, both pleasing and resonant.

Youth in autumn - Forever Young

2011-10-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

The garden is like a toyshop, overflowing with intricate, sometimes bright contraptions. Shall we play? We shall play.

To begin with, gather your seedheads. Of course, you could use a trug - that would be if you can find it at the back of the garage. Why not do what I do, run haplessly back and forth, inside and out, hands full of collapsing dead flower heads and stems, papery cases, falling pods, skeletonising leaves. Works every year.

To tell the truth, I've been gathering seeds for some months now. I love it more than sowing them. Nothing could be nicer than seeing them grow in spring, but you have to accommodate them, protect them and be regular with them. It all becomes like heading up a maternity ward and that doesn't quite suit my devil-may-care approach. But gathering and sorting seeds is entirely positive. You get the fun of marvelling at the tiny universe, the joys of the hunt, the satisfaction of the gold-digger and the total absorption in the task. And then you pack it all safely away. Everyone should do it.

Here's today's haul. Before much cleaning and sorting, some done during collection.

There are all sorts of tricks you can use for the more elusive seed. Some, that don't spring easily from their wiry little catapults and cups (hardy geraniums, erodiums etc), can be placed, casing and all, in a paper bag. They will dry out in there, spring forth and gather at the bottom of the bag. Sadly, a lot of seeds would probably do the same from other formats. That would deprive you of the enjoyment of separating them from the chaff yourself, but I mention it because it would work very well as a first step with nearly everything, should you be so bone-headed as not to want to join me in my childish fun.

You can mess about with sieves or try a little gentle huffing and puffing. You will find other ways of hulling different seeds as you go. Sometimes the fun is just in seeing the immaculate cleverness of the receptacles, their secret inner compartments and their award-winning designs.

Here's the final product, all dross removed. I won't tell you what they all are as it would be boring, but they're mostly easy perennials, including a hemerocallis, a euphorbia, a digitalis, a malva and a couple of asters.

The biggest seeds are from a rather splendid short strong acanthus. Normally I propagate this simply by moving it. Then I have it in two places - where I've moved it from and where I move it to. The same is true of oriental poppies. Quick and easy root cuttings. I'm going to try seeds of the acanthus this year because they're so shiny and because I need them in a garden abroad.

At this point a photograph of the exact acanthus would have been perfect. You could have seen its large, short, tight-packed inflorescences, its strong colour and its proportionate sculpted leaves. But I don't seem to have one so here is the regular acanthus mollis latifolius, taken in St Just churchyard in Falmouth. Much taller, less good as a garden plant as it can fall about drunkenly, but so good with the stone. The whole side of the church is full of them, a perfect example of unity and conviction, with no overbearing designiness.

So to sum up, collect your seeds, clean them, dry them, pop them in small labelled envelopes, keep them dry and cold, sow them in spring. There are exceptions which should be sown immediately. Try Chiltern seeds leaflet www.chilternseeds.co.uk which you get free if you buy seeds from them, for detailed instruction. However the leaflet doesn't mention the vital steps of loving examination, riffling through them with the fingers, comparing the finishes and sensing the weight and intensity of concentrated new life. Don't miss these out, it's like haberdashery or stationery; clean clever little treasures.

Over to another playground full of more little packages. Bulbs need to be planted around now. Daffodils should have gone in already, tulips can hang about till Christmas. All those lesser known others, small blue jobs mainly, scillas, pushkinias, chionodoxas, anemone blanda etc. what are they if not fun? Each bulb has a flower curled inside it, ready to pop out in spring, all it needs is a little sleeping chamber in the earth and a good night's rest.

Never hesitate to plant these amongst your deciduous shrubs and perennials. All you're doing (deep breath) is stealing March on time. They are entirely trouble-free. As are some crocuses, particularly sieberi tricolor in my experience. Other favourites are the pale pink chionodoxa untruthfully called Pink Giant and the taller, later, tulipa clusiana Cynthia.

Your only dilemma with these neat little parcels is to know whether to spread them out or cluster them together as you plant. A nearby child might advise you. You can't lose after all, they'll expand into clumps over time, pull themselves to the right depth and turn themselves over if necessary. So expense is really the only question and from Peter Nyssen www.peternyssen.com they're very good value, though it may be a bit late to order now.

So has Dylan ever sung about such innocent pleasures? Of course he has. And a very well-known song too, one that is pretty close to perfection, being both simple and utterly complete. It's Forever Young, and you get a double dose on the album Planet Waves, a slow version and a quick, so that you can see the slow one is probably better, but you don't end up thinking he's gone totally slushy.

Everything is here in the song if you want your child to be a valuable and capable adult. It's there for adults as well, if they want to be valuable too, and youthful as they age. Three perfect verses, encompassing attitudes, relationships and self-reliance. It is hard to think of any essential strength or virtue that has been left out. My favourite line is "may you always see the lights surrounding you." Beautifully and economically put, I cannot think of a more effective route to contentment. Lights that both guide and cheer you.

Here's another collection of seeds in their containers. The big long one is called Pink Banana and is the size, weight and colour of some babies. Unnerving really, especially as it is much more edible than the regular pumpkin. Sweeter and more succulent.

And the lines from the song that link directly with the garden in autumn? There are two, the first, which could sound like an elderly platitude, is obvious - "may your hands always be busy". Well that deals with a multitude of despairing moments, especially when you're collecting the seeds and fruits of autumn. The true therapy of gardening has something to do with pottering about and fiddling with stuff. Time is snatched from the coming dark and cold, to play with the toys of nature, to store up the youth, to remember the child in oneself.

Now for the second gardening line - "And may you stay forever young", repeated and repeated, carrying and completing every verse. Such lengthy notes on "stay" and "young", and such a dangerous commitment to that last note. I'm no singer myself, and could not carry a tune in any receptacle, so perhaps the tension I feel as he launches onto it is misplaced. And then I feel relief as his voice twiddles down a descent, only to worry again as the next long note becomes inevitable. Finally, listen to how he sings "shift". Obvious but necessary, the ground seems to heave and flex.

The song is sentimental and unsophisticated, if you were wanting dissidence and raging surrealism. But it is jolly good. And I hope we're all convinced that it's the very thing to play as you open your bulb packets and arrange your seeds into a pretty and tempting arsenal. Here are some more, not for sowing, just for decoration. Excuse the shine from the glass, I saw it in a gallery somewhere, and seized it, unattributably. My hands don't need to be that busy.

Collecting and storing seeds has none of the danger, either of singing the wrong note, or of growing through childhood and puberty into an adult. That's how gardening lets us be young when we're old. Strange and ironic that when we were younger it seemed like a middle-aged pastime. Not to me, I was really quite old then. And I'm younger now of course, like all who garden and all who know that other song.

A conker apocalypse - Ring Them Bells

2011-10-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

For several years now, horse chestnut trees have begun to look more and more disgraceful, usually from about July onwards. This is hardly one of the four horses of the apocalypse but it certainly feels like a tossed mane or a distant hoofbeat. Most people are aware of the problem: some are more confused and yet others appear to be like babes in a very diseased wood, looking up in astonishment when someone points out a mass of apparently dying trees. Do we want to know what's happening? Is there anything we can do?

I'm not abnormally attached to the magnificent yeasty masses of horse chestnut leaves and pink or white flowers, but I must admit to not wanting to understand exactly what is going on, simply because I cannot bear to contemplate such wholesale disaster. I don't agree with my own approach at all but find myself set on such a path sometimes, whether or not I approve of my own behaviour.

I write this to expunge my own sin and ignorance and in order to get a grip. Also because I visited Cambridge in the late summer and was distressed to see so many sad trees in crucial places. The species was introduced to this country in the 16th century and feels as if it belongs. Other places feel the same - perhaps because we are all so attached to the prickliness and the shininess of the fruits, so interesting and touchable.

The difficulties facing the horse chestnut are, it seems, double rather than multi-headed. We have a bleeding canker and leaf-mining moth. The first attacks the bark, the canker is often fungal but the rust coloured bleeding is bacterial. Large dark patches appear on the trunk or round larger branches, in dry weather they blacken and flake, reddish dripping may appear. If the patches girdle the trunk the tree will die, if it's a branch, it may crash to the ground. The disease is not necessarily terminal for the spreading may stop and the tree may struggle on. The disease spreads from infected material and has greatly increased, across Europe.

Second problem, a tiny little moth, which may have several families of caterpillars each year, who eat the soft leaf flesh between the two skins that hold the green together. The mined areas become brown and dry, they join together and the leaf hangs on the tree like a memento mori, rusty, crackly, dead, dead, dead. The moth appears to settle in once established in an area or on a tree, each year the leaves look awful more quickly. They will not kill the tree but they make it an eyesore. Spring brings temporary green again, but the pleasure is gone.

And these trees have been planted throughout Europe, to beautify towns, roads and squares - they shade the knowing and the unknowing alike, offering conkers and sticky buds, hand-like leaves and endless, endless photosynthesis. I did not know, and am both pleased and saddened to discover, that you can grind up dried conkers, mix them with water and wash fragile textiles with the resulting liquid. Apparently they will add a faint blue to white materials as well as remove stains. They have also been used in the manufacture of some element of armaments - how can that be possible? Cue jokes about conker fights.

The little leaf-mining moth appears to have been about, in and around Macedonia, where the tree originated, for a very long time too but it has suddenly exploded in population density and speed of spread. Modern transport whisking stuff along highways, warmer longer summers, drier periods, all these have been implicated. Do not imagine there can be many natural phenomena that we don't influence. You probably know that there are no chemical or other solutions to either the canker or the moth yet and you will remember Dutch Elm disease.

It will be obvious to all right-thinking people that there are many songs in the Dylan canon that might be appropriate here and I'm not going to refer to them all. I do however believe that the tendency to catastrophise, or apocalyptacise as I would like to call it, may be a deep personality trait which seems like seeing the truth to some and self-indulgent drama to others. As usual, a Dylan song reveals the listener not the singer. Today I want to focus on one that brings strange tears to my eyes - it's called Ring Them Bells and we're going with a version shot through with verbal tics, crowd interpolations and incredible thrust - it's the one from Tell Tale Signs, Volume 8 of the Bootleg series.

The song is a vision from a high hill across valleys and fields. Bells ring out, shepherds doze while their flocks wander, sacred cows, wheels and ploughs, children cry and innocence dies; there's a definite whiff of brimstone in the air. And then the lines of fighting armies appear, presumably good against bad, the chosen few against the many heathen, but, oddly enough,what this fighting is doing is "breaking down the distance between right and wrong".

I can't help seeing a kind of C.S.Lewis landscape, not really my sort of thing, but we're definitely in Last Battle territory. Imagine the trees, brown and dying in the sunny green landscape, and the warning bells ringing out. Aslan is rustling through the dropping leaves, but we can't rely on him to win.

Now, I have no sense of a world beyond our own, religion of every kind is to me a mass of illustrations and myths which shine light on human fears, desires and conflicts as nothing else. I hear the song in that spirit and it seems to be about choosing to know, or not to know, about the difficulties and horrors that must come. It regrets loss of innocence at the same time as it exalts awareness, awakeness and knowledge. It's probably fair enough to say that adults have no business being innocent.

Of course there are different levels of response to the horse chestnut problem, even when you know what's happening. Perhaps it just means they'll look awful every year, that's not the end of the world, quite true, staggering on is possible, sorry about the disfigurement everywhere. Perhaps again, the scientists will find something. Hmmmm, what and treat them all? Perhaps, and this is my conclusion, we ought to be facing the problem and getting on with removing them. Reducing the sources of reinfestation has to be sensible. Let other trees expand to take their places, if they are in mixed plantings, or get on with planting limes, or planes or whatever seem most likely to endure in the future. Shade trees are vital, and likely to become more so. Don't talk to me about the disease afflicting oaks yet, I'll get there, but at the moment the scales on my eyes about that are still more comforting than painful.

It is at the moment of the unexpected continuation of the music, when you think it's ending but Dylan (I suppose) urges the band on, beyond and beyond, that's when I feel the delinquent sob rise in my throat. I'm not sure why it happens, it may just be the effects of a corny musical device. I wouldn't want to believe that however, I'd rather think about the mixture of thought and emotion for a little longer.

Right and wrong are fighting, but drawing nearer to each other in the song. The earth is a sad mass of wounds; fighting about how it's happened and what to do next feels like a more reasonable response than choosing not to know. I know I sound like a bleeding heart liberal. What else is there? We are only another sort of fungus on the face of the earth and every life-form must live to its utmost - even cankers and moulds that destroy their own hosts. It's our nature to think and fight about it as we proceed with the destruction.

I suppose it would be reasonable to allow the moth free rein, for it seems unlikely to kill its feeder, but I think I would rather fight on the side that says the unsightliness is too bad to bear. I'm a gardener you see, interfering with nature is my besetting sin. Do I hear a neigh? I'm not meaning to be flippant, but I'm afraid I have to live with my apocalyptic sensibilities and I do that any way I can.

A big bouquet of roses - Never Say Goodbye

2011-10-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

I want to spend a little time today thinking about roses. Every day should of course start like that; considering the rose will surely always brighten the saddest, darkest day. The time will soon come, as winter approaches, when the avid gardener will prepare to order a couple of new bare-root roses, revelling in the escapist catalogues of Peter Beales, David Austen and so many others.

Well, I'm sad to say that this may be a short and accurate route to The Garden of Disappointment where large groups of yellowing, spindly plants are to be found. They are not what we call bushes, they are blackened and broken promises. Here and there thin branches hold beautiful flowers aloft, never enough, never together, soured and dismayed by their accompanying foliage. They are spotty by both nature and disease; the roses themselves like larger rounder spots: grace and health missing.

Perhaps this seems a bad way to start a piece about roses; but I really don't want to hold out hopes for scent and beauty that are unlikely to be wholly delivered. Rose catalogues are well known as agents of the strongest seduction, we all make the same mistakes, and we all think we won't mind. Then the buds open in June (often early May these days), they seem to be about to offer everything we hoped and believed for possibly three days, and then begins the dying of the dream. Hybrid teas have been blamed, but Gallicas, Centifolias, Albas, Hybrid Perpetuals, Floribundas, Modern Shrubs - none escape as a class in their entirety. Beautiful names make no difference, antiquity and fame are no protection. Disappointment lurks.

The Dylan song is Never Say Goodbye from the album Planet Waves. It is not a disappointment, but it's SO short. Do listen, it's seriously lovely. First, he is in the frozen landscape of his youthful memory. Then the big bouquet of roses comes down out of the sky, like a Monty Python boot.

While we're in the Dylan area, and before we get to the truly rose-related, I need to share something surprising with you. In his film Renaldo and Clara, of which I have never seen more than a couple of tiny scenes, Mr D used a red rose as symbolic of a "travelling vagina"; I believe this allowed him to film wordless transactions between his characters as they contemplated different forms of relationship. Whatever, it's very funny, this idea of easycare, transportable convenience, untrammelled by the other parts of a person. Once you've heard it though, it makes a ghastly sort of sense to the gardener, apart from the travelling angle. The flower of the rose seems to be the most important part and, in catalogues, that's often all you see - a single flower. I'll allow you, my readers to develop other comparisons as you see fit.

This rose is called Magenta. It's a Kordes hybrid, wonderfully scented and might repeat flower if nicely treated. One of my favourites along with Lavender Lassie which is more pinkly coloured, more repeatable, fabulously scented and very healthy. Plus elusively charming, a quality shared with Magenta in my view and the unnameable element which we search for most of all.

Never Say Goodbye is a beautiful song because of the way in which its parts are spaced. Five snatches of song are alternated with an marvellous ornate melody. I don't know how to describe it; something to do with swelling and building, rippling and lifting, element upon element. The words are loosely connected, part to part - the music holds it all together. There is a sense of being allowed a moment to absorb each sung section before moving on to the next. I don't know why that would increase the feeling of unity in the whole, but it seems to me that it does. Pattern is important, rhythm matters.

And there lie the clues to what we can look for in a truly satisfying rose. The round blobs of colour need to seem integral to the bush, which needs to have graceful arms, issuing from a central unified point. It's good if the flowers are grouped and spread, if their size and complexity is related to the size of the bush, and if their dying forbears drop neatly. A wodge of differently aged flowers, tightly compacted at the end of a branch, is not nice; neither is any sense of overbearing growth in one area, next to a diseased sluggishness elsewhere. Differently sized flowers are good. Spacing is supreme.

Not a marvellous picture of another excellent Kordes rose - Goldbusch. Now five or six feet tall, it is very elegant, once flowering, good hips, tidy, scented. A love.

So here are some suggestions about what to focus on in catalogues and some varieties I have found satisfactory. These are the fruit, the very hips of my experience. I won't cover everything today, fortunately many Dylan songs mention roses and I plan to return again to this subject with further suggestions. Today we're going to stay with bush roses - up to about two metres in height. I haven't found a red one I trust as much as the ones I suggest, goodness knows what that means.

To begin with, avoid any bush rose with "erect" growth. It sounds like it might be good thing, but it's the quickest way to gracelessness. What you want is "spreading", "wide", or even "arching" growth. "Requires support" can be good. This doesn't mean you have to build a great construction - you may get the benefits of a bending kind of elegance if you can surround the plant with something lower and firmer that will hide its sad legs. Sometimes very little will be said about plant habit in the available information: check the width against the height. Tall and thin means flowers at the top of sticks, wider than tall holds out greater hope of a better plant.

Don't expect to grow your roses all together. It seems like a good idea, to harmonise yellow, cream and white, or crimson, pink and pale pink, but it's jolly hard to pull off. One variety will be going over as another comes into flower, relative sizes, leaf colours and habits will matter more than you expect, and finally disease transfer will be encouraged. Keep them separated, preferably enhanced by other plantings.

Here is Francine Austin, a rose that will repeat flower in most places and grows as a lax fluffy shrub, slender, scented and charming. This is a North wall in August, from a recent cutting.

Another favourite Austin rose is Graham Thomas, whose rich saffron looks edible . Nothing unusual in my choices - these are proven doers, as gardeners like to say in sturdy tones. Also Felicia, a warm pink Hybrid Musk and English Miss, a floribunda, the only upright rose I choose, but still a gracious plant, in the palest rose pink. Peaudouce or Elina is a massive healthy hybrid tea, flowers like cream cabbages, dark green leaves and an air of invincibility. The plant is round and solid. I don't love it, I admire it.

Here is a nice wild looking rose I planted last year from Peter Beales. It's called Lyda rose, the flowers are clean, innocent and wild-looking, but they have substance and continuity. The bush is supposed to stay shortish although a parent was Francis E Lester, a massive rambler. We'll see. So far it's short, graceful and the flowers are subtle as they die, dropping their petals unnoticed. Hips are coming.

When you decide on a rose, understand whether you're expecting good hips or not, and whether the rose flowers more than once. It alters the way you manage the dead-heading. A "continuous" flowering rose, can be kept going by prompt dead-heading, taking just the dead flowers off. But it may look pretty miserable continuously too, retaining every spotty leaf, every misshapen or excessive stem. If you take more, down to a healthy bud, you might slow down the next set of flowers, and end up with something closer to a "repeat-flowering" rose, which may be a better idea anyway.

A "repeat-flowering" rose that produces good hips should be dead-headed on its first round or two, or you'll get less of a second or third go. You'll be able to leave the final burst of flowering intact and get the hips then. If you dead-head a once-flowerer, you won't get hips, it should be obvious, but so little is. Feed your roses, give them sun and space, cut out old wood in winter.

If you grow a once-flowering non hip-bearer(Some Albas, Gallicas, Fantin Latour) cut it back harshly after flowering and enjoy the other plants around it. In other words, treat it like a spring-flowering shrub and don't worry about pruning so much in winter. Fantin-Latour is quality in pale pink, I have cut her to the ground and restarted her on several occasions, always to the good.

Consider the ground-cover rose - they often have arching bushy growth and will grown out and down rather than straight up. But not the ones with really tiny messy flowers, and check how they look as they die. They have a certain vulgar reputation but the good ones are flower-machines, as I once read somewhere. Those on the left are a mixture of Bonica, Kent and Wiltshire. Less of the charm, I admit.

Also try Chinas, their flowers, stems and leaves have a delicacy which saves them from any form of grossness, and they cope with drought as well as repeat flowering well. Archduke Charles has astonished me this year, in bright cerise. Cecile Brunner is well-known, a tiny warm pale pink tea rose with thin purplish stems. Enough roses for the moment. There are always more to love, but I have said goodbye to plenty.

It's not at all obvious what Dylan is getting at in his lovely song. Something to do with love and longing and permanence. "My dreams are made of iron and steel" might be an interesting line, it being unclear what connects heavy metals and dreaming. Perhaps it's something to do with pergolas holding up the roses. Perhaps the singer's dreams are stronger than his love, which may be why he fears a loss. Maybe that's all hindsight, like the glimpse of twilight on the frozen lake.

I like the image of the singer standing on the beach waiting for someone he loves to come and hold his hand, it seems so simple and familiar a gesture; reassuring to all of us. Roses all the way, for the moment anyway.

This is from Mount Ephraim in Kent.

And here is the view from within the roses

Dreams of endless roses can fill our imaginations as we plant our gardens. The perfect rose-garden or the perfect rose is like an ever-retreating fantasy, more in the head than on the ground. Sometimes you see something close to your desires, just enough to spur you on. When you return to that same plant or garden the magic may often have departed. That's just the way roses are, a little bit too lovely to last.

Feeling thankful - What Was It You Wanted

2011-09-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

I was thinking today, as I yanked at the ropes of brambles infiltrating their rooting tips over, through and under some close-board fencing, how very thankful I feel to Mr D. Gratitude is fitting for people you don't know personally but whose work means something to you: it's clean, distant and close at the same time. It's also completely imbalanced. And I have a reasonably bad case of it, I'm happy to say, for the gain is all on my side and gratitude adorns the grateful.

The brambles of course, don't seem to have much to do with this. But I hope you'll be very grateful for this tip, if you have a problem with them. They are not really plants: they're actually a sensitive and slow-moving animal which has been cursed with geometrical progression. How else to explain their absurdly tentacular feelers (which earlier in the year were held back in the body) now extending outwards, sometimes for metres, hunting and searching for a little bit of damp soil? Invariably they find it, in the most knowing way too, between the cracks of paving stones, right under the fence line, between logs left in a heap, through cracks and holes.

Now, if you can get in there, give a firm but gentle pull to each of the long flexible arms and you'll find they come away with their touchy-feely tips intact, even though they may already have a healthy little bunch of white roots, growing away into their chosen spots. Catch them at the right point and you'll save yourself a world of trouble next year, just make sure you get that bunch of roots out. Of course, if you're short of brambles, the answer to how to make more lies there in front of you. I have less than nothing against the blackberry, it makes me very grateful, but, as we know, location is everything.

The above picture shows you a group of extended limbs. They are in different stages of development, some just fingering the ground, another rooting, a third starting its own new limb development. I cannot think of another plant that self-layers with quite such unquenchable and humanoid determination. And it happens in these last six weeks or so of the growing year, when the fruit has blackened or been shed and gardeners might be beginning to turn their backs.

I'd love to see a speeded-up film of an undisturbed bramble in in a field: if you had a line of them I think you might get a wave-formation in two directions as they bounded off, if you just had the one, you might get a sort of pebble in a pond effect. Either way, it would be a marvellous thing to see, making one give thanks for the power of nature.

Here's a picture of that very thing, a single bramble surrounded by invadable territory, I'll check on it next year to see how it's getting on.

So, this sense of gratitude, let's think about it a bit more. Not entirely unrelated to some sort of love, it's gives great joy to the person feeling it, somewhat less to the object-person. The person saying thank-you has the glow of satisfaction and connection in their eyes, the receiver of thanks is more likely to look a little distracted and perhaps even rather tired. It's nice to be thanked, and it's annoying not to be, when you've made a big effort, but it's not usually the main reason for doing a thing.

In the gardening world there are people I feel gratitude to, I even wrote a sort of fan-letter to Christopher Lloyd. When he wrote The Well-Tempered Garden, there was nothing else quite as good, he wrote with verve; opinions and experience pouring out of him. It almost seemed as though he were standing next to me, pointing things out and explaining how wrong-headed I was. How could I not feel grateful? On top of that, he noticed the things I longed to know about in plants of every kind. In The Adventurous Gardener, he continued the good work, helping and explaining about cuttings and cutting back - all stuff that has rubbed off on me as confidence and familiarity. I appreciated his energy, his wiliness and his conviction which he was kind enough to share through his books.

If you can find it, Foliage Plants is also written with the same opinionated enthusiasm. I believe these were his first three books and they all have the endearing habit of summarising a page with a soubriquet at the top ( examples: "blue spruces are too popular", "liver-tinted bergenias" and "Be kind to the aucuba"). His later books, for me at least, moved into a more ordinary category.

I have so many pictures of Great Dixter that it was hard to know what to choose. I landed on the one above because it is truly a mixed border, something that has fallen with a great clang to the bottom of the fashion heap. Look at those shrubs - here's Mr Lloyd, still getting away with it, although he is now in the great mixed border in the sky, I am sad to say.

The next photograph shows what prompted me to write expressing my gratitude. Apparently, some sort of Visigoths entered the garden at night and chopped off the heads of some of his many topiary birds. I don't know where I heard it, but my possessive sense of connection to Mr Lloyd encouraged me to believe that the matter was nearly my business and that he might derive comfort from my gratitude for his past works. Who knows whether that turned out to be true.

You will note that my gratitude to Mr Lloyd has a slightly strange edge - I have pilgrimed to his garden so many times that I feel sure you would like me to show you round. My grateful appreciation has muddled me up. And now the word "bumptious" has entered my mind in his regard and I can't seem to root it out.

THANKING

Here we can turn to a Dylan song, from the album Oh Mercy. It's a low-voiced, insistent psychodrama entitled What Was It You Wanted? Endless questions, a mixture of confusion, irritation and hard-won patience from the singer/protagonist, who seems unable to connect with the person who has sought him out. This is the very voice of the individual on the receiving end of thanks, unable to recognise exactly what is being conveyed, seeing that it matters, but unsure what to do next.

BEING THANKED

So many people feel great gratitude to Dylan, I do too, he kindly gives me something to think about and enjoy, nearly every day. Thanks feel to be in order. But I cannot imagine that they would hold any interest for him, or that they would even make much sense, and that is precisely what I hear in the song - bafflement and boredom. Sadly however, there is an even less welcome undertone, one of deep suspicion. Not only has he been collared by some tongue-tied fan, he's worried there may be more to it, some kind of attack or maybe a demand. And on top of that, he cannot quite grasp what the fan is saying, he can't remember the words and everything keeps disappearing.

He's right to be worried. Gratitude has a very dark side. Precisely because it costs something to the person who feels it - a mixture of longing, obligation and energy - it can flip right over into bitter resentment, disappointment and anger. The imbalance should not be so poisonous and is not always so. But balance is what we unknowingly crave and long to restore.

The singer is worried and beset, but an odd thing happens to me when I listen, I can't hold on to the song, its repetitions and tone contrive to erase the words as they're sung, the only bit I can retain is the moment when he darts off, then returns to try again. The words die in my head as they die in the mouth of the desirous follower.

You may be wondering how I will wrench the idea of gratitude back to the opening bramble. Well, I won't. Something slightly different was in my mind. The bramble sends out its flexible tentacles that root where they insinuate. Dylan too, with his sinuous, sensitive voice (OK sometimes prickly, rasping and lacking in ordinary beauty) sends out feelers of words and sound that can root deep, changing the terrain in your head. You cannot trace the bramble further in this analogy, pull it out, just where it's trying to invade. The song we have looked at is not one where he seems to be reaching out and finding purchase, it's more like the very experience of withdrawal, all antennae disappearing.

Weevils in the bud - Just Like A Woman

2011-09-22T00:57:00.000-07:00

So there we were, in the Garden of Eden. Fruit in our hands, beauty in our eyes, trumpets in our ears. I wasn't required to do a thing. Flowers grew and small animals danced.

I bent to pick another enormous wild strawberry ( flavour and size go together in heaven). A small brownish nose peeped out of the purplish sedum at my feet - and I could just distinguish a tiny, creamy body, circled like a piece of reinforced piping. The whole thing waggled about with a kind of wretched, pointless energy, perhaps a sort of savagery even. I was looking at the vine weevil grub, portent of despair.

I stood my ground with the sedum. That is, I dug it up, collected the grubs, took a few limbs off the plant, beheaded them and stuck them firmly in the ground elsewhere ( for sedums, you can call these "cuttings"). I then split and replanted the cleaned up root system, having checked it very carefully.

Of course at this time of the year vine weevil children are just settling in for 6 months eating, mining right into the roots. I have had plenty of opportunity to study these little beasts at the two distinguishable stages of their development. But rarely have I seen such cheek from the young mobsters, they mostly remain underground, doing their wicked work of eating the roots from the inside, so you don't even know where evil lurks. You find out in the spring, when you discover that heuchera leaves part directly from the soil, all underlying parts having been destroyed. All sorts of plants are attacked, but, with unexpected rationality, they prefer a thicker, juicier root if they can get it. I do not believe they enjoy bindweed, which just proves there's some sort of error at the heart of things. Here are some ordinary sedum in a different garden, God knows what's going on in there, but perhaps their ordinariness will save them.

Many years ago, when I first found a potful of grubs, I picked them out and tried leaving them in a saucer of insecticide with a bit of soil for comfort but essentially in full contact with the poison, presumably drinking it. Nada. They were still the same size and just as randomly lively, legless but still waggling about, a full two weeks later. So expressive, and annoying, that pointless, hopeless movement.

I tried another thing. Emptying a big pot where a plant had died, in the spring one year, I did not feel up to binning that large amount of good compost, so I tried picking the grubs out. Squishing them is very nice, a bit like bubble wrap. But, I thought, why not enlist the wildlife, let's leave the compost spread out here, on the slabs, where birds feed. They'll surely pick them out for me.

Well, a bit. But not enough. No real commitment to hunting them out from underneath. Chickens would have done it, but I didn't have any chickens. So, passing over the soil-soaking chemicals, which may be fine, but I just don't have the psychological strength to use, I have turned to nematodes, the biological control. They have been successful for me in the past. If you think you've got vine weevil, the warmer autumn months are your best chance to get the nematodes onto them. If you think you haven't got vine weevil, well, you know what I'm going to say next.

Stand back! Here comes the mother, from Wikipedia, not my own

The interesting thing about these little beasts, apart from what they're for, which nature knows and I don't, is that they are ALL female. Take that in if you will. I believe it's our fault, perhaps apocryphally so don't quote me, but I think I heard it was an adaptation to DDT. The vine weevil battalions responded by ditching the men; they were perfectly capable of endless solo reproduction, up to 1500 a season per womanly adult, it seems. I leave you to check my facts - I may not know them as well as I seem to.

What a lovely neat link I can make here, straight to one of Dylan's big guns - Just Like A Woman, from Blonde on Blonde. I'll attempt to pick the bugs out of it, for myself as much as you, for this is a song that seems to speak directly to the listener, and if she's female, she'll know the news is not all good.

For a start, there's that contrast, between the woman and the girl. The full-bodied creator versus the immature, damaged damage-doer. It takes me back to my youth, listening and worrying, thinking "well, all that strong, womanly, taking, aching and making: I wish I were like that, but I'm rather afraid I'm not". The whole image seemed both distant and suspect.

The only way to identify with the song was to be the breaking one, the little girl one. We women hoped it was charming to be so sensitive, knowing there was something wrong with that hope. But we so easily recognised those moments of little girlhood. The result was that some of us felt diminished and uncertain. A mangled feminism allowed us to add an element of blaming (men) to that particular list of weaknesses. So it went on. The song stays in your head, but for me, is always a bit of a worry. The singer is finding a woman wanting in terms of strength of character - exactly where it hurts most and where many of us, male or female, may fear a deficiency.

But I'm grown up now! So I'm over all that. After I've told you about this next photograph I'll give you my grown up reading of the song.

This flower should not  be out at this point in the year, but  the plant has produced a few late buds. It's eucryphia lucida and I think it's also called Ballerina in this pink version. It's rather a  perfect little girl, nodding a  sweet head, dressed in pink and white.  Ribbons and bows would cheapen it. I may have exaggerated its size so don't expect a thing like a camellia.

For those who wish to know more I would add that it grows on a thin evergreen shrub or near-tree. The plant has little presence when not wearing its heart on its sleeve, fading easily into the background. It doesn't appear to be difficult but may prefer part-shade and as little lime as possible - if you feel like giving it its own way.   It's a plant that engenders affection, one whose flowering you anticipate with pleasure. A nice thing to add to a town garden.

That all makes us feel a bit kinder to the little girl doesn't it? But now for what may have seemed blindingly obvious to many of you for years, the song isn't really about her at all. There's only one person close to breaking down in the song, it's the singer, who can't stand the pain in here, becomes inarticulate ("ain't it......clear?") and has to leave. This is not the inadequacy of the female - it's the so-called "crisis of masculinity". You know, all that stuff about repressing the softer side etc.

Looked at with older post-maternal eyes,  it's possible to distinguish an anxious young man, whose needs are great and who hasn't space for the needs of his female companion.  Everything is laid out here - the neatness of the projection onto her, next to the painful sense of panic so dramatically displayed in the central section. I used not to believe that; I thought he was just telling some sort of truth, now I see he's engaged in a battle with himself, which he absolutely has to win.

I wonder if I will win my own battle, not to make a trite comparison to vanquishing vine weevil, when the song still makes me a little bit sad. I see my own worried young self, who has taken so many years to hear the obvious. I see any sensitive young person, struggling to be unmoved and fearful of the demands of a relationship. I see the shells hardening, necessary but hurtful and hurting.

Choosing - Pledging My Time

2011-09-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

A discriminating eye sees to the heart of that which the world offers. Only the best is selected, the granite work-surface, the perfect wine, the over-designed light fitting. This has been a truly marvellous way to shift stuff and money in ever-decreasing circles. And now look where we are!

So easy to sound prissy about this, and I am sorry to admit to having been unwilling to make the best choices in so many areas thoughout my life. A slight puritanical contrariness in my nature often means I will cling to something that to everyone else is beyond old hat.

This photo is not old hat, it's old shoe. You might, if you peer closely, be able to detect the pathos and sweetness of the observation in it. It's actually not a shoe, it's some sort of trainer, at the end of some very hard travelling. My friends bought it for me, appalled at my taste but convinced that my affection was real. I still admire the skill of its execution although I am bewildered by how it was made, I thought it had been laboriously carved out of stone, someone suggested it was bronze; that's seems even more unlikely.

This story has some kind of moral, though I can't think what on earth it is. After a period of happy possession, I noticed that there were three strange roundish half orifices around the rim, or upper, as I like to think of it. It's an ash-tray! Probably mass-produced.

Let's get back to the safety of gardening. When we choose a shrub or a tree, we're also choosing a great chunk of time and space, all of which has to be devoted to that chosen thing. You can't plant on top of it, and it will take up more space than you thought if it grows well. The time devoted to growing may not be your own but it comes out of your life allotment. You could always have been growing something else. And if you don't like it, or it fails, you won't get that time back. These are the brutal truths of gardening.

Here are two cercidyphyllum japonicum trees, also known as katsura. Every gardening book will tell you that their dying dropping leaves smell of burnt sugar in autumn, and why should I deny myself the pleasure of repeating it? I have actually smelt it. The first is young:

The second is just over 100 years old, it's a Champion Tree in the Morris Arboretum, Pennsylvania. Round of applause please.

Decide to plant a tree and you are tying yourself to a contract. On your side, you are offering to be happy with your choice as it grows and develops. The tree, unable to commit in the same way, will simply perform as best it can and be what it is. So you're the responsible one. And it's simple enough, just choose the one you like best. Repeat, SIMPLE.

Before we contemplate the task in greater depth, we'll select the Dylan song, a short ditty from Blonde on Blonde, called Pledging My Time. Is it because it follows Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35 (Everybody Must Get Stoned) which opens the album, that it gets so little attention? Perhaps everyone is too busy wiping the blood from their ears. A heavy-handed pun can hurt, when repeatedly and thuddingly thrown.

Pledging My Time seems to me, despite a couple of unexpected lines, a straightforward take on what it means to commit to a choice. Time is the least and the most that can be offered, and time is precious. Looking back over something close to 50 years, Mr D. must feel he's kept his side of the bargain, in my view the song now reveals itself to have been about the contract he was offering to his audience.

I'd like to nominate this song, so cheery and forward-looking, to a different category of music - " the jaunty blues".  Purists will be delighted! There's even a bit of a joke in it, about the hobo who first stole the singer's girlfriend ( I can't quite bring myself to call her his baby), "then he wanted to steal me". Sounds better when he sings it.

My analogy with planting a tree collapses at the verse where he points out that he cannot be the last to leave the stuffy room where only he and you (the apparent pledgee) are left. Presumably this means that he's prepared to walk out if his pledge of time is getting him nowhere, but he's not prepared to be walked out on. He'll be committed, right up to the point that there's no more point to the commitment.

Let's say that a tree you have planted is quite clearly a mistake or a failure.  Apart from anything else the damn thing defines you in your own eyes. You're the one who must remove it and plant something else. Get on with it! Time is passing.

Don't mess about in a new garden planting the small stuff until you have got the major players in - trees shrubs, hedges. If you're lumbered with a huge shrub that you're not happy with, try pruning it up from the inside, aiming to achieve a few clear, graceful stems and proportionate trimmed top growth. That way you steal previously pledged time, releasing a small loveable tree from a hulking mass and making everyone much happier. It's a moment of accidental luck.

This one is a griselina littoralis, I don't mean to blind you with science with the names, but I would not feel I was fulfilling my pledge to respect my audience if I kept it from you. It's an appley green, soapy fleshed evergreen, good in most places in the UK, doesn't mind wind. Whoever pruned it up needs to get back to it, you may be able to detect new growth springing from the right handed trunk. That needs cutting off, but how little time and effort for such a lovely woodland creature.

See George Schenk (in my book-list) for encouragement and advice on this sort of gardening plus a comprehensive list of shade-loving plants. It's the best I've ever seen, even if he does cover more climates than might seem immediately useful. He's a charming intimate writer who speaks from his own experience.

My own garden is a sad indictment of my foolish tree choices. I have been positively incontinent with pledges to too many different varieties in too small a space.

This photograph is rather flattering of a small but greedy area. The entire list of trees in my garden would give my kindly correspondent Anne Wareham, who has written a very excellent book - entitled The Bad-Tempered Gardener, absolute palpitations. I read it this week and was startled by the unanimity of our thoughts about all sorts of things. But then I look at what SHE has done with her time in creating Veddw, one of the best gardens in the country, versus my own scattered and diffuse achievements. For I have many gardens. But not enough clear-eyed commitment! Not enough discrimination or proper choosing!

How strange that we both found Robin Lane Fox's Better Gardening so helpful - it is is all about choosing plants. It gives you inspiring advice both on what to choose and how to choose. It looks like one of us heard a subtext - "limit your choices", and it wasn't me. Hmmmm. I promise I will do better in my next garden.

This photograph is like a snatch of harmonica in a Dylan song. It gives us all time to think, and breaks things up. In Pledging My Time you get a heavenly burst of that very harmonica. He stays right there, not leaving, on a high note. Oh listen, do.

I think I said choosing was simple, a few paragraphs ago. Just take a glance at the lists of malus and crataegus (crabapples and hawthorns) in Hilliers wonderful comprehensive Manual, or in the RHS plantfinder online. Smallish, easy trees, but look how many! And the gardener has to commit. Someone needs to explain what to look for and pick a few good ones out and that's what Mr Lane Fox did, in a jovial but opinionated way.

Back to Dylan's song. I can't leave him without pointing out a crucial repetition. He is not a man who is prepared to be unrequited. He pledges his time lightly and generously but "hoping that you'll come through too" . The line is sung with an equal weight on the last two words and no separation between them so the "through" comes through the "too". It could be "two", both sides of the contract. Mutual commitment between sentient human beings, that's what he wants.

I have to hold myself responsible for the massed confusion of my trees and renege on my pledges to them. Dylan doesn't need to renege: people are still listening and turning up so as long as he still has time to give, he turns up too.

A lucky accident pops up in the last verse. We don't quite know what Dylan means by it - it could even be rather sinister. It's something gardeners recognise; visitors will often admire a perfect plant for a particular spot, when all they are looking at is good fortune and a choice which sprang from a chance, not the other way round..

Contrivances - Angelina

2011-09-10T06:31:00.000-07:00

I love the word contrivance, it implies a thrifty amelioration - what could be more worthwhile or charming? "Let us contrive to make the best of things, Amelia, despite the misfortune of losing our cook, our home and our friends." I contrived that, there is no Amelia.

The best contrivance in gardening, which gets me everytime, is the sight of distant sunshine through a foreground of graceful trunks. If you can get that to work, you will never go wrong, if you can come across it as you round a corner, even better. Others classics are large ponds in small spaces, dark dank pathways opening onto wide sunny slopes, dark doors opening to a vision of flowers, pergola shadows falling aslant, distant eyecatchers, retreating columns, the perfected sylvan glade.... I'm almost hypnotising myself.

Today we're going to think about contriving on a big scale, we're going large, really large, almost monolithic. Before we do that however, I'm going to outline the perfect recipe for getting rid of bindweed, well-known and dull it may be, but I keep finding people who don't know it. You do have to stick at it - I'm quite tempted to go on and on about persistence.

Anyway, unwind it carefully from what it's grown up and over, retaining only what is still attached to its roots, stuff it in the plastic bag of your choice. Spray inside the bag, around and about, with glyphosate, tie it up firmly, squidge it about a bit more to distribute the spray as much as you can, stuff the bag somewhere out of the way.

As you do all this, a boring, irritating job in my view, listen to Angelina in The Bootleg Series (vols 1 - 3) by Bob Dylan. You will be lifted way above the menial task, I promise that, as much as I promise that the bindweed solution will eventually work. The glyphosate seems to continue to remain active as it circulates amongst the leaves of the bindweed, due to heating and cooling within the plastic bag. In a few weeks all the green will be a nasty rotten mess. The roots should be dying, way under the ground. I mention it now because the time is ripe, autumn is forcing deciduous plants to suck what they need to survive back down into their roots. You have avoided spraying the killer all over the place. You have done an excellent thing. You have added not what they need, but what you want.

In case you want an alternative - remove all plants from the area and all vestiges of bindweed from their roots. Store elsewhere, lay turf or grass seed on infested area. Mow for a year or two, dig up, replace plants. Or black plastic the whole area for a similar amount of time. There'll still be bindweed round the edges with these last two solutions, I'm sorry to say. I'll stick to the bags, thriftier and more ameliorative, as contrivances go.

Right. Let's raise our sights and get back to some monolithic contrivances. Two famous gardens -Chanticleer and Dartington Hall. I lay these names down like trump cards, but they're huge in scale, far too heavy for a mere mortal to lift.

Chanticleer is in Wayne, Pennsylvania. It's huge and intensively, luxuriously gardened. With a vast stone ruin, made like an abandoned library, at its heart.

Dartington Hall is in Devon, UK, made in the twenties, as part of a programme of ideals, education and natural justice, with a Henry Moore overlooking a huge sunken "tiltyard". Both gardens are costly, visionary achievements.

First, have another listen to Angelina. Spot the connections? Well, nearly all Dylan takes time and concentration. Turn to Michael Gray's Encyclopedia again for a complete, and compelling, exploration of the song plus a surprise about the subpoena. Or stick with me and get a tiny little bit of it, all related to the art of the garden.

Gray describes Angelina as a "grand failure". Dartington Hall is, for me, a sublime achievement, so that's not the connection, Chanticleer is balanced on the cusp. But both gardens have one particular wonderful moment: a journey to a high point, a turn where there is yet more to detain you, then an expansive view, calling you to step into it.

This photograph, at Chanticleer, shows too much tree. But I hope you get the feel. See the path winding away in the distance. At the same moment you're surrounded by the most astonishing plants and furnishings, rank upon rank retreating behind you. And you turn to take those in, whilst hardly able to draw away from the view.

There we are, at the beginning of Angelina - "Well, it's always been my nature to take chances, my right hand drawing back while my left hand advances." The second half of this sentence is an image of a kind of creeping, wary movement. Distant half-spoken cliches are reborn; "The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing", "one step forward, two steps back". The feeling is that of an opposition, a nearly physical dilemma. You hesitate, unsure and doubly transfixed.

So to Dartington's similar contrivance. You are led to a wonderful view and drawn out towards it at the same time as being stopped in your tracks at the spot where you stand. Your next step is uncertain, backwards or forwards? Movement or stasis?

Ideally you will listen to the exquisite end of the song as you look at these photographs. They are illuminated by that last verse, but I do not ever want to interfere with images that may be in your own head. It's not the same, it's just a similar feeling:

We start off down this rather non-descript curving path.

Round the corner, past the vase, down the steps (no angel! no spiral staircases). Round another corner -

Bang! Oh I wish my photographs did it justice.

Can you see the arena beyond in the first of these last two photos? You can definitely see this multi-faced round thing, (Heavens! It's a rolling stone!) which makes you back up to see it better, pivoted round from the view (note the tree in both) in the second. Two things, pulling you two ways.

Out there it is, it really is, an arena Just like in the song. Do read Michael Gray about stepping into that if you can. It's all a question of taking chances, putting yourself out there. And hear Dylan's voice, the climbing, the stepping and the turning in it, the final release. Angelina never fully formed herself, amongst the idols and the dictators. The things she rhymed with were almost too much for her anyway, so exotic and so complex, dare I say it - almost contrived. They made me smile and they charmed me, but they didn't finally persuade, although the protagonist's voice is clear and vital, thoroughly connected on every knowing level.

Against those idols and dictators, creating gardens may be a small, unneccessary indulgence. I know that. However Dartington convinces as a garden and as art, it's inevitable, enormous, meant, with stairs elsewhere that seem to lead you straight up to the heavens. Just to wind this piece up, I'll point out that bindweed would not infest such a garden. Such weeds would surely fall away, like sand from a hyena.

The effort economy - Man In The Long Black Coat

2011-09-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

I'm reluctant to waste effort in the garden. I like what I do to be quick, significant and where possible multi-functional. I have three rules:

Cover the soil up.

Know when to cut down or prune and do it nicely

Grow easy plants

The first incorporates planting things so that they join up, mulching, not amending the soil, and not digging. The second usually includes localised weeding and attention. The third speaks for itself but is about eliminating fuss and being appropriate. I don't like spraying and generally only use light quiet tools. A good hand fork, small secateurs and a little folding saw can achieve a remarkable amount. Mowing I leave to others who like it.

Of course there are dozens of supplementary processes and activities. My rules are just simple guides. You CAN have free will in the garden. You MUST follow your own vision and desires. But plants are not random entities and time is short, so a little understanding is in order.

I have another subconscious, take it for granted rule. Always leave any garden looking noticeably better in the present, but always get something done which is aimed squarely at the future.

A lot of gardening is basically housework outside. We all know that, as we sweep up, gather up, pick up and finally glance up with a wild surmise, asking "What is this for? " "Has someone run off with my life?" That's when you need the vision and the desire.

For most of us, there is a time when no effort is too great. We go through periods where gardening trumps almost every other activity. However most of us arrive at a point of balance where not every simplification or relaxation is to be rejected. I think I started pretty close to there, seduced by ground-cover, adoring the shrub, always reluctant to dig in great loads of manure, although I believed in it, just too bone idle.

Ken Thompson's books have told me only what I want to hear. He's good on feeding and composts, leaving me with the conviction that even using garden compost on clay soils is unneccessay enrichment - leading to mad fast growth - leading to more control needed, leading to more trips to the compost heap. Stick it on the veg is his answer. Time moves gently for the first two years after planting, then it often speeds up and gallops off with your vision.

Mulching with small leafy prunings and lawn-mowings is a good way of reducing effort. As you reap so you sow, dropping them as close to their place of origin as possible, pushing them out of sight, covering the soil. In a large garden this will always work amongst shrubs. At the back of a wide border, dead wood and proto-compost can accumulate, to the good of your garden and wildlife. I have found composted bark and wood chippings completely satisfactory - despite dire predictions by some pundits. The bark in particular appears to be disliked by slugs, adding to its charms. Of course I do feed roses and I'm quite keen on that myccorrhiza, but without any personal proof. Just belief I suppose. Here's a garden planted 2 years ago (not the trees of course), directly into heavy, rubbley soil and mulched with wood-chip.

I am now economically and effortlessly summing up my whole garden at the beginning of the month of September with this photograph of acidenthera murieliae.

Look how all the other messes and mistakes have fallen away! I love the way you get that sometimes in magazines or on gardening TV programmes. In fact it's not that easy a plant, preferring an earlier start and a warmer winter than we can provide and producing a lot of tall bright green leafage which needs a bit of management. So I've broken my own third rule here. But it smells delicious. A "dream of gentle beauty" as Beth Chatto had in her catalogue about Trollius Alabaster - which was always too lovely for this world.

For apparently effortless economy, try Man In The Long Black Coat (Oh Mercy version) by Mr D. Here is an entire Gothic mystery where two pieces of clothing populate a drama. That "soft cotton dress on the line hanging dry"! What more is there to say - she was as lovely as an acidenthera. With the crickets in the background you know where we are and the dress is dry so you know that time has passed. Perhaps her name was Marie Celeste. As I listen, I have a sense of utterly conscious control of the material, nothing lost or forgotten. It's a Deep South Wuthering Heights, summed up in two words - "She gone".

Another salient point arises in the song "There are no mistakes in life, some people say". Well now, you could follow that with the word "Discuss". A person who used to line-dry soft cotton dresses may well have gone to hell which could easily count as some sort of major error. We gardeners generally make smaller, more retrievable misjudgements, which nature will kindly cover over with sycamore and brambles when neglect sets in. But without doubt it's best to try and capture the knowledge as they say these days. Mistakes are also revelations.

Here's one - a biggish plant, tree or shrub, growing well, even quickly and healthily, suddenly loses the will to live, dries up and dies. Dig it out, have a look at the roots. How many times have I seen this, they're all twisted round each other and self-strangulation is under way.

I have learnt to ignore the rule not to disturb roots too much when planting. It is generally astonishing how much disturbance they will take - treat 'em all like roses, prune them back, separate them out, spread them wide. Get right in there and see whether they're creating a great, costive, twisting mess - the nursery will have repotted them , you don't know what crimes are going on in there. I'd rather have them in the soil they're going to grow in anyway so it's a chance to acquaint them properly with their future environment. Rather than leave them in a pot of peat in a sea of clay, that is.

Best to give our plant beauties a fighting chance against the man in the long black coat. If you try leaving the bulbs of acidenthera in the garden over winter "They gone" will be their epitaph. True enough the lost laundress of Man in the Long Black Coat may have chosen to go out and search for her risky escape. Perhaps her roots weren't happy, something was being strangled. Perhaps it was something to do with that person in the background beating the dead horse. He clearly didn't put enough effort in, in the right way, where it was needed.

A stab of scarlet - Jokerman

2011-08-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

When green lords it over the garden, the summer flowers are gone, the autumn yet to come, then is the time to call a tried and tested garden motif into service. Add a little bright scarlet.

When the gardening world is full of misty endless driftiness and many-plumed loveliness, this may seem a pedestrian solution. But many of us, struggling through in poor light, enjoy a little heart-lifting in our smaller townier gardens. Scarlet will gain its fullest value from the green around it and will not overwhelm or cheapen in this mode. Even a single rose or a couple of day lilies will do it. I think these below are hemerocallis Pirate.

Scarlet geraniums are always good, and easy to buy flowering away throughout the summer and into the autumn. The despised begonia is reliable in pots despite lack of regular care and will put on a reasonable show in shade. Pop the pot into your under-nourished shaded garden, where ground cover never fully knits and privet rules. Suddenly the whole place smartens up and there is evidence of a care for appearances which more or less defines the space as a "garden". A sweep round, a quick cut back of any overhanging branches, you're done till October.

Here's another example of a red minimalist signifier. No doubt that this is a garden. Equally no doubt that the effort required has been reduced to a manageable sufficiency. It's from Fota in Ireland. Of course, endless plumes might have been nicer, but we're taking a breath here.

I'm not really one for the "hot garden" concept. Not keen on being too hot and I find there is a tendency to overdo it. The removal of all strictures on hard yellows, oranges and reds can lead to a slight loss of control. Too many flowers of these colours crowded together under a slippery grey English sky can cancel each other out. Not sure this photo illustrates my point well - it's rather a successful example of the breed, perhaps because there is a softness about the colour selections. It's from Wollerton Hall Garden.

I have however found myself turning away quickly from such borders, unable to find much interest or enthusiasm. My plate is far too full. But a tall flimsy grass or a thinly foliaged tree would help, casting interesting shadows and making the shapes less stolid. Ah, you point out, but with the tree, things wouldn't flower so well, Quite right. We'd be back to where we started.

Here's an example of hitting hard with the red. It's from the Valley Gardens in Harrogate. Tough but clear. I like the way the whole thing is graphic, with no concessions. We have some sort of regime here.

I know people are getting a little bit fed up with the unavoidable crocosmia Lucifer. I still like it, but it's best not to try and put too much with it. Backlighting always helps.

Finally, in this round-up of redness, I have been impressed with the performance of the rose La Sevillana, even in part shade. It is a tall floribunda, not heavily petalled but shapely, pure scarlet, scentless, repeat-flowering and healthy. It socks you in the eye from a dark spot but there is a grace about its gait and a sparkle to its colour. It's leaves are an attractive bright green and the whole plant is unpretentious and completely lacking in blowsiness. In this photograph it's suffering slightly from recent rain. (I do not pretend my photos are good, you know. I just hope they convey something to your kindly imagination). The flowers are also less crimson, more orangey.

What will Mr D have to offer this theme of signifying something with red? Let's listen to Jokerman, in the Infidels version, our minds overwhelmed by the complex images that pile in, so suggestive and atmospheric but never quite hanging together. Wait and you may find something you can clutch onto, suddenly you're lying in a field, a small dog is licking your face.  You're in a churning turbulent world, facing weapons and badness, and you move on, move on to what? A baby dressed in scarlet!  I find this unexpected vision jumps out from the song, not to make sense of it but, like these flowers against the green, creating a force that pulls everything towards it.

That baby (a just-born prince by the way) is backed not by green, but by those slippery grey skies.   The red looks darker against them, more regal somehow. The colour tells you something important about the baby, if not the song. What else would a baby joker wear? We're not talking about what used to be called a Babygro here. These are robes.

So there's our image and our connection. It is not a satisfactory summary of Jokerman, which is a prism of doubt and paradox. The levels of meaning multiply once you've found a way into the song.  Michael Gray will explain it beautifully and convincingly to you in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.  He tells us about the superhero saint/sinner but I don't think he mentions the baby. Enjoy the lovely lengthy "Wo oh ooh oh oh oh oh!" with which Dylan punctuates the chorus - a mixture of a warning, a plea and a call to attention; another sort of red flag.

Timing - Born In Time

2011-08-24T01:32:00.000-07:00

Drying yellow leaves are fluttering down in the gardens here in south east Kent. The spring drought dried the soil out deep deep down and there has been little replenishment. Recent rains have not come our way. My heart sinks into my boots. Few things are as distressing to me as a lengthy waterless period. I know people go through this all over the world, that they have to watch their crops and animals shrivel and that nothing we British gardeners have to bear in the form of drought can be comparable. But even this much is a premonition of death. I find it hard to settle; projecting into the future doesn't feel possible while we're waiting for rain.

In a wetter year, there is a heavy darkness about trees in August. In this one, especially on this heavy soil, there is a tinge of yellow and a sad droopiness overlaying all. The leaves shrivel on the stem, roots lose their way in the cracking soil. Early rank unthrifty growth, made on the badly drained soil even as the drought bit in April, quickly turns pallid and flimsy. It was the unnatural earliness of that dry period which has left its legacy, way into the later part of the year and despite rainfall in June.

A thick cuticle is a reasonable protection and I do love a small glittery leaf. Even now, I can lope quietly round my garden, resting my eyes on the unperturbed greenery of myrtle, pittosporum Oliver Twist, sarcococca and vinca minor (pictured).

Even the small euonymus microphylla gives me pleasure.

That extraordinary wiry self-clinging personality, muehlenbackia complexa, gives a good account of itself under these conditions, just be ready with the shears in case it actually comes after you.

Below is a small selection of this type of leaf. I've been charmed by these plants and the jaunty stance of each individualised leaf so often. To me they don't have the plastic look of the larger-leaved, brighter green broad-leaved evergreens, they're cheerful in shade because of the glitter and humble in sun because of the darkness. They radiate a quiet energy. Many people find this affection hard to understand but Penelope Hobhouse always championed these plants and her garden at The Coach House was an absolute festival of the interesting evergreen shrub. Closed now unfortunately, and I'm not sure if she ever wrote a real testament to her own taste but On Gardening and Natural Planting are still excellent reads.

Bob Dylan song of the day is Born in Time. Some people think it a bit of a throwaway pop song. It may be, it's certainly one of the few Dylan songs you might conceivably break into a dance to. My musings about early drought link to what I hear in the song, which seems to be about time-bound conjunctions that fail as time moves on. Naturally Dylan appears to be mourning a scheming beauty, for whom, once, the time was right, but that is true of gardening too. We schemed for beauty didn't we? And it's all gone wrong, leaving us with just the glittering leaves that were armed against the depredations of drought. By now, no-one feels much like endless water-carrying and hosing. We'll just wait till it comes right again.

But there's another connection. Born in Time is set against record-breaking heat, shaking streets and the rising curve where the ways of nature will test every nerve. Exactly! Don't get me started on climate change, but isn't he right there, warning us and reminding us, his voice rising immediately after, not on the rising curve (because it's a curve you see, and he wouldn't want to be too obvious), and the whole song kind of lifting you along on a wave of time. That's what I need, to be lifted on, to the point when it rains.

Judicious cutting - Not Dark Yet

2011-08-22T04:56:00.000-07:00

Today I have spent some time letting light in to a small dark garden, at the small dark end of town, on this strangely dark August day. You may think I’m going to talk about it not being dark yet, but getting there. All I can say is, not yet, not yet.

So, we're letting in the light. A large mahonia, probably one of those tall hybrids in the media group, and a viburnum bodnantense stretch up in front of a wall of conifers. To the side (not pictured) a purple cotinus waves and bends its arms. It’s inevitable, at this time of the year, that some shrubs or trees which seemed to be an acceptable size and shape, and may indeed even have been pruned at their correct time (immediately after the flowers were over, in so many cases) suddenly seem quite irredeemably overgrown and in need of immediate drastic attention. This is the time when “gardeners” who offer “tidy-ups” will come in and wave their hedge cutters about, creating a multiple blob effect. Tidy yes, but letting in another sort of dark, the death of grace and natural beauty.

So how to deal with these three shrubs, if I am to avoid my own harsh judgement? The viburnum is an interesting case, it grows straight up, to about 9 foot, if it’s happy and strong, with its roots well down. But it flowers best on older branched wood that has slowed down a bit. You often find a mixture of both things going on, but if you remove all the old branched growth at this time of the year, there’ll be nothing ripe enough to flower well AND you’ll have stripped all the slightly japanesey character from your subject, leaving it looking like a bunch of tall leafy sticks. If you take the opposite path and remove all the healthy straight shoots, you’ll be unable to renew the shrub and will be condemned to a cycle of growing and removing ever stronger, more desperate shoots , which will look ever more out of place against the increasingly aged branchy originals. In any case, it should go completely against the grain of the sensitive gardener, to take out new growth and you may find your hands trembling as you do it.

So the way forward has to be, as you will have guessed, a bit of both. It’s not very satisfactory, but I sacrificed the oldest, most japanesey looking growth, and the strongest, most erect and forceful. I either took those down to the base if they were badly-placed or back to an outward-facing shoot, hoping for growth which will slow down, ramify and flower! flower! flower! We’re left with a shrub that’s a bit smaller but less confused looking. May that be true of us all, in this time of obesity and bewilderment.

Now for the mahonia, a much easier case. Have courage here, it’s a bit late to prune growth you hope will flower in the very early spring, or even autumn, but to be honest, I have rarely seen a mahonia look the worse for pruning, even when flowering time comes. Inexplicable. They just seem to like it. So simply cut at the height where you would like the next set of fans of leaves to emerge. It’s usually possible to hide the cut ends amongst the existing foliage. If you want growth from low down, cut right to the base. In general mahonias make all their leafy and flowering growth at about the same level on their ever-lengthening stems. It’s up to you to distribute it up and down the structure, by varied cutting.

People get strong feelings about mahonias, I take them with equanimity and a measured appreciation for what they have to offer (almost tropical looking leaves, drama, architecture, flowers in winter, shade-loving etc). I do feel a stir of affection for mahonia japonica however, with the lemony flowers that look like tiny daffodils and smell of lily of the valley. But less drama and VERY dark leaves.

Finally the cotinus. This is a shrub that would be better left unpruned really, it seems to like to develop old wood and then takes on a naturally shapely quality and, in some clones, flowers like billy-oh. Nothing to be done here but take out those branches of purple that were excluding the greatest amount of sky, and take them back as far as possible, to a joint. In my own garden, I stool a cotinus (in the form Grace, which is less purple, more mixed), taking it to a stump every autumn. I don’t want it looking like a great beached summer pudding. This way, it grows very wavy stems of big leaves, never flowers and gets persecuted by thrips. You win some, you lose some.

Would I plant any of these shrubs now? They're redolent of 80s and 90s planting and you're unlikely to find them in the Garden Design Journal gdj@publishing.co.uk amongst the wildflower meadows, the land forms and the Cor-ten. But I would plant the viburnum for the winter flowers - they screen by attracting and halting the gaze in the winter and their tall leafiness in summer can effectively background your massed grasses if you can get the sun to shine from the right direction. The mahonia looks worst when mixed with complicated colourful borders, it needs simplicity and other greens.

So back to our theme of judiciously cutting, in the near dark. When I first heard Dylan’s beautiful song, Not Dark Yet, (No. 23, Time Out Of Mind version), I laughed aloud. He speaks like a tactful Grim Reaper. Then the layers began to unfold. I don’t respond to each word and line, I listen to what I’m picking up and look carefully at it – it can change every time and with different versions. But you probably know all that.

Now what I hear is the failure of verve and excitement which attends aging. We're enclosed in a hot dark place where there's not even room to be. But I also hear the value of whats left in there with us. I focus on that, whether it’s a viburnum promising pink flowers in winter, a mahonia looking less jagged and threatening, or my own drooping flesh, my lined face and frequent sense of absolute pointlessness. But Dylan reminds me, as he always does, that the truth may not comfort, but it does sustain. Winter will come. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. Brandishing my loppers I keep on doing what I must, as best I can.

Rocks in the road - To Ramona

2011-08-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

AUGUST. The time when, as a gardener, the thrill has gone, everything lacks sparkle somehow. My energy is low, little excites me out there.

But then, I drift into a little light weeding or tidying and somehow just seeing the squalid dead stems of campanula persicifolia cut down and the nice leafy rosettes revealed - that's enough to start me off on removing the dead stems of hemerocallis and picking out the browned leaves. A bit of this and I can almost face pruning the lonicera hedge and picking a bit more gubbins out of the pool. I weed the gravel a bit - it's just lying on some Type 1 I battered down with a mallet 15 years ago. I've never topped it up, use a little glyphosate on the weeds that break off leaving their roots in there, but in general I would not say it's too bad a surface.

Sometimes you have to make your own path easy, gently gently creeping up on what needs to be done.

Over the weekend, I removed two large santolina Edward Bowles from the side garden, where they were called "santolina boulders" (should have been Bowleders) and supposed to give a repeated motif, leading you through the garden and giving solidity and shape without formality. Plus there are no real boulders here and sometimes all you want is a few rocks. There is an exquisite French garden (Nicole Vesian was the maker) where this idea is taken to the absolute edge of beauty - proper rocks included. My santolina are much less tenderly cared for than the tight shapely roundels of that garden, and they are usually allowed to flower at some point every year. They have pretty pale yellow flowers and grey rather than silver foliage. But they do get a bit big. So two have been removed, with some trepidation in case their absence just makes the whole thing look a bit more uncertain. I'm trying for scale, volumes and spaces in harmony and all that kind of thing. But of course I'm aware the whole idea is completely odd at the north-facing front of a late Victorian double-fronted house.

So there we go, a sort of idea I nicked and gestated a long time ago, one I've never completely fallen for but that I putter along with relatively happily, it being an area we just walk through or hang about in to see what's going on in the pond. I would add that this part of the garden was heavy yellowish clay ( the house was a brickmakers). I have not amended it, just covered it up with gravel and grown things that have been prepared to put up with it, like the santolina, the lonicera hedge, skimmias, the phlomis and the bergenias.

Ideas and fashions in gardening are a kind of genteel republic. We can all visit gardens and thumb through books, looking for a convincing solution that excites and charms us. It's fun and it's not against the law, except in very arcane circumstances. Later on, it's equally easy to dismiss and reject the proliferation of copycats when a particular idea dies, even if we are part of that army of followers. I'm balancing there, longing to defend myself and carry on borrowing and adapting, but worrying that it will all go horribly wrong and look like yesterday's takeaway.

Turn with me to To Ramona, in the Another Side of Bob Dylan version, for a little light bracing. So it seems you can get away with "cracked country lips" and still be loveable in your imperfections. What you cannot do is be untrue to yourself. Only we gardeners can decide if it's truer to ourselves to follow and imitate the things we have thought admirable, or whether we must throw ourselves onto the stony landscape of unrelenting originality. Poor Ramona, she had to go back to the south, neurotically longing to be like others. But what a beautiful tune, how tender he sounds as he condemns, knowing that they are both struggling with the wounds of youth. They are very real characters, they could almost step out of the song.

We all play a slightly double game when we believe that we don't care what others think of us, I would love people to admire some of my gardening ideas as original but in the end it's not the most important thing. Dylan of course knows that to be true, though he won't let Ramona off the hook; it's how you use and combine the elements and influences that matters. I'm not one of those who criticises him for plagiarism, for me he always brings new light and remains himself, whatever he turns to.

If you peer more closely into the photograph, you will see a shaped hedge on the right hand, protruding out behind the pond. This is lonicera nitida, trimmed against the usual close-board fencing, and it hides it neatly and effectively. Not an idea I found anywhere else, but it has turned out to be both successful and efficient, despite the frequent trimmings required. Serendipity? Not at all. The tiny leaves work well with the santolina, the fence was quickly covered and the pond defined - all things I wanted to happen. Follow others and you sometimes find something different on the road.