A winter walk

The day is full of understated greys and monotones; clouds in shape and hue like bonfire smoke, woods shaded charcoal-black and the land full of muted browns. The way down to the border is through a small woodland. To walk through woods in February is to walk on the weave of a threadbare carpet, with its threads of ivy, bramble and wild clematis loosely covering the floor. My feet slide on the sticky, slippery mud as I descend to the winter garden’s delight. And there through the opening is China. A bustling market place of spice and noisy colour, crowding into an Italian winter’s garden.

Low light, high scent
The winter walk begins in Pig’s Wallow, so named from the not so distant times when the wild boar used the bottom of the bank as their summer bathing pool. I walk up the gentle slope, more aisle than path, passing the pillars of Viburnum bodnantense on either side, their pink capital clusters blowing streams of prodigious scents - honey on buttered bread, clove and allspice - into the tunnelled air. Behind them the walls of ludicrously loud coloured stems of various dogwoods, farinaceous clouds of Viburnum tinus, and overstated but bewitching camelias. I feel like the tourist in a foreign land, rather than the gardener of my own blessed plot. I stop to stare, to wonder and to dream, just as I have done in those exotic lands in travels past. The path turns down towards winter’s colour of choice, cascading banks of yellow; ‘Chinese’ jasmine primulinum and nudiflorum, Euonymus fortunei, (so named after Robert Fortune the plant hunter who brought so many of these plants to Europe from Asia) and the Euryops pectinatus from the Western Cape. Mahonia japonica’s wear their delectably spiced and golden necklaces upon their prickly shoulders and their cousins, Mahonia x media, a bastard if you like of the royal line, their coronets once brilliant gold, now oxidised green, their short and early reign over. Set at the feet of the intoxicating Winter sweet, are the early flowering narcissus, the page boys of the winter procession.

The real delight is down on one’s knees
The massed band effects of this winter border are bold and brassy. However for all its uplifting brashness, the real joy is a little further along the muddy path where the ground has been previously pocked by my knees, where I kneel as I always kneel in the cold, grey earth regardless of the calms or rages about me. Here are the snowdrops, with their myriad styles of green moustache on mandarin white faces and the flecked hellebores and the yellowed yolk cups of winter aconites. Ceilinged above them tongues of honeysuckle, lusciously lemon scented, under whose shelter these essays in fragility live.

A winter feasting
This is a mid winter party with lights and fires and music. This winter border is more vivid than anything summer affords; more scented than a perfumery, more glossy than paint, more loud than a rave. However like the traveller, I have to leave. Other places call me and the way is homeward bound. A roaring fire in the grate, a cup of tea and cake. The daylight is dimming and I turn to walk once more on the threadbare floor of winter woods, leaving the joys of the Orient behind me. Back in my own land, the wind once more begins to rattle the sky with snow.

Some of the key players in the Winter Border

• Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’- derived from V.ferreri, discovered and brought back from China by Reginald Ferrer.

• Mahonia japonica - unlikely to be from Japan, possibly originally from Taiwan known under the name Mahonia tikushiensis.

• Mahonia media - ‘Charity’ - hybrid shrub - parents M. oiwakensis, native to China.

• Cornus sanguinea Midwinter fire -developed from Eurasia.

• Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’ - Siberia and N China.

• Cornus sericea ‘Flaviramea’ - north America.

• Lonicera fragrantissima - Chinese honeysuckle - native to china brought back by Robert Fortune in 1845.

• Chimonathus praecox - ‘Winter sweet’, endemic to China.

• Saracococca confusa- ‘Christmas box’ , native to western China.

• Camelia Sasanqua - The Rose of winter - native to Asia.