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'Planet Earth'.

                With the British voting to leave the European Union this year and the United States imploding politically, it's clearer today more than ever how different - how divided - we are as a race. There's been so much mistrust and so much anger. As this stormy year reaches its end, however, an oasis of common ground has emerged. Ten years ago, naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough brought to the nation his most astounding television series: 'Planet Earth'. It revealed scenes of wild species and their behaviour from the highest peaks and the deepest jungles which most humans had never seen before. Now in 2016 'Planet Earth II' has come. Ten years of further developments in science and technology have meant even more breathtakingly special stories from nature recorded on camera. The once-familiar thud of my awestruck jaw hitting the floor on a Sunday evening has returned. Best of all, from what I've heard from social networks and conversations it seems that regardless of our societal and political divisions, its a thud echoed across millions of homes worldwide.

                There have been three episodes of this series so far, and each has completely inspired me. The scenes of jungle fauna yesterday were too stunning for me not to place them here, on the blog, for me to return to and continue gazing.

"Cloud-breathing"

“They cover less than six percent of the earth’s surface but they are home to half of all the plants and animals on land. Jungles have just the right amount of light, water, and nutrients, and they have had - every day - for millennia.”

“Everything in the jungle has to compete for space. Only 2% of the sun’s rays reach the ground, so even the plants must battle for the light they need if they’re to grow. 300 years ago, this Hura tree began its race for light. And every day since, it has absorbed the light and water it needed to grow into a giant. It has succeeded in doing what every tree must do to survive… rise above the gloom of the jungle floor. And what is more, its success has given life to others. Its branches now carry a thousand other plants. These particular ferns, figs, and orchids live only on the branches of other trees. A thousand plants growing on one single tree. Throughout the forest, this story is repeated endless times. As a consequence jungles are home to more species of plants than anywhere else on earth, and they in turn support a wealth of animals.”

“In some jungles it rains so much that for part of the year the trees are almost totally submerged - the forest floor is thirty feet below the water’s surface. This is a mysterious world, a place few people have explored. We have much to discover about the animals for which this is home… including some you might never to expect to find amongst trees. Here, a thousand miles from the sea, are dolphins.”

“For the coming of the night, a new cast of jungle characters takes to the stage. Fungi unlike plants thrive in the darkness of the forest floor. They’re hidden until they begin to develop the incredible structures with which they reproduce. Each releases millions of microscopic spores which drift invisibly away. Many have fruiting bodies which reach upwards to catch any feeble current there might be in the clammy air. But some become luminous. Why fungi light up has remained a mystery - until now. Scientists studying the brightest fungi in the world think they might have an answer. Like a beacon the light attracts insects from far and wide… [which - like bees and pollen - the fungi use to spread their spores.]”

The Dell in autumn, Bodnant Garden.

                Anyone who has set foot into Bodnant Garden knows that it’s a very special place. You don’t need to have a blog on horticulture or fluency in botanical Latin, anyone I’ve met who has been there knows it. It is spectacularly beautiful, and I shall always count myself blessed for having had the chance to pop along as a volunteer gardener three years ago, when I first got started. Bodnant was the first experience I wrote about on the blog, in December 2013, and I was there every week until the RHS invited me down to Essex the following summer. I hold the garden in the highest esteem, and I have been there through winter, spring, and summer - yet for all the drifts of daffodils I have seen, the azaleas in flower and the laburnum arch dripping with yellow, it is only now that I have been there in autumn.

                There is no need for me to point out how lovely it looked - it is the most romantic garden in the United Kingdom, with a further brush of autumnal colour of course it looked wonderful (and the mild weather has even kept Bodnant’s roses lingering on). To add to the enjoyment, I wasn’t alone but with my mother, sister Charis, and Michelle who was visiting Bodnant for the first time. The only slightly regret I had was in bringing a cameraphone with no battery - the garden’s loveliness would go appreciated, absolutely, but not photographed. However, perhaps noticing that for once I wasn’t annoyingly dashing about or getting myself lost for the sake of a few photos, Charis kindly offered me her cameraphone instead. Looking back at the photos now (at the subject, rather than my skills as a photographer!), I'm so glad she did. Hopefully I can use them to persuade my friends to visit the garden!

Much of Bodnant's fame rests in its evergreens - the mighty redwoods and rhododendrons - but it's wonderful to see hitherto green-camouflaged acers deepening into reds and purples.

Although some sort of enchantment appears to lie on this land,
protecting the leaves from falling, cyclamen are a true sign of the
shortening days. In the image below, it is barely possible to see
white-flowered cyclamen at the base of the Sequoiadendron giganteum -
a hint of its vast scale.

Michelle pondering to herself whether Bodnant would host a wedding reception!

Pinus strobus ‘Minima’ aglow in the warmth of a setting sun.

The greens, yellows and pinks upon a Deutzia scabra ‘Candidissima’ slowly recalling that it is decidious after all.

One of Bodnant’s countless pretty streams, babbling toward the Pin Mill.

The Mourne Mountains.

What a day the Lord God Almighty must have been having when he put together the Mourne Mountains! We had six hours here of hard walking, in high winds and then under a setting sun. Having finally climbed Doan, it felt as if we were sat in the heavens, with breathtaking views before us whichever way we turned our eyes. Epic. Truly, biblically epic.

Castlewellan Forest Park.

                I'm certainly no aficionado when it comes to art. As a painter my mother has always taken the family along to galleries, and as a result I could name some names - da Vinci, Caravaggio, Monet and Manet, Picasso and Pollock - but whether I would be able to express much of an opinion on any of them is a different question! However, there is one artist I really have come to admire: Bob Ross. He's no longer with us, but through the 80s and 90s he had a great old show called The Joy of Painting. With his tips and tricks he taught his audience to paint some of nature's most beautiful scenery - mountains, waters, and famously "happy little trees". His ethos was to make things as simple and as encouraging for the public as possible, and while painting he would often be rambling about his Christian faith or his love of wildlife, even bringing rescued animals and birds from home into the studio. In reality that was the charm of the programme, more so even than the finished work. It may not have produced a generation of Botticellis, but it left thousands of people interested and willing to try - and if I could replicate that in some small way with horticulture I'd be a very happy man. All the same, his finished works were lovely to look at: the glades of Florida, Alaskan pine forests, morning mist rising from bubbling streams.

                It was a surreal but very enjoyable feeling then, to find Michelle and I wandering into one of his paintings about a week ago. Castlewellan Forest Park is a favourite of Michelle's family, a really mixed forest with so many different species of tree encircling a great lake at its centre. Each colour from the rich autumnal palette there loomed out at us - softer shades from a distance, through the day's fog, and brightening as we walked closer. Sounds came echoing from every side of the water, with geese honking and children shouting on their bikes, but the lake's surface lay undisturbed, by evening as still as glass. It really did seem as though we had had our little figures painted into one of his scenes.

Although it's not unusual for 18th century parkland to come with a folly, Castlewellan's Moorish-inspired tower is absolutely unique. With countless little ferns growing between the brickwork, it has been "Irishised" rather nicely, and the gracefully-shaped windows are marvellous for gazing out on to the forest's canopy. We found it on our second lap of the lake, following as many paths as we could and remaining until it was quite dark.

Belfast Botanic Gardens.

Irish novelist Forrest Reid, Apostate (1926):                 "When I was about six or seven I used to be taken out each morning by my nurse, Emma, to the Botanic Gardens, at that time not yet transformed into a public park. There was a large conservatory there, and the wing of the building where the palms and cactus grew had a glass door bordered with red and yellow panes. On chilly October days I was very fond of flattening my nose against one of these coloured windows, and peering out into an exotic world. What I saw then, in spite of the familiar shape and position of each tree and shrub, was not the Botanic Gardens at all, but a tropical landscape, luxuriant and gorgeous. The damp warmth of the greenhouse atmosphere, the moist earthy smell of the ferns and creepers and mosses growing there, helped to deepen the illusion that I was far away in the virgin forest."

Kells Bay House & Gardens.

                Had we come to the Ring of Kerry to gaze upon the Skellig Isles and nothing else, it would have been a worthy trip. However, Michelle had arranged for us to stay at Kells Bay House & Gardens, known as the 'Jewel of the Ring'. Considering the Ring in question, an unending circle of wonder, one could fairly presume such a bold claim might open the walled garden's gates to disappointment. As grey rainclouds gathered, doubts loomed higher.

                In the end, the clouds could have blackened and the evening drawn in swifter, and still these thoughts would have been dispelled by the enchantment of a garden the like of which I have never seen before nor shall likely see again. What an extraordinary place!
                It began by stepping into the Ladies Walled Garden - perhaps so-named because it is the only part of the gardens with such hallmarks of civilisation as stone paving or roofed benches. Its centre point is a broken tree trunk, thick and ancient-looking, adorned with nature's palette of lichen. Surrounded by trees and shrubs, as we were approaching it in autumn it loomed before us out of a rough circle of red, purple and green foliage - a circle met by further pathways leading higher or lower, past walls or toward mossy stairways and out of sight.

                One path lead out to something signposted the 'Primaeval Forest'. This lay outside of the stone walls, and yet if one were observing from a bird's eye view they could see that, in actuality, this meant stepping into a larger, more ancient and organic "walled" garden. Hills completely surround Kells Bay, each with fabulous names like Cooduff or Teermoyle, and combined with a thick forest canopy overhead they ensure the gardens never fall below five degrees centigrade in temperature. It is because of this natural alignment (and perhaps a little Victorian forestation), in such a remote pocket of Ireland, that something astounding has been borne.
As we discovered on our walk, the sign for a 'Primaeval Forest' did not lead to any old mossy corner but to the largest collection of tree ferns on this northern half of the planet. Brought from thousands of miles away and planted in the nineteenth-century by Mr Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett (I've used the words "fabulous names" in this paragraph already - perhaps from now on it worth accepting as an unspoken rule that all Irish names are indeed fabulous), the height, vigour, and sheer numbers of these tender tree ferns left me desperately grasping for a way of communicating to Michelle how horticulturally impressive they were, and of course as I write now it escapes me again. To still exist today, they must have been kept safe from frost for a century. Hundreds of these giants, for a century.

                As I hinted at earlier, part of Kerry's landscape is a result of Victorian forestation - the mass planting of beech, ash, and larch saplings among the preexisting holly and yew. In the present day, these trees are now huge and have produced an understorey of native ferns beneath the canopy, inviting their Antipodean cousins to dwell among them. The greens, golds, and browns of the northern hemisphere blend happily with those of the south, as the tree ferns spread from their initial density into a forest shared with the European trees.

                This forest carries on right down to the sea in one direction, and back up towards the mountains in the other, and the ease with which we were able to quite genuinely lose ourselves in it was remarkable and enjoyable. Perhaps this was due to the endless carpet of beech leaves covering paths - but my suspicion that evening was that beneath the leaves there were no paths to find. Occasionally some roughly hewn steps would come into view, or a short post with an arrow on it, but when they did appear they often seemed to contradict each other. Moreover, the further we walked the narrower the paths became, taking us above and alongside rivers and bogs. One such path had so much water running along its stones, I'm quite sure it had made the transition into a small stream! The sound of running water seen and unseen about our ears made it all the more atmospheric.

A thick old bough falling across a path.

Huge boughs crossed the paths at points, requiring a little athleticism to climb over or under them. Needless to say, this was as far away from the tarmacked wheelchair-friendly layout of the modern public garden as one could imagine. However, were there a visitor unable to scramble or weave along these paths, I wonder if they would even see it changed - for, in its unkempt present state, this is a garden that truly allows you to believe any wild thing might be waiting around the next tree.
It seems that later generations of gardeners have had the same feeling themselves, and now offer a little joke to visitors who feel it too.

                It is an extraordinarily exciting, intimate place, and though I feel deeply inspired by its horticulture and its style, Kells Bay Garden has also immersed me in magic.