Autumn light, Virginia

If New York failed to cast its spell, I fell in love with rural Virginia at first sight. Finally, I have discovered the England that English people like to tell you that England is like. No crisp packets and scrubby trees and burned out Ford Escorts, but deep gorgeous forests lit by evening light, cut by deep rivers. And roads of course: this is the USA. A long day's work was punctuated by two long drives, one at dawn with a sky red from horizon to horizon, one at dusk with butter slavered on every tree and every glimpse of meadow as smooth and green as a pool table. I drove through the Pocahontas State Park and stopped for a crisp walk, bathing in that light. When no one was around I put my arms around a tree and stayed there for a long while, finally interrupted by a polite cough. An old couple with a small, waggy dog, stared at me strangely. I coughed myself and carried on my way. Rural Virginia is punctuated by real history. Old houses. Failed settlements.  Graveyards.

Travelling without a GPS to save money, I found myself lost on an increasingly rural road. There I found a Civil War cemetary with six thousand graves in it. They didn't invent mechanised warfare in these parts, but they learned its grammar: machine guns, trenches. Big cemetaries. It was noticeable, however, that there were no native American cemetaries. Even Pocahontas is buried somewhere in England, in a lost grave, under a dual-carriageway. As the man said, the last thing a human being needs is a sense of proportion.

Perhaps these beautiful, warm trees are their graveyard, tall and stately, dignified and silent. 

New York. State of Mind.

When I was 17 and Freddie Laker was in his pomp, I had a plan to use my Saturday-job money to take a £99 trip to New York City. I would fly out, walk the city for a day, then come straight home. No hotel. A few bucks for the subway and hot dogs. People told me that I was mad. New York in a day? Impossible. You'll die. Now New York in a day is a business-macho tick-box. Over the years I went off other people and my dream morphed into the same desire to visit remoter, lonely places. But now I'm fond of peoplewatching from some high castle or another. I'm at peace in a crowd. Two-score years later when it no longer matters to me, I finally made it. Did I feel that cartwheeling joy that I had anticipated as a boy? Not even a flicker. I felt precisely neutral about that initial step into the Big Bad City. What I wasn't prepared for was the rising flood of cultural references. Every corner turned brought a new song to mind, or a story of one kind or another and pretty much every one a warning of some kind. The city brought an unexpected, different kind of romance. Where Vegas is the sparkling domain of dark and hypnotic enchanters, New York is Mordor-on-Sea.

We passed Hackensack on the freeway to the New Jersey Turnpike. Newark Penn station for the Ironbound,  Suzanne Vega to Tony Soprano in a single tannoy call. We were a group of unlikely gangsters, followed by a state trooper for a spell. Don't look in the trunk, I thought, you'll find a Tesco bag-for-life full of unwashed boxers. After that preamble, I had a dead day between two work weeks and that's always dangerous. I took the shuttle from my jaded airport hotel to the air-train and then to the proper train to Penn Station. In that underground warren I got lost and intimidated in a world that might have inspired The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, with references all around her, from Times Square to Broadway. I finally emerging from what turned out to be the bowels of Madison Square Garden. That brought the memory of among other things, Jimmy Page performing wicked acts with a violin bow.  Ali and Frazier slugged it out somewhere overhead. Marilyn Munroe sang happy birthday to JFK, a real Fairytale of New York. John Lennon's last major performance was here. Biblical trumpets sound and great towers and icons fall.

People in coffee shops were polite through gritted teeth. I think they wanted to be rude, but maybe they thought it would make me a happy tourist, so they weren't. There were derelicts with a curious state of mind dodging the traffic.  There were mean-eyed cops in doughnut shops. I didn't get as far as Tom's Diner, or a walk on Madison Avenue, and I couldn't find a skateboard punk rocker  but not for want of trying. I was surprised to find that the sad and lovely Kettering is a reference to an institution in New York and not the town on the A14. There was no buzz. Instead there was a turbine of movement accompanied by a fierce bassline which it will take me a while to process. I take pleasure in being alone in a crowd and in that one regard, New York City was an unfettered joy. Unlike Vegas, I may have to come back. There is some siren thing here, a hint of the Angel.

All of this made me realise that if I had landed in New York in my teens, intending to spend a day and fly straight home, I am quite sure I woild have lost myself and never gone home at all. In the end, at eighteen, I spent my Saturday job money on a fellwalking trip where I discovered heaven in the mountains and valleys of the Western Lakes. I would say that I never looked back, which is not true, but over the years that teenage dream has turned into a very different, lifelong yearning for a true spiritual home where, one day, I intend to fall asleep under a high crag and never wake up. Which would, it has to be said, be a more satisfying end than a desolate backstreet in New York City.

The Tree Gods are angry with me

We have excuses. There is so much work to do that we never finish it all. The scourge of the fens laid me low for months. But in truth there is no excuse for killing a tree. Not for me. On the other hand I am no genius tree doctor. It is true that I have nursed specimens back from the dead, but we also have casualties. A Witch Hazel that we planted dropped dead in a week. There is a spot in the Old Orchard which has so far killed a Mullberry and an ornamental crab apple. We can't work out why. 

Each year we pot up a dozen tiny self-set trees which go to repair the hedges. But we missed a couple of Silver Birches in the front yard. When we came to move them, one was three feet high. The other five. Our only chance to dig them out was early summer. We should have done it sooner and it was a massacre. Both seem to have died in their new spots. Time will tell. Meanwhile the Tree Gods are angry and will have their revenge on me. 

Ghost

A self-set Buddlea has grown in front of the garage door. We've tried everything to move it. We dug out all the roots that we could find. When that didn't work - with the alternative being to dig under the floor of the garage - we hammered copper nails into its roots. Still, it refused to die.

Or did it.

Last year it was the colour of a common Buddlea. This year it is the purest white. I think it's a ghost.

This year in the yard.

My first view of what would be the Night Planted Orchard was not auspicious. The front yard was an expanse of dirty, crunchy gravel designed to park multiple vans and protect them from marauding brigands. There was not a living thing in sight. Within a few weeks the decrepit fences had mysteriously fallen down, all on one windless day.

From its position, we guessed that the yard would get little light. We decided to plant a Tombstone Rose to soften the Stalinesque front and hide the miss-matched brickwork in the extension. As we repaired the fences we removed several large pieces of concrete which had to lie where they wished. We planted a few herbs around them, scattered some seeds and left it to its own devices while we coaxed the Night Planted Orchard from its long sleep. We were wrong about the light, and under the gravel is fen soil, rich and unused. Water drains through the yard and because there is a steep drop on one side, it doesn't hang around, but it's not completely arid either. The weeds that sprang up in the first year should have been a clue.

The Tombstone Rose established itself in a season. Perhaps its closeness to the lair of the Water Spirit has something to do with that and now it smothers one wall with relish. I have to prune it three times a year to keep it going onwards and upwards. I could say that the rest of the planting was slow to establish. But that would be stealing credit. The yard self-seeds like nothing on Earth. Indeed, sometimes I think tiny plants rain down from heaven when we're not looking and establish themselves overnight.

Over the years this self-perpetuating garden has grown like a child that you meet once a year. One year it's tiny and inconspicous. The next it's feisty and running around. The next time you see him he's filled out and is a rugby player. So it is this year in the yard. Amongst the ferment, a couple of pretty little silver birches set themselves in altogether inappropriate locations. We decided to move them to somewhere more fitting. So it was that I found myself sitting among the growing gravel garden, trying to persuade roots out from under the garage. The Hunter came snuffling about and was surprised to find me hiding among the plants.

Hiding.

I realised with a certain amount of shock that the plants had spread enough in height and width to provide me with a hiding place. I am not a small person. What's more it had integrated itself into some coherent whole. It had 'clicked'. I was surrounded with lavender, rosemary and a stray buddlea. Thyme crunched under my hands. Poppy heads caught my eye as I sat and the tall spires of Salvia spread all around me. In the heat the scent was strong and muscular, a genuine herbal immersion. California Poppies line one wall. Welsh poppies brought from our old garden flourish. A couple of nigella have popped up by the water butt. Grannies bonnets nod everywhere. The banksia is now in full flower, a solid wall of tiny cream blooms. it occurs to me that we have never had a garden where plants self-set so abundantly and in series, year after year. My usual experience is that one year's planting brings a second, smaller flush the next. Here each year doubles the number of plants. The self-setters don't creep, they detonate.  Lady Snoutingdingle resolutely pulls up all the forget-me-nots when they finish every spring and every year they come back. Even the winter flowering jasmine, a plant I see in my mind's eye as a tangle of ugly bald branches for most of the year, looks lush and comfy against every wall. We have two pots of sedums and even they have self-set in the gravel, spreading like a lime-green foam. I laid back among the herbs and let the Hunter snuffle sloppily at my chin. Content. 

When I returned to the house, Lady Snoutingdingle sniffed my herb-washed jacket and said that she was inspired to make pizza. The Hunter wagged his approval.