Another gang was laying a new surface on a section of towpath. One man was driving a heavy digger, another a dump-truck.Huge bonfires were burning rubbish from the flood plain and, up in the ruins of the hospital, yet another little team was chipping the old black mortar off salvaged bricks.Mike Palmer, burly national chairman of the WRG, turned out on a raw November day in hard hat, red T-shirt and shorts, with a black bin-liner split at the end and pulled down over his torso like a tabard. “Canal restoration used to be all tree-bashing or shovelling mud by hand,” he explained. “Now the work we’re being asked to do is more and more specialised. We’re using machines all the time, and for that reason we do a great deal of training on the job.”Partly because most of the materials are free, but mainly because the work is being done by volunteers, the project at Over, which would have cost at least pounds 250,000 if carried out by contractors, should be completed for less than a tenth of that amount.

This, of course, is only a small part of the restoration; but the H&G Trust has already won a major victory in securing the support of local authorities, who believe that if the canal can be reopened it will prove a strong tourist attraction and bring much holiday business into the areas. The result is that if anyone now tries to put up a building along the line of the waterway, the application will be vetoed.Restoration projects of this kind have recently become fashionable. “Canals are starting to get major funding,” said Mike Palmer, “but only because volunteers have been hacking away at little showpiece schemes for the past 35 years. Here at Over, if H&G hadn’t gone for it – if it hadn’t been for us idiots wading around in the clay – the site would have been covered with houses, and the canal would have disappeared for ever.”Further information from Nigel Bailey on: 01452 533835 or website: http:// www.h- g-canal .uk. THERE WAS a boy at my husband’s school called “Greasy”. I know nothing about him except what I have divined from his name, and the fact that he once wrote these deathless words in a biology essay: “Bones are to stop your arms floping into a blob.” As the leaves finally come off the trees, and the herbaceous perennials in borders are cut back, many gardens are also in danger of floping into blobs They need some bones to hold them up.

Good bone structure is as important in a garden as it is in a middle- aged woman, when the flesh first begins to sag. It can be made with what we call “hard landscaping” (paving, walling, steps, trellis, fencing and arches), but also with most evergreens, especially the tight-knit clippable ones, and those relatively few deciduous shrubs and trees with dense branches and sturdy stems.
Most deciduous plants, unfortunately, lose their shape when they lose their leaves and are inclined to degenerate into airy twigginess or blobby ground-covering And this dormant period lasts almost half the year. They are the flesh that sags, and we need now to think how to plan our gardens so that the bone structure can show through in winter.I am afraid it means some appreciation of the virtues of geometry, another subject that may have stumped “Greasy”. Garden-planning is partly about managing space, and that you do by defining it with, or carving it up into, geometric shapes.

Straight lines, especially squares and rectangles, best create a “formal” effect but, for a “semi-formal” atmosphere, curves, parabolas and circles can be employed as well, or instead Both horizontal and vertical planes need to be considered. Vertical hard structures or strong plantings will give you light and shadow in winter sunshine, and their visual impact will be enhanced when their shapes are dusted with frost or light snow. The pattern remains throughout the winter; in fact the absence of summer flowers and other clutter brings them more starkly into relief; except when there is heavy snowfall, of course, in which case the pristine beauty of a white blanket more than compensates for any temporary loss of definition.”Hard landscaping” is plainly important for creating the garden’s skeleton, but so, too, are plants, especially hedging, which is capable of making almost any shape you like. This is particularly true if you use small plants, such as dwarf box – Buxus sempervirens `Suffruticosa’, or Buxus microphylla – which have tiny leaves and can be planted very close together. It is no accident that dwarf box has, for centuries, been the preferred plant for parterres and knot gardens, in which intricate shapes were realised on the ground, for the benefit of people looking down on them from above.For a taller hedge, yew is desirable – except where the soil is badly drained, or for a boundary hedge next to a field where there are livestock, for all parts of this plant, with the exception of the red “arils” around the seeds, are poisonous. Not that he gives a damn.So many of the audience – estate agents, junior estate agents, their parents but not their kids – are in their coats that it looks like the next winter catalogue in here.