I have just been been lecturing in Japan during their rainy season, up in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture on Honshu. Every day starts with an onsen, a communal hot spring bath taken in the nude. Many of the ladies who came to my lecture later in the day had already seen far too much of me, which would never happen in England. While there a typhoon struck, turning my e-ticket for the plane and my Oxford bus ticket to papier mâché, obliterating all the relevant details. The bus driver at Heathrow gave me a very weary look as he unfolded it, even though I explained it had been ruined by a typhoon!

The Nagano Prefecture landscape where I was is rugged and mountainous with Japanese acers, Cornus kousa and azaleas growing along the sides of the road, or by the sides of waterfalls. The traditional Japanese garden emulates this greenery and rock using refined local flora. The majority of Japanese people live in concrete-covered cities, so any patch of green or balcony is planted up. As a result of city life, the Japanese love their plants and their landscape. Whichford Pottery containers (made in Warwickshire – whichfordpottery. com /01608 684416) are widely appreciated in Japan and many a Tokyo balcony has one. However the Barakura Garden, where I lectured, is a recreation of a British rose garden. It has a laburnum arch borrowed from Bodnant in North Wales, rose arches galore and a Lutyens-style pergola with round supports copied from Jekyll and Lutyen’s Hestercombe Garden in Somerset. There is also a white garden reminiscent of Sissinghurst in Kent. If I closed my eyes I could be in England. However there are no box hedges. Buxus sempervirens will not survive the long, cold snowy winters so yew is used instead. Lavender mostly dies every year too, although nepeta survives. Roses thrive, especially ramblers, but they put out enormous amounts of growth due to the warm, rain-soaked climate. Shakespeare’s Musk, or ‘Rambling Rector’, seems to ramble a little further under the hot Japanese sun, spurred on by the rainy season which lasts on average a biblical 40 days. And when it rains, it rains heavily. You don’t need a weather forecast either. If the cicadas (grasshoppers) go silent and stop rubbing their knees together you know it will rain in the next half an hour.

The Barakura Garden is very famous in Japan. It was originally laid out by John Brookes in the 1980s for the Yamada family. Miss Kay Yamada is a national celebrity on Japanese television. Over the years she built up a warm relationship with Peter Beales, the late Norfolk rose grower, and he visited most years until ill health forced him to stop. He named one pink rose after her mother, ‘Mrs Yamada’. This was a rare sport from the stripy Bourbon rose ‘Variegata di Bologna’, spotted by Peter in the garden. The rainy season is interspersed with spells of hot sunshine so plants look as though they are on steroids. The climate is perfect for Japanese and Asian flora like hostas, hydrangeas, acers and wisteria. If you’ve struggled with these your garden is probably too dry in summer and possibly too cool. Hostas, pictured, are untroubled by slugs here and there are few snails. I recognised several varieties including the lime-green ‘Sum and Substance’, the all-green ‘Devon Green’.

The biggest surprise was the size of the tulip trees. Liriodendron tulipifera, the American Yellowwood, was planted in the late 1980s. They are already huge here, helped along by summer heat and copious rain.

In chilly Britain, a 30-year-old tulip tree would be a mere stripling, although I’m quite glad we don’t get Japanese typhoons here!