Last week, we spent a June night at Great Dixter. I arrived late after giving a Garden Masterclass at Sissinghurst and met Fergus Garrett on the drive, who was busily ferrying a very full car of excitable people to the train station. The sun had already gone down and twilight had begun. Dark hedges and the push of meadows spilling over the path to the front door. The greyness of the Crataegus orientalis that I have known since I was a teenager and a cloud of perfume from the pots of the sweet pea ‘Matucana’ huddled round the porch at the front door. 

Great Dixter had been hosting a group of environmentalists and like-minded thinkers for the previous three days and the after-party mood pervaded the house. Washers up in the kitchen after a final last supper and the remaining guests who were also overnighting, drinking in the half light on the back terrace where the enormous myrtle hunkers into the building and dierama spill from cracks in the paving. Huw and Wren had arrived earlier, but no one knew where they were. Standing on the parapet of the terrace, though, I could hear familiar voices down in the stillness of the garden.