The smell of elderflower is everywhere. Rain followed by sunshine has produced moist air that carries its flowery, musky perfume in drifts across the fields and down the lanes. It is strongest in the mornings when the air is still. It pools in the glades down by the stream and by the barns where it mingles with honeysuckle and eglantine to produce an intoxicating blend.

As with many other things this year, the elder is earlier into flower than usual. And, as with the blossom of plum, pear, cherry, apple and hawthorn, it also seems that it will be a bumper year for elderflower. Its more normal flowering time in mid-June always happens at one of the busiest times for us, with annuals to plant out, vegetables to sow and manage and a number of group garden visits, meaning that our focus gets pulled to the areas closer to the house. Combined with a run of wet Junes this means that for several years we have missed the opportunity to gather elder for cordial. Since many of our bushes are on the woodland fringe down by the stream and north-facing, we sometimes miss them completely, putting off to tomorrow what should be done today, lulled into a false sense of security that they will hold onto their flowers for some time yet in the cool. This season’s early start means that I have been able to gather the first blossom to appear and plan on making a batch of cordial this weekend.

Geraldine Noyes, my childhood gardening mentor, always had a posy on her kitchen table. In winter it might have been no more than a sprig of witch hazel and the first spearing Iris unguicularis but, as the season went on, the posies would become more complex, always changing according to what was happening in the garden. They were not overly considered compositions, but distillations of the season and an opportunity to observe the garden at close quarters. The posies were a moment caught and savoured, always humble and delightful for the plants being on the wild side and particular to her loves and sensibilities.

When I started gardening at scale and growing the garden at Home Farm for my client Frances Mossman, I kept up the tradition and very quickly found that the posies were very instructive. Not only did they capture a micro-season or mood, they also allowed you to combine plants in often unexpected ways. Things from different parts of the garden that I hadn’t ever thought of using together or colour combinations that I’d never considered in these spontaneous couplings. When Huw came to stay when I was gardening there, Frances would let him loose to fuel his love of combining the plants and thus began this interesting cross over of me doing the garden making and he the reinterpretation through the arrangements.

We pinch ourselves daily to have the great fortune to live here and to be part of this land and its cycles and nuances. We engage with them daily, once in the morning before breakfast and once after finishing work. It is a ritual of sorts, but the dogs are the catalyst and let us know when it is time and that there isn’t an option but ‘Let’s go!’.

Our meanders vary from season to season, but right now we move towards the sun in the morning, heading from the house and through a garden now stirred by May. Despite the burgeoning growth, this tended place is of far less interest to our companions who want to be in the meadows where it’s all happening.

After the big cut back that took place at the end of February and beginning of March, I made all the edits that needed to happen ahead of the summer. Splitting and moving plants and making additions and edits where changes might be needed for the sake of the new energy they provide. Next came the mulching, the finishing protective eiderdown which keeps moisture in and weeds and seedlings down. These tasks were happening right through until the end of April and just last week I was winkling plants in that I’d had sitting in the cold frames needing a home.

As apple blossom gave way to hawthorn in the last fortnight, the garden has reared up and away into the growing season. Bare soil and visible mulch swallowed up in fresh new growth and the handover from spring to early summer. If you haven’t caught those last few weeds in this window, they will become part of the borders and gaps that just a fortnight ago felt large enough to receive something new have quickly closed over. This is the moment you realise that, if you haven’t done it yet, then spring jobs are now best left until autumn.

Spring is rearing headlong into the growing season in this brightly lit week that could be summer. Brilliant blue skies, the crabapples in full sail, cow parsley spilling from the hedgerows and buttercups rising in the meadows, taller and more plentiful from one day to the next.

In the garden we have already begun a series of micro-seasons where favourite groups of plants cluster together to make these times all about them. One of the first are the peonies, which have already made their early start so markedly with spearing growth pushed from their deep, tuberous roots. Molly-the-Witch with lipstick red shoots breaking open to push smoky, damson-coloured foliage. ‘Merry Mayshine’ with filigree new leaves that flare in spring sunshine, a luminous ruby red. The new shoots of ‘Mme Gaudichau’ are the deepest plum, you’d think it liquorice black until you peer closer.

On the Mexican leg of my sabbatical last autumn, I made the journey to visit to Las Pozas, the surrealist landscape of the English eccentric, Edward James, the heir to West Dean House in East Sussex. I had been immersed in Mexico City for a week by then, visiting the works of Luis Barragán and, as the Dia de Los Muertos approached, two friends and I took to the road. We were heading for Xilitla, a mountain town buried deep in jungle where James exiled himself in the pursuit of making this garden. A garden not as we might know it, but a lifework of minarets and fantastical spaces that manifested his singular vision.

To get there in a day was ambitious and felt far longer than its actual duration, for the landscape changing so much as we journeyed. Leaving the smog and hubbub of the sprawling city behind, we started the ten hour drive north-east towards Pachuca, passing through the agricultural plains of maize in the central valley and heading towards the Gulf of Mexico. After about four hours the flat land suddenly gave way to dry valleys scored with the cartoonish upright of cactus and ocotillo. We stopped in a layby to take in the change and witness the startling silence and enormous reach of seemingly hostile vegetation. Emerging from dust and rock, without road or habitation and completely still, bar dark raptors soaring on thermals above us.

Wishing all of our readers a very happy Easter.

In this mantel arrangement are;

The land is having a moment here, alive after slumbering, with no turning back and blossom lighting the way. It is at its very peak as I am writing, in a week of blue skies, still days and moonlit nights, with frost so far staying to the hollows. Spring as you dream it to be. Onward and surging.

When I cast my mind back to our arrival fifteen years ago, the fields were very different. Grazed tightly to their very margins and hedgerows pared back to the bones. There was a curious silence with the land stripped to the essentials. Walk the fields now and you move in a soundscape enabled by the land having been relaxed and allowed to be more itself. In hedge trees rising from hedges that were once tightly trimmed and from spinneys of self-seeded hawthorns that step up the hill from the woods, bringing the birds with them. Follow the blossom trees or the willows in catkin and you walk into the drone of bees working or the chattering flurry of long-tailed tits, the very opposite of the stillness that we found when we first came here.

Today’s recipe is a departure from the usual. It contains nothing home grown, nothing seasonal and yet it is one of my favourite and most frequently made recipes. The reason for this change of tack is that my Dad died a few weeks ago, his funeral is on Monday and I have spent every evening this week reading through his handwritten memoirs piecing together the eulogy I will give.

Dad was a proud Welshman and his memories of his childhood are vivid and emotive. He was born in Swansea on April 25^th 1935 and was brought up in the suburb of Cockett by his father, Herbert, who worked for an iron and steel merchant, and his mother, Winifred (née Lewis), who left school at 14 and was a maid in the Mayor’s Parlour in Swansea, until she married my grandfather in 1929. The house was on a road on the top of the hill (Town Hill) above Swansea Bay, and you had a fine view of its golden sweep from the upstairs back bedrooms. When we went there as children during the summer holidays, the sound of seagulls and the smell of the sea were ever present.

The hungry gap is almost upon us. The last of the stored root vegetables are becoming wrinkled and dry. We are eating our way through the remains of the pumpkins in a race to beat the mice, which have discovered them in the tool shed. The kalettes and kales in the outdoor vegetable beds have almost been stripped bare, having provided for meals over the winter and we have just finished the last of the Pink Fir Apple potatoes. And yet, as the tide goes out on the winter veg, there is a countermovement in the polytunnel. A green tsunami that has been building for the last couple of weeks, is now breaking and every meal features leafy greens of one kind or another.

It is five years since we got the polytunnel and it has proven to be just as useful for overwintering crops, as it is for the customary hot climate vegetables – tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and more – that we initially bought it for. The first few years saw me experimenting with various winter crops, but for the last three I have settled on a reliable selection of winter salads and herbs to be eaten in the darkest months, and a selection of oriental greens and brassicas intended for consumption right now.