The garden builds quietly over the first half of the growing season, mustering energy and readying for the point when the meadows that lie beyond begin to go to seed. It is planned this way so that, as the oxeye daisies dim, the garden comes into its own and we circle back in to look more deeply at the cultivated garden, happy in this hand-over. 

The colour comes in waves. First the electric green euphorbia and then, as foliage gives way to flower, the gradual eruptions of colour. One of the first pools of concentration is around the Rosa glauca, which I have used mid-way in the garden. They mark a ripple which moves you from the stronger colours that hold your attention closer to the house to the smokier tones that sit well against far distance. The rose is an old favourite, with its plum-grey foliage and gentle arching growth. There are three straddling the intersection of paths and their structure provides an anchor point to the perennials which move amongst them. A place to work up a combination that drives the area immediately around it. 

The bright light in these few high months of summer is too intense for looking at the garden during the day. Our looking times are first thing, when the light is low, and then again later as it dips into the head of the valley. During the middle part of the day we go about the activity of tending and it isn’t until around six, when the light changes, that the garden starts to register once again. If we can, we down tools and make the time to take in the results of our hard work, made visible by the sun tilting into a long evening. Time to watch the colour change as the light yellows and then fades to blue and the dusk of gloaming. 

This is a time of observation and the garden actively settles into a different energy. If we have had a breeze, it often drops now and in this stillness the handover from the day to the night shift begins. From the activity of bees and the drone of hoverflies to the silence of the moths and bats that come to work the evening. Many plants come into their own at this time and the violets and the blues, which by day have sat back in bright light, begin to pulse and vibrate with an energy all of their own. In the main garden the wicks of violet veronicastrum become a point of gravity and rise above pools of denim blue Nepeta ‘Blue Dragon’ and the electric indigo of Salvia patens.

Early summer mornings and the field poppies are blazing. Open and already reverberating with bumblebees as the sun spills over the hill behind us. They are the epitome of these long days and with growth reaching towards the summer equinox, you suddenly find they have elbowed their way in. By afternoon, the flowers that opened that morning will have done their work and shed their petals so that we see past them where they held our attention earlier and prevented us looking anywhere but into them. Next week, as if in response to the light once again tilting in the other direction, the plants will splay, their foliage yellowing as energy goes into making seed in the second half of summer. 

The field poppies (Papaver rhoeas) arrived here when we disturbed the ground. Seed that had sat happily dormant, but marked a time when the ground here was cultivated as market gardens and predated these pastures. Their reincarnation at Hillside is something we celebrate in the cultivation of the garden, for with the garden comes the opportunity of change, both the ephemeral and the more permanent. Pastures turned and ground exposed to give them what they need. Pioneer territory, light and, for a couple of years, the upper hand an annual needs in the perennial mix. 

It has been a good year for the yellow rattle and we are happy to see it so clearly making its space in the meadows. This humble annual is the vital ingredient that has allowed us to begin to reinstate richly diverse meadows on our heavy, nutritious ground. An annual that is semi-parasitic upon grasses, Rhinanthus minor diminishes the vigour of its host to allow diversity in the sward to re-establish; creating windows between the grasses where the wildflowers can flourish. 

When we arrived here twelve years ago, the fields had been grazed hard and it had been many years since they had been allowed to run to meadow. Our fields make good ‘grub’ – the local term for rich grazing grass – and pasture had been the sole objective of the cattle farmer who lived here before us. Years over which the diversity in the fields diminished due to continual grazing. The opportunity missed again and again for the meadow plants to seed. 

This first week of June marks the last week of our bearded iris. Their energy, stored in the rhizomes from a baking last summer, gives them the stamina to sprint as soon as spring is warm enough to make them stir. All their growth is vertical as they move towards flowering, their fan shaped foliage backlit in the bright new light and fattening where they show promise of flower. 

As April spills into the month of May, the leaf sheaths part to allow the ascent of the flowering stems which draw us out daily to check for first colour as the upward-facing buds begin to swell. Wrapped in tissue paper tunics to reveal just a glimpse of what is to come, they teeter long enough to build the anticipation. A theatrical pause before their unravelling and scene-stealing opulence. 

Two years ago when we dug the pond, the soil from the excavation was trundled up the hill and used to extend the level beyond the barns, where I’ve been gardening with self-seeders in the rubbly ground. The new soil pushed the landform out towards the plum orchard where, in the back of my mind, I’d always seen an extension to the garden. The subsoil from the base of the pond was capped with the topsoil strip and in the first autumn the banks were seeded with a wildflower mix from our neighbouring valley, to hold the slopes. We over-sowed the topsoil with a green manure crop of winter rye and clover to protect it over winter. Then last spring, after rotovating in the green manure, I sowed an annual pictorial meadow mix to buy myself a summer of additional thinking time.

My mother, who is quite rightly concerned about us overreaching our energies, loved the riot of colour that flooded the new garden last summer. “Could you not simply repeat the annuals rather than give yourselves yet more responsibility?”. Of course, it was a good question, but the germ of an idea had already sprouted. I mowed a curving path into the annual meadow of cosmos, cornflowers and fluttering poppies to play with the idea of a movement across the site and so began the shaping of the place in my mind. We would keep a working track to the barns that would divide the flatter ground from the gentle rise above to make two new environments. The upper area, beneath the grown out hedgerow on the bank above, would provide the opportunity for a shade garden, while the lower area would offer a place to experiment with a plant palette that will cope with our increasingly dry summers. 

I have been called away for a week of work in the States. One longstanding project on the west coast where we are already in summer and a new landscape on the east coast where I will be stepping back into earlier spring. Work is not a word that suits an exciting few days of making things happen, but even so, it is a small torture to leave in this week that sits so very definitely between spring and summer. A time marked in our landscape by lanes narrowed with cow parsley and creamy clouds of hawthorn stepping through the woods and marching down the hedgerows. 

In Japan the year is divided into 72 seasons each lasting about five days and the principle applies here too, if you make the time to look and take in the many shifts and changes. Five days for the buds to suddenly be in evidence on the Malus hupehensis, five days for the buds to break and the tree to cover itself in five more days of the purest white blossom. In that time the blue Iris hollandica planted alongside them have been joined by a sea of yellow catsear. Standing under the trees this morning I drank in the spectacle and noted the first petals falling. It will be five more days, the time I am away, for the blossom to drop and dim into the burgeoning green of summer. 

The beds in the vegetable garden are bare. Although the garlic and onions are making their presence felt, after the long, cold spring our winter sown broad beans have only just started flowering and the first spring crops of beetroots, carrots and peas have a long way to go before we get to taste them. We still have a good supply of winter lettuce, sown last September and planted out on our return from holiday in October, and a somewhat meagre asparagus harvest has provided for a couple of meals so far, but otherwise – and as usual in the hungry gap – home grown produce is pretty thin on the ground.

Until, that is, you enter the polytunnel, where a green tidal wave of kale threatens to engulf all around it. These too were sown in September in plugs and planted out in early October once the tomatoes and peppers were cleared. The variety – ‘Hungry Gap’ – is extremely well named, as they bided their time over the winter, slowly gathering energy to provide for us right now, when most needed. Due to the failure of some other brassicas intended for the polytunnel I ended up planting out twelve plants of this kale, and they have been producing an almost endless supply of leaves since early March. 

The Lunaria ‘Chedglow’ are having their moment and offering the garden its first flare of colour. Welcome this early, their licorice foliage has an iridescent sheen, which adds depth to the surge of spring green as the flowering spikes rise to bloom. A darkness that this selection is famed for and why we keep them in a separate area of the garden from the paler Lunaria annua ‘Corfu Blue’, which would sully their richness if they crossed. First vibrancy, a dark, rich violet, less violent than the more usual mauve of green-leaved honesty. It is this depth of colour, both in flower and leaf, that I love here for not eclipsing the soft, primrose yellow of Molly-the-Witch, but highlighting its paleness. Over time, and as the refining process continues, I have added darkest indigo Camassia leichtlinii to the partnership, which puts a quiet sting into the palette.

I sowed my first plants from seed, which comes as easily as mustard and cress, raising a dozen that I worked into the gaps in the newly planted garden. Biennials and annuals are useful in a new planting to add a lived-in feeling and for filling space whilst slower growing perennials find their feet. I hadn’t bargained on the profligacy of the lunaria on our rich hearty soil.

Every year in August I sit down with a number of bulb suppliers’ website pages open and start to formulate a selection of tulips for the coming spring. This has customarily been an enjoyable process, with little more on my mind than assembling a good colour selection alongside consideration of a range of flowering heights and times to ensure a longlasting display. I must admit to never having given the means of production of the bulbs much thought, although in recent years there has been a growing niggling doubt, which I have shamefully chosen not to examine too closely.

In 2021 approximately 14,400 hectares of Dutch farmland was dedicated to the production of tulip bulbs. This is where almost all commercially grown tulip bulbs come from and the majority of them are treated with a range of phosphate fertilisers, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides. All of these chemicals persist in soil and water and have a seriously damaging effects on soil-living creatures and mycorrhiza. In the case of systemic insecticides(although the use of three key neonicotinoids has been banned in the Netherlands since 2021) these can persist in the bulbs after lifting, so that bees visiting your tulip display will be directly affected and transport poisoned pollen back to the hive. Dutch studies have also shown that people living in the vicinity of commercial bulb growers have higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies with as yet unknown effects on biology and health, although in animals they are known to affect reproductive health and the respiratory system. The more you look into it the reasons to only grow organic bulbs are legion.