A perfectly ripe fig, picked fresh from the tree. Heat in the fruit and the energy of a long, hot summer caught in sweet, juicy flesh. I can think back to specific trees that marked a moment in time. On our daily walk to the beach in Andalucia, in a baking courtyard in Seville, a dusty, walled garden in California or standing alone in the boulder-strewn landscape of Greece. Surviving against the odds, but producing such succulent fruit despite the stark contrast of their surroundings.

The equivalent fruit in our moist, forgiving climate might be the pear. At its moment of perfection, they are the most delectable of cool climate fruits. You can taste that they love the land like figs love the sun. However, our quest as gardeners is to always push the boundaries and have what we know might be out of reach. So we experiment, in order to capture a memory, or outmanoeuvre the limitations of our site.

Winter is coming, but I am still eking out the last of the summer vegetables in the kitchen. The approaching months of pumpkin, swede, turnip, celeriac, potato, cabbage and kale will last long enough, without extending the season further by embracing them too quickly. Although they seem like summer vegetables the reality is that peppers reach peak ripeness in the polytunnel in mid-October, as do the summer sown fennels in the vegetable beds. Together with aubergines and the beans I grew for drying this year, these made up the bulk of my harvest on return from holiday three weeks ago.

The aubergines we ate quickly, as they are not good keepers, but the fennel and peppers store so well in the salad drawer of the fridge that, although this recipe uses the very last of the fennel, I will be looking for more ways to use the peppers in the coming week, as this year’s crop was outstanding, with nine plants each producing at least six fruits. A romesco sauce is on the cards, though not made with our own walnuts as intended, since the squirrels got them all before me. A tomato and red pepper soup with a generous addition of our homegrown paprika will provide a warming lunch. And, if all else fails, nothing beats Elizabeth David’s Piedmont peppers, halved and filled with anchovies, oil and garlic before a blast in a hot oven.

Over the years of being at Hillside we’ve worked out that there is a breathing point in the season at the end of September. The apples will stay on the trees, we can delay autumn by heading south and when we return it will be the optimum time to get planting again. So, earlier in the month, we put down our responsibilities and took three weeks in Greece.

To cover for the break we made the usual flurry before leaving to bring in and store the last of the harvest and left instructions with the house sitters to water this and not that and to pick the pears and keep an eye on the seedlings in the cold frames. We also worked hard to ensure the design team in the studio had everything they needed to progress without us while we were away. Busy time. Heads in the future. Heads down to clear the time.

You were due an article by Dan today, but he has been taken ill on our return from holiday and so it falls to me to fill the gap.

We have taken our summer holiday in mid-September for as long as I can remember. In Peckham it was always too difficult to leave the summer garden at its peak and since we’ve been at Hillside there is far too much to sow, plant and harvest in August to think about straying too far. And, of course, the crowds have gone, the temperatures are more amenable and there is something particularly appealing about the feeling of places at the end of the holiday season. We are creatures of habit and have been going to the same island in Greece for the last twelve years. Before that it was twelve years on the Cabo de Gata on the east coast of Spain.

I returned home from a fortnight’s holiday earlier this week, during which time our regular weekly articles have been on hold. After an ebullient welcome from Wren I dropped my bags in the house and made a beeline for the vegetable garden and polytunnel.

I had spent the week before we travelled madly crossing tasks off a seemingly endless vegetable garden job list. First of these was to clear the tomatoes from the polytunnel, which had finally succumbed to blight. Given the cold, wet summer I had been concerned that we would not have a comparable harvest to previous years. I normally start processing tomatoes for the pantry in early August, but this year they did not come on stream properly until the third week. Then it was all systems go.

I visited Hillside in February this year as winter was turning towards spring. The dried stems of last year’s blooms scratched into the sky. Down beneath many forms of snowdrops were being inspected by Dan and near neighbour, Mary Keen.

It was now six months later and in early September I was back photographing a story about food. It was meant to be done a month or so earlier, but a disappointingly wet and cold August had set things back in the vegetable garden.

Though it is just in its infancy and unfinished, with more open ground than planted, the new garden beyond the barns has already deepened our connection with this place. Dubbed the Sand Garden, the working title which will probably stick, it has provided me the same opportunities as the sandpit my father made for us when we were children. I think it was Jung who theorised that if you could find the place where you lost yourself as a child, you could find a place of deep meditation and calm as an adult. And sure enough, the familiar feeling of being lost in a world of my own making, enhanced in this case by the very sand I’ve used as a top dressing, has rewarded me with the same opportunity for play all these years later.

I have always known that the act of gardening is my place of retreat and contemplation, but somehow the sand has emphasised the connection in this extension to the garden. The sand radiates light and is warm to the touch and I can already see plants that would struggle on our heavy loam responding favourably. When writing earlier in the summer and to reiterate, part of my experiment in the sand garden has been to cope with our increasingly polarised weather patterns. Drier growing seasons and wetter winters are a challenge when selecting drought tolerant plants and few are adapted to both. The sand should provide free-draining conditions in winter to open up a range of plants that simply aren’t possible on our heavy clay loam.

On March 11^th 2020 we received an email from a photographer named Kate Friend asking if Dan would be interested in participating in an ongoing project. At that point it had the working title ‘A Book of Flowers’ and was the development of a series of photographs Kate had been taking over the previous two years. At the start she had asked gardeners from Great Dixter, Chelsea Physic Garden, Houghton Hall and Fern Verrow biodynamic growers to select some of the best flowers they grew. Then, with medium and large format cameras she then photographed them on film using only natural daylight against simple, painted backdrops in colours of her choice. The resulting portraits were strong, sensitive and compelling.

In 2018 Kate exhibited some of them at the Garden Museum in an exhibition titled ‘Botanical Portraits’. We had seen the exhibition and were intrigued by her process and so Dan was very happy to agree to be involved. Kate explained that she had since asked a number of creative people that she admired to choose their favourite flower including Margaret Howell, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Maggi Hambling, Penny Rimbaud and George Harrison’s wife, Olivia, and that she was was looking to include more people in her selection. We emailed about identifying potential dates for her to shoot at Hillside when some of Dan’s favourite flowers would be in bloom and then…

Last month I made the long journey back to the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Hokkaido. My annual visit, which was curtailed by the pandemic, had run to three years of absence and the impact of Covid had made the distance feel more profound than usual. In this time, isolation during lockdown, two snowbound winters and the garden closed and running on a skeletal staff for two growing seasons, brought a particular kind of quiet to the foot of the mountain.

Nature continued to run its course, uninterrupted and growing thickly in the brief northern summer. The Sasa bamboo that the garden team keep carefully in check in an orbit around the more cultivated parts of the garden, returned like an incoming tide. Cut once a year in the autumn to encourage the indigenous flora of the forest, the clearances had a dual purpose. Firstly, to recalibrate the woodland flora after the initial clearances by the 19^th century settlers created an imbalance, allowing the Sasa to overwhelm the forest. Secondly to impose a managed domain. The bears that live on the mountain and use the bamboo as cover are not to be confronted, but they are also respectful of the open ground created by its removal. The garden team has been careful to only take as much ground as it could tend with available labour and a balance was struck that worked without having to erect fences. But during the pandemic the landscape took on another life and with energies pulled back to the essentials and the silence of a garden quietened by closure, the bears came back with the Sasa.

Wishing you all a wonderful August bank holiday weekend

Flowers and photograph: Huw Morgan