And so, once again, the courgettes are on the march. No matter how quickly we think we are eating them – and with house guests for the past three weekends we have got through a fair few – there are always more than we can manage. Every week the largest are liberated and put in a crate on the verge by the front gate for passersby to take. More often than not they are gone within the day. 

A couple of years ago, during the height of the pandemic, we witnessed the entertaining sight of a cyclist removing the water bottle attached to his bike frame and offering up each courgette in the crate to the bottle clamp to see if it would fit, like Prince Charming trying slippers on Cinderella. With the match finally made he tucked the water bottle into the back of his Lycra shorts and off he went, unaware of our spying. We were delighted to think we had provided a free supper for someone who had just gone out for an evening ride.

The last few weeks of wet has had its influence. The meadows remain uncut and the long grass that we allow to lap up to the garden paths has cast seed far and wide. The wet has seen the seed germinating a whole month earlier than usual in a green haze that shows where the wind has blown. The tomatoes are only just starting to ripen in the polytunnel, for the cool that has come with this summer’s wet has checked the plants that need warmth to flower and ripen. Compare with the heat and drought of last summer, a tomato glut in a polytunnel it was a struggle to keep cool and worrying signs of stress in trees that were dropping foliage prematurely. It is becoming increasingly difficult to predict our new weather patterns and what to plan for, but what does seem clear is that we are bound to have to deal with change. 

The wet has been kind to the trees that looked so threatened last year and we have seen a weight in their branches and a second round of growth where they have had the moisture. A halo of new green on the young oaks and vigorous shoots on the shrub roses that have put another notch on their belts. In the garden the paths have narrowed so that we emerge wet from the August overhang after our morning inspection. One such moment, where the Hydrangea aspera crowds the lower steps to the east of the milking barn, has seen it all but obscure the way and I can see that it won’t be long before we start to feel overtaken. 

I am a firm believer in finding the niche. The place where a plant might naturally be most at home. Where the right amount of sunlight falls, be it plentiful or dappled or none and where the shadow counts. The same applies to shelter, for the difference between an airy place or one where there is a still shelter might be the make or break and opportunity.

Our conditions here on the hill are all about the light and free air movement. The sun rises in the east and swings around in a great all-day arc across our slopes until it sets at the top of the valley. There is very little shadow and very little shelter, so for most of the day the garden is exposed and at the whim of whatever the weather decides to throw at it. The places where the air is still or where there is reliable shadow are few. In the lea of the buildings where you can see the light falling differently and where it is worth taking the time to observe where the wind fingers and where it doesn’t.

The milking barn yard used to be a very different place. The access track to the barn descended at a perilous angle down the slope, with everything on the angle to save digging into the hill and making up the ground with retaining walls. The yard itself was poured in a patchwork of concrete slabs by the farmer before us in characteristic ad hoc fashion. It was an ugly place, but we liked it in spite of that and although I always knew the yard itself would have to go, the space it carved out for the little barn was important. 

When I brought in the granite trough to provide the centre of gravity and frame the yard, the concrete buckled like a pie crust under the weight of the forklift and, in the hiatus whilst we were doing up the buildings, seeding weeds grew back into the cracks. The interlopers were not noteworthy in themselves, but the airiness of these pioneers refined the roughness of the broken concrete and the feeling that this place was being reclaimed had resonance. I watched and thought and took away from living with the yard in this halfway state the importance of it being a place that felt gently occupied. 

The last few weeks of whipping wind and rain have been painful. It has torn at the poplars at the bottom of the slope, their enormous limbs as heavy as they ever will be in leaf weighted by rain. The tell-tale crack and pregnant pause before the impact saw three limbs the size of trees come crashing to earth. A whole tree gave up a few nights later, to lay between and fortunately not on my young hornbeams, as if the fall had been planned. We will wait until autumn before beginning the enormous task of clearing the wood from where it has shattered amongst the slumbering snowdrops for fear of the weight still up there in the remaining trees and this not being the last limbs down. 

The garden has stood the test of our exposed position remarkably well. I stake lightly, preferring the garden to be composed of plants that are not reliant upon us to keep them upright. The wiry stems of the hemerocallis and dierama and the pliable Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ were almost made for wind and withstand even the rain-laden gales, but the plants that topple when in the full sail of summer growth need assistance. Taller than me, sanguisorba that would splay in a great cartwheel without support and echinops that would derail an area as wide as they are tall if they broke loose from their metal hoops. Staking takes valuable time in the rush to finish the garden work before growth starts in earnest in the spring, but our metal hoops work and are fast to install. 

It’s been a great year for the gooseberries. Our two bushes – one ‘Hinnonmaki Green’, the other ‘Hinnonmaki Red’ – have produced the largest crops we have ever had from them. Over 6kg from each. These dual purpose culinary and dessert types can be used when immature for cooking in pies, jams, sauces and chutneys, while the fully ripe fruit is sweet enough to be eaten straight from the bush. Originally bred in Finland these cultivars are reliably hardy and resistant to powdery mildew and have cropped reliably for us since we planted them seven years ago. In the case of the red, being thornless they also make for easy picking, unlike the green which bears the familiar needle-like thorns that lacerate your hands, however carefully you go.

Although the first to bear fruit in the vegetable garden, gooseberries have not always been our first fruit of choice for eating. Too many childhood memories of the pale green, seedy pulp floating in a bowl of curdled custard or evaporated milk and the disappointment of Nana’s buttery, sugary, shortcrust giving way to undersweetened (to my child’s palate, at least), sour and watery fruit. Gooseberry fool (gooseberries, Bird’s Custard and cream) was one of the first desserts I was taught to make in ‘O’ Level Home Economics but, by the time it had been carried home in Tupperware on a hot summer bus, it was not the most appetising of puddings and, with fears of an upset stomach, neither I nor the family could bring ourselves to eat it.

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.