The Amicia zygomeris are eking out the good weather in this last mild chapter before the inevitable frost. They have taken this long to all but come to fruition with a flurry of pea flowers which are surprisingly opulent in their appearance at this closing moment of the growing season. Tilting outward and down from a yoke-like ruff of ink-stained bracts and glowing a warm, golden yellow in low sunshine. 

My first plants originally came from Great Dixter when I was a teenager, but I do not remember where Christopher Lloyd grew them before he replaced the old Rose Garden with the Exotic Garden. This is where you will find them today, juxtaposed with other exotics and reaching boldly skyward. Hailing from Mexico, best advice in this country is to provide this sturdy perennial with a winter mulch, as you might a dahlia that you intend to leave in the ground. I followed these rules with my first plant, growing it against the only warm wall where the light fell into our woodland garden in Hampshire. I remember this plant with the same delight I feel about the ones here at Hillside all these years later, but I have grown in confidence about their hardiness and now grow them in the open with just a little shelter from the wind. Out of habit I mulched the plants here in their first few years but, now they are fully established, have found them to be perfectly hardy on our free-draining slopes and indeed they are reputed to be hardy to -10°C . 

Twelve years ago this weekend we dropped the keys through the letterbox of our house in Peckham and headed west to the prospect of Hillside. The first few days and the quality of this last weekend in October are imprinted very clearly for being so new and suddenly in such a different environment. Where the skies were huge and not narrowed by buildings and where the season was manifest in everything and all around us. In the dew-heavy grass, the hedges beginning to show their winter bones and the apples pecked into cups by the birds that flocked to gorge on the windfalls in the old orchard. 

The wind that moves with such ease down the valley and which we have grown to love on our faces had all but torn the last of the foliage from the poplars, their silhouettes clear against the flanks of the rise behind them. The newness allowed us to look deeply into every detail, more intently than you do when you come to know your environment. We combed the land, walking the line of the stream and noted where the farmer before us had pushed the fields as far as they could go to the very quick of the hedge-lines. 

This time last week the garden was at its autumn peak and it coincided with the gentle best of October. The Dahlia australis reaching tall, but now on borrowed time with clear bright nights and a chill in the air. Asters at their most floriferous and still buoyant in a garden flush with colouring foliage and yet to be dashed by rain. The zenith of brilliant nerine and bright but autumn-soft sunlight shimmering in the miscanthus. 

A run of clear mornings kept us spellbound at breakfast time when the light broke over The Tump. One ray grazing the dome of brilliant green where the meadow has replenished itself and then subsequent fingers reaching their way into the garden. The first threw a bolt into a gap in the hedge that passed in a direct line through the silvery seed heads of the tabletop asters to fall full-stop upon the last of the Kniphofia thompsonii var. thompsonii. It was as if the  pokers were waiting for the light and for a full three minutes they flared like candles. When it was over we looked up to find the garden awash, the ultramarine of the Salvia patens and the burning seed heads of the switch grass suddenly illuminated. And then the moment had passed. It was simply morning.

We take our summer holiday late to be in the here and now of our growing season. We have honed the dates around the harvest now the orchards are grown, to bring in the plums as August comes to a close and the pears begin to drop, which they do in sequence. ‘Beth’ first, then ‘Beurre Hardy’ and ‘Williams’, which is done by the middle of September. There is a pause then for the best of them all, ‘Doyenne du Comice’, which will hang on for a month, so we seize this window for a fortnight in search of the last of a Dodecanese summer. 

The softness of September is perhaps the most beautiful time in the garden, so we depart with a little wrench. Where it feels wrong to leave the fruit to the birds, the compromise of missing a flowering is weighted differently. One year will be different from the next but my absence has never prevented me from planting with asters and autumnal grasses and a host of late season bulbs that make this time their own.

September is surely one of the most beautiful months. Evenings cooling, grass wet again with dew, but warmth still in the sun. The tiredness that sometimes hangs over August is now refreshed after rains. The meadows flushed with new green and germination happening everywhere. A rash of poppy seedlings seizing the moment to establish themselves before winter and, of course, the sea of dandelions. The very moment I thought about back in May when the airborne seed moved in silken clouds down the valley, but I’d all but forgotten whilst they lay dormant in the dry weeks of summer.

With the change we welcome a new wave of energy in the garden. The first of the asters, the sudden emergence of naked colchicum and smatterings of autumn flowering cyclamen, the harbingers of this shoulder season. Most lovely of all on this particular September day is the Clematis ‘Sundance’ which has been readying itself for autumn. I have it on the edge of the garden close to the milking barn veranda where, if ever we do sit and look, we are inclined to catch the warming, morning rays. The covered veranda is our breakfast place, so it is a moment in the garden which affords close scrutiny and where we need the detail to satisfy the time we take to pause there. In spring we have Paeonia mlokosewitschii, followed by navy blue camassias twinned with the blackest Iris chrysographes.

When we arrived here, the milking barn that sits just below the house was marooned in a patchwork of concrete slabs that the farmer before us had poured to hold the slopes around the building. We had plans for the barn to be renovated as my workspace and for the old yard to become a place for the barn. Somewhere to take in the view up the valley and for the planting here to capture the evening light. 

The trough that is now the anchor point in the yard was the catalyst. We hired the largest forklift to lift the trough from the waggon that parked in the layby at the top of the hill, but as we edged down the single-track lane, we quickly saw that maybe we had bitten off more than we could chew. Weighing in at about twenty tonnes all in, the concrete patchwork buckled like a pie crust as we inched the trough down the slope and into the old yard. We were a way off yet from doing the renovations to the buildings, so the trough sat marooned in the remains of the yard and, in the time that followed, the interlopers that found their way into the cracks and gave the yard grace, spawned the idea for the mood for the planting. Herb Robert and hogweed, Timothy grasses and willowherb. Plants that could survive on very little and, whilst we were waiting to make our next move, made the place their own. 

Another summer of tomato growing brings another summer of learning. Now three years in to growing tomatoes under cover I have learnt from my previous mistakes. Having started to feed the plants very late in the first year, I now have a firm grip on watering and feeding regimes. After overcrowding the polytunnel with too many plants last year and risking blight, I reduced the number of plants and increased the spacing, which has resulted in much better air flow and more light reaching the fruits. Perhaps feeling a little smug I was preparing myself for our biggest harvest yet. However, this year’s impediment to a bumper crop has been largely out of my control. 

When the first heatwave came in July we covered the polytunnel with two spare lengths of bird netting from the fruit cages to create enough light shade to keep the temperature down somewhat. Yet, on the hottest day, when it reached 37 degrees here, the temperature inside the polytunnel was 46, despite having both doors open and regularly hosing down the floor (which rapidly reduced the temperature by 4 or 5 degrees). About a week later it became apparent that the last fruits on the first trusses and nearly all of the second trusses had aborted due to stress. So I kept up the watering and feeding and trusted that there was still all of August for them to produce plenty more fruit. 

The Agapanthus inapertus, which are kept in pots for their late summer display, are slow. They take time to decide when they want to flower, making you wait until they are settled in, sometimes a year or more after planting, producing nothing but foliage in the meantime. They are sluggish when breaking dormancy, keeping you on edge as the spring burgeons around them whilst they wait for the warmth. Once they get away I start a weekly seaweed feed to encourage flower and impatiently part their strappy foliage to see if they are going to reward me, for it’s not until the longest day or so that they let you in on their plans. 

When the tapered sheaths – pointed like skyward arrows – begin to ascend, I move them to the front of the house from the holding ground by the cold frames before the stems are long enough to be damaged. Anticipation continues throughout July, as the flowering growth slowly draws itself out well into August and up to the teetering point between the seasons.

Wishing you a wonderful late summer holiday weekend

Flowers & photograph: Huw Morgan

If you didn’t know and had to take an educated guess at where zinnias originate from then it is quite likely that Mexico would come near the top of the list. With their kaleidoscopic colours and searing vibrancy they speak of a hot climate and it is no surprise to discover that Frida Kahlo grew them in her garden at Casa Azul, the home she shared with Diego Rivera in Mexico City, where they honoured indigenous culture and planted only native species. Visitors at the time would recall the blood red zinnias that decorated the dining table and, if you look at the many self-portraits and photographic portraits of Kahlo, alongside dahlias, tagetes and bougainvillea, zinnias also feature in some of the dramatic floral headpieces that were her trademark.   

Despite a love of colour, for many years I could not see the attraction in them. Their stiff habit, dry, papery petals and outlandish colours reminded me too strongly of the depressing vases of cloth flowers my grandmothers and great aunts had gathering dust on mantelpieces and windowsills when I was a child. In the past few years, though, I have begun to appreciate the shot of energy they bring at this time of the year, when many perennials in the garden are on the wane. Picked for the house, in combination their colours intensify and play off each other and, like a good firework display, provoke an instant rush of childlike joy.