At the beginning of the pandemic and locked down in the isolation that was forced upon us all, I began to post daily moments of that incredible spring on Instagram. It was a counterpoint to the fear we were living with on a daily basis. The reassuring surety of the unfurling season and its life force. 

The films were no more than a minute and were made to capture the incremental changes. I’d sit and take in what happened in front of me for a given moment so that the films felt like moving stills. Spring light caught in wood anemones. The sound of the wind in the poplars above and April birdsong. By definition every post was different, because in truth a moment only happens the once. Time slowed and captured. 

I was lucky enough to have an enlightened editor during my time writing for The Observer. I loved working with Allan Jenkins. He pushed hard when he needed to, but left you to enjoy the process once he’d set the scene and his expectations. He was good at making a creative environment in which you could flourish and he paired Howard Sooley and I on the gardening pages for the best part of ten years. 

It was easy to have Howard as part of our lives during our time in the Peckham garden. He’d come down weekly on my Friday writing day, we’d talk over our subject matter over coffee and then he’d set off into the garden, whatever the weather and time of year. There was always talk about plants and life and our common ground. Chat that moved easily from one thing to the next and often revolved around things that matter. The recurring theme of authenticity and of being in the moment and of context. We talked about looking and in taking the time to do so through our respective disciplines.

During the course of this last week, we have witnessed a change in gear and the signs are marked in a gathering number of indicators. Garlic spears in the woods pushing through leaf litter as the brilliance of the snowdrops and their February energy dims. As if it was planned for, the first of the primroses appear to cover for them, first flower alongside the waning Galanthus, the relay now begun. As you turn your eye to the hellebores, which are now hitting their stride, the first stirrings are suddenly everywhere. Tulips pushing through ground that just a week ago was apparently empty. The seedlings of the wood aster germinating quite literally in their thousands. 

The pools of shadow under the trees where I’ve planted Cardamine quinquefolia (main image) were cleared as a first job in the New Year, the early risers driving the pace and the order of things. We then moved on to clear and mulch the areas where the bulbs have been worked amongst the perennials. Mulched before any signs of growth were visible, they have come to life this month and grown up and through the protective eiderdown. New spears never look better than pushing through mulch and getting the timing right is like knowing your footwork in a dance. It allows you to move with confidence and to keep your eye on the advancing spring. It also speeds the process so that you work around the habits of your plants and their timings and this makes for good feeling. 

Today is not a day to look at the crocus. Battered and tattered by a strong south-westerly with drizzle on the wind to weight and tear at their delicacy. In fact, it is best to look the other way, because the season can be cruel. You have to bask when it’s good and two days ago was quite different, their tapering buds revealing quite another story from their interiors as they blinked open in sunshine. Held from us for weeks now, your whole body welcomes this flood of saturated colour, freedom and abundance.

Though I love the spare winter, the first crocus spearing the grass are genuine magic. First one, then several flashes of mauve, silvery on the outside like a shoal of fish or hatch marks made repeatedly with crayon. Crocus tomassinianus are the first to show here and the repeat and the abundance are what I am after beneath the crab apples. It has taken a number of false starts to get to where we are now and, until relatively recently, it was possible to source the true form with the pearly coat and the flash of pale mauve that contrasted the interior. The species has poise and slenderness and a colour that is compatible with the first of the gold eranthis or the early narcissus and the silvery grey of the season.  

This very weekend in 2010 we came to visit Hillside for the first time. We walked down the north-facing slope where our friends live on the other side of the valley, crossed the stream in the woods that runs the boundary and strode up the hill into the long shadows of the poplars. When we reached the house and its assemblage of makeshift outhouses, we turned around, faced into sunshine and surveyed our potential prospect. The uninterrupted view up and down the valley and fertile ground that in our minds eye represented dreams of being part of somewhere. 

It was a very different place back then, with its runs of barbed wire bringing the grazing to the very foot of the buildings. Bleak and exposed without any protection if you took it at face value, but already we carried the dream that one day the open slopes would carry orchards and a garden would nestle the buildings. We took five years to plan how we’d go about making change and in this time we ruminated. Noting where the light fell and the wind didn’t blow and where the shelter might afford us a warm corner in the sun or a cool one in the shade. I knew immediately that the garden should feel subservient to the view and to be part of it, but it was important that it allowed us to hunker into the slopes. The garden would provide us a sanctuary and a little sensuality as a counterpoint to the exposure.

This week we have been part of an almost imperceptible shift, but one that registers deeply. We have tipped the mid-way between the winter equinox and the spring solstice, and the light is finally on our side. In sun that fingers over the hill before coffee time and in the weight of darkness that is now in retreat. Afternoons that are no longer curtailed by gloom and evenings that start at six make all the difference in how we use the day. 

Just a week ago the snowdrops down by the stream were barely nosing through leaf mould. Visible only when you walked amongst them as clutched fingers holding tightly onto buds, the growth has been slow and epitomised my yearning for movement. But this first week of February their energy has been on the move, the flowers pushed and all at once luminous so that you can see them as you look down from the house. A bright ribbon that represents hours of obsessive dividing and imagining this very break on winter’s hold. I followed the trail from the lowest point in our land just this morning, walking upstream, with the light behind me to show them at their best and planned this year’s divisions that can now begin to extend its reach and influence upon the season.

These are store cupboard and pantry days in the kitchen. Meals assembled from the toughest veg standing out in the garden, combined with those brought in to dry storage last autumn together with our own preserves and frozen supplies put away during the last growing season. With soft herbs, oriental greens and winter lettuce in the polytunnel, a variety of lentils, beans and grains in the pantry, a well-stocked spice cupboard and those ingredients that add depth and savour – think anchovies, capers, parmesan, olives, tahini, miso – there is little need to venture to the shops. And so, over the past couple of chilly weeks, we have hunkered down and eaten simply and mostly our own.

In the vegetable garden a continuation of last year’s blighted season saw all our early purple sprouting broccoli, many of the kales and even the red cabbages succumbing to the brutal freeze in early December. On one night it got down to minus 10ºC and many of the potatoes stored in paper sacks in the uninsulated barn were also frosted beyond use. ‘blue Danube’ was. the exception, retaining it’s firm, pure white flesh, so I’ve just placed an order for tubers to grow again this year. Adding insult to injury, after I had carefully nursed them through the heatwaves last summer, all but five of the sixteen celeriac were reduced to balls of slime. And the chard, usually our most dependable, productive and frostproof winter crop, have been eaten repeatedly by deer. So, although we are eating mostly our own, this year it has been a more limited diet than usual of beetroot, cabbage, pumpkin and potatoes.  

At some point this winter the old ash pollard leaned into the next phase of its life as a refuge for all the things that have contributed to its end. A seedling elder in the crown deposited by birds, brambles between its knuckled roots and, of several mycological inhabitants, a matt black fungus exuding from its cracks and fissures.  

Pollarding the ash was one of the things that the farmer here did in his last and seventy fourth year. It was the year before we moved to Hillside and took over the custodianship of the land and in our first year here the ash put out hesitant regrowth that indicated that the tree was in retreat. It stood quietly alone and monumental on the flank of The Tump to mark the handover. A figure, an enormous timber torso we named Venus, which surveyed the open grounds in each direction. 

The new year has brought deluge. One day after another of rains. Some gentle and constant, but the most persistent lashing against the windows and driving their way into every corner of our ramshackle barns. The soil, which just weeks ago was still cracked and fissured by summer drought, is now at saturation point. Springs are breaking through on the slopes and travelling over the surface because they have nowhere else to go and the stream that runs in the crease in the bottom of the valley has been boiling over and throwing itself at the twists and turns to redefine its contours.  

The alders that I planted to stabilise the banks ten years ago were placed at a sensible distance to give them time to get their fibrous roots established, but this much water is outstripping even their fast growth, so that several are already teetering on the edge where the banks have been eroded.

we wish you all a very happy Christmas and a peaceful new year

we’ll see you in 2023