The farmer who cuts our hay for us in exchange for the grazing is usually ready and waiting on or around July the 15^th. Of course, the date is weather dependent, but it is fixed for a good reason. There is still energy in the meadows as they have not yet run completely to seed and the hay is still nutritious. Importantly for us, the annual Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor), which we introduced to help curb the vigour of the grasses has had a chance to seed. The saying goes “When the rattle rattles, it is time to make hay”. And sure enough, when our feet rustle amongst the bladder shaped seedpods, we know the meadows have not much time left for standing.  

This year the meadows were cut a whole three weeks later than usual, because the bailer went up in smoke in the week of the last heatwave. We let out a gentle sigh of relief, because the eerie silence that descends after the hay is harvested is always disquieting. All that habitat swept up over two fast days. First the cut with the hay left to dry in the sun, then the windrowing later in the day to gather it into a giant’s corduroy for easy baling, The next day the dusty commotion of the bailer and, if he can, the farmer collects the same day so all is done and silent by the second evening. 

The Field Scabious are high summer flowers. Hovering, lilac-blue and dusk-luminous once the meadows turn tawny. They arrive as the heat comes into July and hold well into August, the month of wild carrot and twisting bindweed. A time of dark greens, pale fields and ripening as the energy shifts towards berry and seed. 

I step a number of cultivated scabious into the garden as the first round of summer perennials pass and begin to change the tone to maintain vitality and provide a succession of forage for pollinators in August. We are lucky enough here to have room to allow them to repeat and the original plantings of Scabiosa ochroleuca have migrated along the paths where they are happiest on the edge of things. I leave the seedlings where there is room, their filigree foliage being distinctive and easy to winkle out if they look like they might overwhelm their chosen company.  When happy, a seedling can make flower in the first year and go on to be in their prime in the second and third. Though they will live longer, the older a plant becomes, the more it is prone to splay and showing its middle, so I keep them on rotation, removing the eldest and editing the seedlings so that I look like I rule the roost and they don’t. 

The first winter here I extended the farmer’s vegetable garden and the only square of cultivated ground in the lee of the milking barn. The following summer, our first summer of new wonder, we began the great experiment to see what the land was made of. We planted a kitchen garden, as there is nothing like vegetables and annual flowers to tell you what does well within a growing season. With space on my hands for the first time and not the vicarious space of a client’s garden, I dissected the new plot into additional rectangles to begin a trial of plants for the garden, which was then in my mind’s eye but now, ten years later, overwrites these first cultivations. 

Whilst I was gathering my thoughts and with ground to spare, four areas were sown with Pictorial Meadow mixes so that I could test them for myself and witness their day to day evolution. I’d used them before to provide a show where we were staggering the development of a garden or for a fast and easy fix in an area where we needed an economical solution. But there is nothing like growing at close quarters and witnessing the evolution of a garden on a daily basis and under your own control. Developed originally by Nigel Dunnett who this year sowed the Superbloom at the Tower of London, the panels were each different in mood and their raipid development taught me a lot in that first summer of discovery. The red orach toppling in one mix showed us the heartiness of the soil and the need to keep it lean in our blustery exposed position. The Shirley poppies, that still come up in the garden today are the offspring of these early years of pioneering and live on as a memory. 

Although it’s just two weeks since my last recipe, Dan has been away for most of this week and so it falls to me to provide for you all again. And, as the harvest season begins in earnest, the kitchen garden has been much on my mind.

Just before Dan left we dug out the last of the broad beans and peas, laden with full pods we have not had time to pick in the last few weeks. It was a hot evening and we threw the plants into barrows and wheeled them to the shade of the covered area next to the house, where we sat down with cold drinks and removed the pods. 

The day lilies are a celebration of summer, brightly teetering and reaching towards the sun. Each stem holds several buds that come in succession, so the fact that the individual flowers last just a day is neither here nor there, for most have a month’s supply to claim high summer. 

I first encountered their steadfastness when we unearthed a double form of the Tawny daylily, Hemerocallis fulva, in my childhood garden. Several clumps stood strongly amongst the nettles and tangle of bramble to mark a long-forgotten border from another time. They had survived fifty years of neglect and didn’t even thank us for clearing around them. They just carried on as if nothing had happened. 

At the end of my childhood garden, beyond the old Nissan hut, was a wasteland which still appears in my dreams. Once it had been the site of allotments, which I imagine saw good service during the war years, but which had been deserted long before my parents moved there. When I was young it was a seemingly endless tangle of brambles and nettles, colonised by seedling ash and sycamore. Compared to our suburban garden, where dad mowed stripes into the lawn on Saturdays and the shrubs were regimented in beds to either side and pruned regularly to keep them in check, the ‘Plot’, as we called it, was a feral place rich with shadows and the possibility of adventure. It was also the home of the ogres, witches, wolves and murderers that haunt childhood imaginations. It was a place where I could conjure Middle-earth or Narnia on my own back door step.  

There were two long derelict glasshouses, which we had been forbidden to enter, but of course did, our hearts racing a little at the danger of such disobedience. Broken glass crunched underfoot and sometimes a pane would crash to the ground and splinter sending us running for the doorway, our arms clasped over our heads. An old whitewashed beehive still stood in a clearing and buzzed to bursting in summer with the wild colony that had taken it over. Once they swarmed into our garden and dad called a man to come and take them away in a box. The beehive stood near an impenetrable thicket of bushes, which made a great hiding place during games of Hide and Seek, unless you happened to push yourself into the thorns of the gooseberries and raspberries, since these were the mature and unkempt remains of somebody’s wartime fruit garden where, alongside the berries, were red and blackcurrants.

The first half of summer would not be the same without Lilium regale. Sitting dormant over the winter in pots up by the cold frame, it is always hard to resist a rummage when the promise of their awakening is in the air. I have been stung more than once by such impatience, damaging a new shoot before it has fully broken ground and ruining all the energy stored carefully in the bulb from the year before. Patience learned the hard way sees me waiting now to check the number of stems once they have broken ground, the coppery growth which at first looks not unlike a sea anemone and comes with such promise. 

Over the course of the spring, the stems rise up fast, tilting towards the sun as they grow and festooned along their length in foliage. The buds, which were formed last year and are carried in the growing tip, are held protected in the ruff of foliage until late in May when another moment of restraint is needed not to part it to count this year’s buds. Behaviours I learned as a boy when I fell under their spell, for my father grew two oak tubs of the Regal lily opposite the front door on the drive. I can still remember their charge and expectation and it is every bit as good today as the buds begin to swell and make their presence felt in the run up to the longest day of the year. 

Last week, we spent a June night at Great Dixter. I arrived late after giving a Garden Masterclass at Sissinghurst and met Fergus Garrett on the drive, who was busily ferrying a very full car of excitable people to the train station. The sun had already gone down and twilight had begun. Dark hedges and the push of meadows spilling over the path to the front door. The greyness of the Crataegus orientalis that I have known since I was a teenager and a cloud of perfume from the pots of the sweet pea ‘Matucana’ huddled round the porch at the front door. 

Great Dixter had been hosting a group of environmentalists and like-minded thinkers for the previous three days and the after-party mood pervaded the house. Washers up in the kitchen after a final last supper and the remaining guests who were also overnighting, drinking in the half light on the back terrace where the enormous myrtle hunkers into the building and dierama spill from cracks in the paving. Huw and Wren had arrived earlier, but no one knew where they were. Standing on the parapet of the terrace, though, I could hear familiar voices down in the stillness of the garden. 

The hogweed have pushed their heads above the meadows and in the rough places where they have taken their hold. Heracleum sphondylium is a brute if it has the conditions it favours and will soar to two metres to eclipse less vigorous companions. We see this happening here on newly disturbed ground and in the rich soils by the ditch, but in the higher, drier meadows it is kept in check and steps nimbly enough in company. We watch it though as it will rain an army of seedlings which, from their lofty position, can travel some distance. If they find a shadowy area where the competition is less the hogweed will soon be king. 

We have watched their evolution in the top meadows, enjoying their creamy flower, but noting their propensity for dominance where they find a niche. Being biennial, or  more usually a short-lived perennial, the simplest control in those areas where they risk becoming dominant is to deadhead the umbels after they have done what they can for the pollinators, but before they run to seed. This is a task that is left until the meadows are already toppled by rain so that you cannot see your tracks and always with gloves as the sap can be an irritant in sunshine. 

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend in the garden