Finally, the winter is here. A cleansing frost that rose from the hollows and enveloped the garden in a unifying stillness. Colour held at bay where the freeze touched down, a red sky thrown from a late sunrise and then shadows elongating and revealing the humps, the bumps and the winter tussocks on the Tump. 

It is a relief that the tender salvias and their persistence into December is at last curtailed. The dahlias are finally blackened and the place that the nasturtiums made for themselves so swiftly made absent. The inevitable snap is later than ever this year, and things had begun to feel uncomfortably out of kilter, but the sudden shift feels right and the letting go cathartic. Time for the garden to rest.

The leaves are finally torn from the poplars to reveal their grey, wintry outlines. The last of the autumn colour hangs in the hazel understorey. The Molinia ‘Transparent’* wait until now to do their very best and, as the wood becomes bare, the grasses in the garden begin their blaze.

I first saw Molinia ‘Transparent’ in the mid ‘90’s, growing in the garden of the late Mien Ruys in the Netherlands. I’d gone with my friends Izzy and Gabriela to meet this great designer and to look at her garden, which was ground-breaking for its juxtaposition of loose, naturalistic planting to the geometries of the layout. It was several weeks earlier in the autumn and the molinia were planted alone and in gravel so that you could appreciate their reach and the fullness of filamentous flower. They were spaced so that you could walk between the plants, which arched up and out and towards each other. Planted just as they should be to reveal their form and to make a place of their own. The flowers, which were yet to go to seed, were plum-red forming a dark halo at their extremities. Everything moved as we walked amongst them, swayed by the slightest breeze and our caresses.

Earlier in October I posted an image of my first autumn snowdrop. Reactions ran high for this apparently out of season anomaly. Surely the snowdrop is an emblem of deep midwinter, a welcome sign of life in a grim February, but out of place for showing its head in the wrong season? Being thoroughly under their spell and wanting the spell to last for as long as it can, I was surprised that people were not as delighted as I am by the first of the season.  

I never meant to fall so hook, line and sinker and for years stood by a self-imposed rule that I had to be able to spot the difference between one snowdrop and another from a sensible distance in order to justify acquiring them. To a point this is still true, but the more you go deeper, the more you understand that galanthus are as varied as a room full of people. Some rise early, others with the crowd or fashionably late and their differences in character are as nuanced as anyone on the spectrum of galanthophilia could possibly need them to be. 

Finally there is a chill in the air after weeks of warmth, with grass still growing and meals eaten outside when it really should be time to be in. I have been keeping a close eye on the forecast, but a frost has eluded us so far and the garden has continued on. The nasturtiums, which are the litmus test to freeze, are sprawled further than ever across the paths in the vegetable garden, their growth unchecked and now unseasonally green in contrast to the pull of dark nights and dormancy.  

Watching closely, I have been gently preparing for the winter. To be ready for it when it finally comes. Some of the tasks have felt premature and preparing the gunnera to tent their crowns with their own leaves is usually a task that happens immediately after a frost in early November. By then they are wilted enough to have lost their presence, but this year I waded in to dismember them whilst they were still entire. Working amongst their vast canopies, cutting through stems heavy with sap and the rasp of leaves not yet diminished in power by a freeze. It was a good day, but one that felt out of kilter with what we expect of November. 

We’ve been clearing the beds in the vegetable garden over the past few weekends, with the aim of getting as many of them manured this side of Christmas as possible. The withered climbing beans have been slipped from their hazel supports, the last dried beans in their parchment pods saved for sowing next year. The spiny skeletons of courgettes pulled from the ground with gloved hands, their almost non-existent root systems making me wonder how on earth they get so huge and produce such an endless succession of water-swollen fruits. And the ghostly grove of rustling sweetcorn, which was left standing for as long as possible, because its coarse whisper brought such a strong Halloween atmosphere to the fading kitchen garden, was finally felled. All were thrown onto the compost heap to complete their life cycles. No longer providing food for us, but now offering shelter and sustenance to a slew of other creatures, both visible and invisible. In the coming year the resulting compost will be spread on the beds to improve and feed the soil producing next season’s harvest and so it will feed us once more in another chain of the cycle. 

Along with the spent crops there have also been roots to lift and store. Primarily beetroots and carrots, although most years we also have turnips. We lift these now and store them in the barn in paper sacks alongside the potatoes. If left in the ground we have found that the beets are damaged by slugs which then invites rot, while the carrots are prey to wireworm, which renders them inedible.

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.