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

For the first year since we have been here the cow parsley on the lane has stood standing on both sides. Previously the neighbouring farmer, who has the fields to the other side of the lane, has cut it on his side just after it starts flowering in the belief that it taints the milk. A sign of the times this year has been marked by this spring phenomenon having its liberty, for he has now converted to beef cattle. For the first time the lanes are unbroken, their lifeline spilling from the banks and continuously along the verges. 

I enjoy the lacing of the lanes and the shadowy parts of our meadows where the cow parsley thrives, but I am not brave enough, as Fergus Garrett is at Great Dixter, to let it venture into the garden. At least not in its wild form, but I have invited the liquorice-leaved Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ into the beds where it is brilliant for rising up early and covering for a discernible gap between spring and summer. The couple of weeks before and then during the Chelsea Flower Show when we suddenly find spring racing and then tipping into summer. 

The hungry gap has been shorter than usual this year, but we are still in the slim pickings phase of the new round of harvesting. The spring cabbages are over. The remainder of last season’s kales have all gone to flower, as have the beetroot, their gargantuan roots now tough and woody. We have eaten our fill and fill of chard. And so we have been watching very closely to see when the first of the real spring vegetables will appear. 

From the Instagram feeds of restaurants and foodies you would think that late spring began in late February, since that was when the posts of asparagus, broad beans, peas, artichokes and even courgettes started appearing. At that time of year I just know that most of those vegetables will have come from the polytunnels of Spain, perhaps southern Italy or even further afield, and I always feel rather duped by the promise of early summer they make when in reality it is only now that those vegetables are starting to make an appearance in British gardens and farmer’s markets. 

It has been seven months since we began the process of healing the rawness around the newly excavated pond. It was early September, the optimum time to throw down the meadow seed, and the ground greened quickly to stabilise the slopes over the winter. 

A pond at the bottom of a slope is not an easy thing to build and, by the time we had completed the work at the end of August, using the dry summer months for the dig, the weather was cooling and it was too late in the season to plant. So the pond lay waiting. An empty disk of sometimes silvery, sometimes inky-green water, reflecting the seasons as they came and went. In March we were surprised to see both frog and toad spawn, but despite our delight we were unsettled to see it without a haven as it drifted in March winds without an anchor or the shelter provided by planting. Life had begun against the odds. 

There is an exponential moment that happens at the beginning of May.  A coming together of energy that is altogether bigger than anything we can garden. A bluebell wood hovering and luminous or the brilliant carpet of wild garlic that make the woods their own. It is a particular feeling to be part of this energy if you put the time aside to do so. To pause and feel the surge.

To achieve the same experience in a garden is something to strive for. A feeling of immersion where the sum of the parts is greater than the components. A generosity that stops you in your rush or diversions, because the very nature of the moment is that it will be fleeting, and probably just the once. The light falling a certain way, the particularities of the year or just chancing to be there when it all comes together.