A week ago, suddenly and unexpectedly, we lost our dear canine companion.
We buried him in the top field above the house, where he used to go to be more dog.
He would sit here with a view over our land and the length of the valley. With his nose raised to the sky, he would close his eyes and take in the scents on the air.
This arrangement was gathered from the nearby hedgerow and field banks. A collection of wild things for an almost wild boy.
We are now going to take a little time off, to recuperate and gather ourselves for the approaching winter
We are thankful to all of you who have written and will be back with you in mid-October.
Published 11 September 2021
When the pandemic took hold last year we decided very quickly that we would no longer split our time between here and running the studio in London. The enforced remote working proved that what we’d thought not possible was possible and the grip of the city quickly lost its hold. This was something we’d been planning for, but the enforced decision presented another layer of engagement. To be here daily has been profoundly different and we have gone deeper in the process of living our lives here more fully.
The polytunnel was a direct response to being able to tend the place daily and to get more out of the land by extending the growing season. Arriving late, because the steel for the frames was being used to make hospital beds at the beginning of the lockdown, it eventually arrived at the end of May. It was erected for the beginning of June, running down our steep slope in a north / south orientation as it should be, the sun hitting either side equally as it arcs over the course of the day from east to west.
The tomatoes by that point were straining in the cold frames so we planted them up in growbags as there wasn’t time to make in-ground beds. It was late to plant them out, a good six weeks, but they made up for lost time in the glorious summer. At the end of the season we inherited a second cultivation pause whilst we constructed the beds so that we could grow our plants in the ground. Our hearty soil was not so long ago market garden and it seemed entirely wrong to be using growbags.
The Mypex mulch which we’d laid directly over the pasture to keep the ground in the polytunnel clean in the first season had done its job. The soil was now ‘clean’, the rough turf having been starved of light so, once the beds were constructed, we mulched again with compost and put down the first winter crops in early November. We felt the knock-on delays, one bumping into another and the winter crops sat there without light and didn’t move again until spring.
We have both been part of this learning curve, but the polytunnel is very much Huw’s domain and he has claimed the daily running and tending because he is the man behind the vegetable growing. This year we have learned once again. The beds have been so much easier to water than in containers and, in general, the plants have been able to delve deep into good soil and be less reliant upon us. By spring we were back on track and the tomato plants were planted out in mid-May whilst they still had energy in them and hadn’t outgrown their pots.
We got the spacing between rows correct at 60cm, but fear we have been greedy in putting four and not three plants to a row in the beds, so that they are only 45cm apart. The plants have shaded each other and made tending less easy and now, at the end of the season, we have finally got the tomato blight that we were surprised hadn’t hit sooner with the prolonged cool, wet summer. That said the crops to date have been good and the cold season has not had the same impact it would have done had we not made the commitment to this protected growing environment.
Huw’s selection of tomatoes is working towards a perfect balance of varieties that each offer something different, so I will hand over to him now to run you through this year’s choices.
Dan Pearson
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I got my tomato seed order in early last year in mid-September. The reasons were twofold. Firstly, I wanted to place the order while the shortcomings of last year’s varieties were fresh in my mind and secondly, I did not want to risk the varieties I wanted being already sold out due to last year’s extraordinary demand for vegetable seed.
Almost all of this year’s varieties came from The Real Seed Company, whose seed and growing advice I have come to trust over the years. It is a small, ethically run company and, contrary to what you might expect, they give guidance on seed collecting for oneself very freely.
I always like to grow a good variety of different kinds of tomato, both for their appearance on the plate and the range of things you can do with them. This year’s selection includes a number of culinary types or those that can be eaten raw and cooked, some with striped skins or unusual colours and ranging from tiny cherry tomatoes to huge, ribbed beefsteaks. I was also interested to try a number of Eastern European varieties, which start cropping faster, are not as susceptible to cold and some of which are reputed to still produce fruit at Christmas under cover.
Although our harvests this year have been respectable we lost our second trusses during the extreme heat at the end of July when, even with all the doors open, the temperature in the polytunnel reached 42° Centigrade. With the blight that has just arrived in the last 36 hours on the back of last week’s damp, cold weather it now looks as though that may be our lot for this year. I have just arrived back from a couple of days in London but, first thing tomorrow morning, I will be heading down to the polytunnel for a thorough inspection before starting the necessary but slightly disheartening business of removing the lot. However, the silver lining is that I can get a late sowing of French beans in the ground before we go on holiday for a couple of weeks.
Huw Morgan
This year’s selection listed as seen from left to right in the main image. For scale, the largest tomato (the beefsteak Feo de Rio Gordo) is 11cm in diameter and 8cm high.
An unusual pale yellow variety from the Ukraine, which produces fruit in a variety of sizes up to medium beefsteak. It can look insipid on the plant, but makes a very elegant sliced tomato salad, particularly with purple leaved basil. The flesh is juicy and fresh tasting with a hint of lemon. Reputed to fruit until December with protection.
This old favourite is well named. Reliable, heavy crops of delicious, sweet red cherry tomatoes.
Perhaps the most beautiful tomato you can grow. It starts off green with deep purple streaks, ripening to red blushed dark brown with metallic golden splashes. Unfortunately, however, it is watery and flavourless, although the Real Seed Company recognise this and are working on developing its flavour.
Not purple, but a dark, bruised plum tomato with brown shoulders. One of the earliest to get away and to crop, with an elegant habit and lacinated foliage. Very heavy cropper for us and, due to its provenance, reputed to have a long season. With Black Russian and Amish Paste, this has been the basis of all of the passata I have made this year.
A monster beef tomato from Spain which has produced a steady stream of fruits weighing in at 400-500g each. Surprisingly early given its size and provenance. Delicious thickly sliced with olive oil and shallots.
A sport of Green Zebra with beautiful gold and green splashed skin and really good flavour. Produces a variety of sizes on each truss from cherry to golf ball to tennis ball. Will be growing again.
Last year’s discovery and a new confirmed favourite. One of the heaviest croppers of all with some trusses having forty or more fruits. Delicious spicy scent and flavour.
This year’s revelation. Large green striped fruits, which ripen very slowly to amber. They retain their firmness on the vine and have been the best keepers, even out of the fridge. The succulent flesh is pale green, which makes a lovely contrast with red tomatoes on the plate and, contrary to expectation, is exceptionally well flavoured. Our new favourite.
An heirloom American variety which produces very large, firm plum tomatoes (the one illustrated is of smaller than average size) with a low water content. Perfect for roasting and grilling, bottling or making into pasta or puree. Not as productive for us as Purple Ukraine.
Another tomato that isn’t really black, but a dark mahogany red. The fruit in the image is small for the variety, which typically produces medium beefsteaks of excellent texture and flavour. Equally good raw and cooked.
We have always grown this and always will. Totally reliable and heavy cropping. The very sweetest tomato of them all and the one that mostly gets eaten either in the polytunnel or between meals.
A variety I grew last year, with lightly striped skin and adequate but not distinctive flavour. Surpassed this year in all departments by Red Zebra. Sorry, but it’s goodbye.
A slightly larger, squarer version of Gardener’s Delight. Firmer and with a thicker skin, so better for packed lunches and picnics. Gardener’s Delight is a much heavier cropper though, so if you are only going to grow one red cherry that would be our choice.
A firm, shiny, bright yellow cherry tomato from Siberia with good flavour. Contrary to the Real Seed Company’s write up, this has been one of our lightest croppers. Will try it again next year.
Words: Dan Pearson & Huw Morgan | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 4 September 2021
August is the month when every meal comes straight out of the kitchen garden. Our local village greengrocer, who is also a market gardener, is now used to my prolonged summer absences, and when I do eventually visit we compare notes on what has done well for us this year and what hasn’t. He knows that I will only buy those things that I can’t or don’t grow myself; plump Italian aubergines, lemons, limes and oranges, root ginger, flat peaches and British strawberries. We used to grow our own, but strawberry virus is rife in our valley and we had a mass crop failure two years ago and so it is the only soft fruit that we now buy. My eyes pass over everything else like so much convenience food, knowing that I am returning to a well-stocked garden of courgettes, summer squash, French beans, peppers, runner beans, cucumbers, salad greens, beetroot, carrots, turnips and sweetcorn.
Such choice and variety can make menu-planning a challenge, as the demands of those things that need to be harvested fight the desires of our mouths and bellies. We don’t fancy runner beans this evening, but they threaten to break the tripods if left unpicked. A tiny courgette left on the plant this evening is sure to be a marrow requiring coring and stuffing two days’ hence. And do I have time to dig, wash, roast and peel beetroot, when a tomato salad will take just moments to prepare?
And have we eaten tomato salads in the past few weeks. Almost every day for days and days. Nothing fancy, just thickly sliced tomatoes – beefy ‘Feo de Rio Gordo’ and ‘Black Russian’, striped ‘Red Zebra’ and ‘Green Zebra’ and pale yellow ‘Lotos’ – simply dressed with olive oil, homemade vinegar and sea salt, a scattering of fresh basil or oregano and perhaps some finely sliced shallots. The most productive of all are the cherry tomatoes which, when they’re not just popped whole into your mouth like sweeties, have gone into pans of braised vegetables – courgettes and beans – sauces and soups, or I have slow cooked them in the oven before bottling them in jars for the pantry. This is a change from bottling them whole and uncooked as I did last year. As they are cooked you can pack them in and get far more tomatoes to a jar, so saving space in the pantry for other preserves. I will use their concentrated flavour to bring a taste of summer to winter dishes or delicious, unseasonal luxury to a slice of toast.
Last week I was left with half a tray of these mi-cuit (half-cooked) tomatoes, which wouldn’t fit into the jar. Pondering what to do with them, my eye caught sight of the Genovese basil in the herb bed, and so I made this quick and easy recipe for an impromptu summer lunch. If you don’t have the time or inclination to make your own pastry, this is even quicker and easier with a pack of shop bought puff pastry or some sheets of oiled filo. Replace the basil with any fresh herb that complements tomatoes like tarragon, chervil, oregano or thyme. The sharper flavour of authentic sheep milk feta and sheep curd works very well with the sweetness of the tomatoes but, if these aren’t easy to get hold of, substitute cow’s milk feta and ricotta.
270g plain flour
10g fine polenta
140g, chilled butter, cubed
1 egg, beaten
Ice cold water
Salt
250g sheep feta
125g sheep curd or ricotta
125ml double cream or mascarpone
A large handful of fresh basil leaves
2 large eggs, beaten
About 500g cherry tomatoes, halved, sprinkled with salt and slow-cooked for 2 hours at 125°C, then allowed to cool
You will need a 20 x 30 cm rectangular or 28 cm round metal tart tin.
Set the oven to 180°C.
Make the pastry by putting the flour, polenta, salt and butter into the bowl of a food processor. Process until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. With the motor running slowly add the beaten egg. Then add chilled water a couple of teaspoons at a time until the dough comes together. When it does, immediately switch off the machine, remove the dough and form into a ball.
On a floured surface quickly roll out the dough and line the tart tin. Trim off the overhanging pastry, prick the base all over with a fork, line with baking parchment and baking beans and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the baking beans and parchment and return to the oven for 5-8 minutes, until golden brown and looking dry. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
Put the feta, sheep curd and cream into the food processor and process until well combined. Add the basil and process again until the mixture is completely flecked with green. With the motor running add the beaten eggs. Pour the filling into the pastry case. Arrange the cherry tomatoes on top of the basil cream, fitting in as many as you can. Return to the oven for a further 25-30 minutes, until the tomatoes are lightly browned and the basil cream is golden in places and puffy.
Serve warm with a green salad.
Recipe & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 28 August 2021
When we arrived here, we took back some of the field to make a trial garden. It was workmanlike in its layout, with dirt paths between manageably sized beds and functioned as a test ground to see what the conditions here were capable of. We grew a range of perennials to see what would feel right and do well on our south-facing slopes as well as vegetables and flowers for cutting for immediate rewards in that first exciting growing season.
The annuals were the immediate litmus, rearing out of virgin ground where they were bathed in sunshine. The response was immediate and immediately rewarding, the cabbages bulking up to a couple of feet across and letting us know exactly why this had once been a market garden and that, yes, it was right to turn field back to garden. For fun, and as a celebration of this new space, we planted a bed of five or six types of sunflower. They grew like you remember things growing as a child, the seedlings popping through the newly turned dirt and not looking back as they raced skyward. I hadn’t seen growth like it and before long they were standing literally twice as tall as me and rejoicing as we were in this wonderful new ground.
We picked them by the bucket and took vigorous bunches back to the studio in London to tide us over during the week and stop us pining for the hillside. They kept us going through July and were at their peak in August, reminding me by the end of the month of that back to school feeling. The time of the year when the summer is nearly done, but still caught in their energy.
In September we let them form seed and those that didn’t get ravaged by an October storm stood blackened by frost, the seed cases scattered at their feet where the birds had feasted. Seedlings returned in the garden and I left them where I could work around them in the following years, but when we developed the kitchen garden to the east of the house and then the perennial garden to the west, they temporarily lost their home.
Last year’s response to the pandemic saw us putting up a polytunnel so that we could extend our season of growing to eat. This year I extended a new growing area around it to make an area for continued trials and a spill over for vegetables that need more space. Potatoes were planted to ‘clean’ the ground in this first year of transition from pasture and to repeat the experiments from our first years here we planted a new bed of dahlias, annuals for cutting and sunflowers. It has been so very good to have them back and in generous amount, once again letting us know that, yes, this is a good place for growing.
We have three varieties of Helianthus annuus that have done splendidly. ‘Lemon Queen’, ‘Velvet Queen’ and ‘Chocolate Cherry’. This will be the last year though that we grow ‘Italian White’, a more demure variety that has proven once again to be a shadow of its cousins. Perhaps it is my own experience and I have been unlucky, but every time it germinates poorly and then limps through life. Shy is appealing sometimes, but when you have such boisterous cousins that literally throw you into shade, it makes comparison difficult.
As a complement and for the saturation of pure orange, the Mexican Sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia, has been easy and rewarding. Grown from seed sown inside and planted out after frost, we have combined it with lime green Nictotiana langsdorfii. The new ground is here to spur ideas and a few plants, the Tithonia included, have already found their way into the perennial garden to punch some late indelible colour. Annuals are good for that, taking this month as their own with no apologies and covering for anything that tends to that back to school feeling.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 21 August 2021
The first Cyclamen hederifolium are already in flower and letting us know that autumn isn’t far off. Although I love their coil from bare earth, their arrival always triggers a pang of melancholy. Surely it cannot already be this time and summer already waning ?
In truth I find August one of the most difficult of months and always have, time showing in the garden where you haven’t quite got it right or where you haven’t built in a degree of expectation to keep the energy up. Knowing myself, I have learned to not give the mood purchase and plan for it with an undercurrent of asters and a stride of late-flowering grasses that still have energy in them and are yet to come into their own.
Where we leave the meadows long on the banks beneath the house, they have mostly run to seed and lie akimbo after summer storms. Wild carrot, a good latecomer and a reason to leave the meadows long until the end of the month in places, offer their flat creamy heads for the wealth of life that still occupies this place. The late cut allows for the last of the scabious, the knapweed and the late-blooming wild origanum and I have added to the banks with a slow but measured introduction of everlasting peas.
Lathyrus latifolius is a long-lived perennial usually seen in a bright magenta and often taking hold on the sunny sides of railway embankments. Perhaps these plants, often seen with running asters, were originally an escapee, hurled over a fence for being too vigorous in garden company. They could just as easily have been flung over the fence naturally, their seedpods splitting on a hot day, cracking open and catapulting their contents.
I have ‘White Pearl’, a clean creamy form here and I plan for there to be a flotsam of lathyrus to sit amongst the choppy hollows of the spent meadows. I plant twenty or so every year, which I raise from seed to extend their domain. You have to get to the seed as the pods dry and brown, but before they rupture and the seeds are jettisoned. Sown fresh they are often up in the autumn to overwinter in the frame to be the right size to plant out the following spring.
Being nitrogen fixing, the peas are happy to take to poor ground and where the company isn’t too vigorous on the dry banks they rise up and take hold as the meadows around them begin to fade. We have the narrow-leaved everlasting pea, Lathyrus sylvestris here also. The seed originally came as a gift from my friend Jane who collected it on the cliffs above Branscombe Bay in Devon. Though it is naturalised in many parts of Britain it is speculated that it wasn’t also an escapee originally. It is a pretty thing with small flowers of a dull rose-pink and growth that reminds me of a stick insect. Long, straight limbs to rise up and above the competition and tendrils that allow it to attach and suspend itself in a scaffolding of growth using nothing more than the spent stems of the grasses to provide purchase. Touch the plant and you can feel how structural its cage of growth becomes despite its delicate appearance.
I would not plant either pea in the garden for fear of being over-run, as they are more than capable of growing to 2 metres in a season. Neither have scent, but this is a small price to pay for such a welcome interlude in the high and teetering summer.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 7 August 2021
Today’s In The Garden is the result of an extremely busy week. In fact, we almost thought about not doing Dig Delve today but, having thrown myself at work this morning, I took a deep breath after lunch and it has been a pleasure to gather all of the colour in the garden and arrange it on the mantelpiece for us and you. However busy I am, as soon as I put my head in the right space for flowers, everything else falls away.
First thought is, ‘What is the story?’ Despite the glowering cloud and torrential rain, it is the colour that draws me into the garden. Then, ‘Which containers?’ ‘More colour.’ I think. So down from the shelf in the boot room comes my collection of Italian, coloured glass vases, covered in months of dust and cobwebs. The first job was to wash and dry them, before arranging them on the mantelpiece, looking at a good distribution of form and colour, while also considering a range of heights spread evenly to ensure a good rhythm. Without anything in them this can be a bit hit and miss and, once the vases are in position and filled with water, with the first stems arranged, it can be nerve-wracking or foolhardy to try and re-arrange them.
Then the selecting and cutting of flowers. This takes longer than you might think. Judging whether a plant can spare the bloom. Should I just take one, or several? Sometimes one perfect flower means sacrificing several buds still to mature. Will it stand upright in the vase? If not, how will I get it to face the way I want it to? Then, how to get them back to the house undamaged? Some flowers are far more fragile than others. The hemerocallis are a case in point with their fleshy, snappable petals. Three ‘Stafford’ were cut to get the one perfect one in the arrangement, while I had to give up on the Hemerocallis altissima every one of which was broken just getting it into the trug. There were meant to be poppies, but they shed all their petals long before I could get them into position.
I picked a few at a time, going round the garden methodically, starting down by the barns and working my way through to the end of the main garden. Each trugful contained perhaps just five flowers to prevent squashing. I placed each batch where I felt they would start to create the right composition of colour and form. By chance the softer colours came first – blues, mauves, pinks – then the yellows, followed by the strong pinks, reds, saffrons and oranges.
Stand back and evaluate. Are any flowers hidden? Is there enough space to see most or all of them clearly? Is the colour rhythm working? Does it need more yellow? More red? More height? Are the vases pleasingly spaced? These questions come as observations, not concrete thoughts, and once they have been answered it is time to take the first photographs.
Picture this. I slip off my Birkenstocks and climb onto the dining table, over which hang two pendant lamps. The one at the mantelpiece end is right where I need to be to get my framing right. So I carefully balance it on the nape of my neck and then try not to make any sudden movements, otherwise it comes swinging round to hit the front of my face and my camera, and it is made of metal and has sharp edges. Years of practice mean that this fortunately seldom happens.
Then the light needs to be right. Today has been particularly gloomy, so I had to use a low aperture setting and high ISO to get the exposure right, but this also means the images are far more prone to camera shake. I can’t use a tripod, due to the dining table and pendant lamp issues, so I brace myself, keeping my elbows close to my sides as I grip the camera and hold steady while kneeling on the hard table top. Then I just keep shooting, making tiny adjustments to the framing and hoping that one of the images will be good enough.
I check the composition in the playback screen, but it is not until I download the images that I can see whether there is a problem with the arrangement, the composition or the image. If there is, further adjustments are made and then back up on the table to take some shots.
So, that is how the image you see at the top of this page came together today. It is how all of these mantel arrangements come into being. It took the best part of the afternoon, and I enjoyed every minute, but now, it’s time for a glass of wine.
Flowers, words and photograph: Huw Morgan
Published 31 July 2021
I have just returned from a week away working. Not much time in reality, but a sizable shift upon returning. When leaving, the meadows were still standing, alive with life and shifting constantly. Their energy had run to seed in a week or ten days and the farmer we knew was ready and waiting to harvest the hay before the goodness went out of it.
The official date to cut the meadows is July 15th and, as the day approached, the wet July cleared to blue skies and the dry winds and sun that make the cut viable. I knew this was going to happen whilst I was away, so we walked the fields one last time to soak them in. The Meadow Brown butterflies rose in front of us as we pushed our way through the track that we have walked into the Hospital Fields and my feeling of having to leave was part melancholy for being distanced from this place and part for losing the meadows to the season.
Huw sent images to keep me in touch and bang on time on the 15th, the hay was strewn and drying in the gold of evening sunshine. The next day the hay was windrowed in readiness for bailing. Windrowing or tedding is quite an art on our slopes, the fields transformed for one more day to dry and lined up as if they were braided or patterned in a giant corduroy. By the time I returned, the hay was bailed, the process done and the fields lying empty, still and temporarily silenced.
The aftermath of the cut is an interesting moment to be part of and one that sees the garden suddenly come into new focus. Our walks out and beyond are cut short for a while by the shock of the fields stripped bare and the jar between the garden and what lies beyond is immediately closer. Perhaps it has been a subliminal move on my part and a response to the fields being simplified, but the planting in turn kicks into another gear in the very same week. The colour pushes more strongly, and the floral content hits its stride to hold our attention whilst we adjust to the change.
It is good to have separated the ditch from the land that is harvested for hay and although our backdrop is suddenly changed after the cut, the softness of this near environment keeps our boundaries blurred. I have planted into the ditch with perennials that bridge the two worlds and the Inula magnifica do so just at the right moment, lighting the near foreground and removing any melancholy. I have just visited to soak them in and their elongated petals are fluttering brightly amongst the meadowsweet. The butterflies, interestingly, are busy here this week, moved from the now empty meadow, perhaps, to live the summer out where we leave things long.
The ditch and its sense of profusion has been an inspiration for the garden and I have drawn the yellows up so that the inula and the garden proper can talk to each other. Night blooming Hemerocallis altissima, still open and perfumed in the morning, draws the moths into the nightscape garden. Where the cut meadow is quiet, the garden is a feasting ground as dusk descends and the spires of the Digitalis ferruginea are busied.
As the greens darken in the landscape acid yellow dill, run to flower, Euphorbia ceratocarpa and Euphorbia wallichiana provide the bright undercurrent within the intimacy of the garden. Fiery pinpricks of red enliven the immediate foreground and lead you along the inner paths. Potentilla ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’ and softer red Lobelia tupa, whilst a dance of Hemerocallis ‘Stafford, perhaps the best of the reds, reaches out towards you on their beautifully balanced stems. Bright now is good I find, the light suiting true colour, but I have kept things soft towards the edges so that, as the fields recover from their shearing, the garden does not jar. Pale willow herb, and Thalictrum ‘White Splendide’ which smatters a pure clean white and allows your eye to travel to the ditch, the meadowsweet and the sanctuary provided by the places that are allowed to be and escape the harvest.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 24 July 2021
Twenty six years ago I bought a newly published recipe book, which was to have a major impact on the way I cooked. It was the first River Café Cookbook. Throughout my university years I had been cooking from the books of Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Marcella Hazan, Richard Olney, Elisabeth Luard and Claudia Roden, but there was something strikingly different about Rose Gray and Ruthie Rogers’ approach to the Mediterranean kitchen.
Looking back, it is hard to imagine that their approach felt so new, so accustomed are we now to the ideas of seasonal eating and only using the best quality produce, but their minimal approach to preparation and presentation, so artfully expressed in the clean graphic design of the book itself, was not the norm and it was this simplicity of approach and insistence on the very best produce which still sets The River Café apart.
When I worked in film in the 1990s I was lucky enough to eat at The River Café on numerous occasions, my bill charged to various people’s expense accounts. Although it was, and still is, a glamorous destination the food was so memorable that after those heady days were over Dan and I would return whenever we wanted a meal to mark a special occasion; a fortieth birthday, a special friend visiting from overseas, a pre-marriage celebration, the purchase of Hillside. In the abstract, if you look at their menu, the food certainly looks expensive, but in all the years I have eaten there I have never once felt that the food is overpriced. The attention to detail in every aspect of the experience elevates it to a level that makes total sense of restaurant eating. If anyone ever comes to London and asks which is the best restaurant we can recommend I always answer, without hesitation, ‘The River Café’.
Several years ago, faced with this very question from Midori Shintani, head gardener at Tokachi Millennium Forest and an inveterate foodie, we booked ourselves a table. As the first plates were brought out I suddenly saw in the expression on Midori’s face that, although the ingredients may have been European and unusual to her, the care taken with the food was instantly comprehensible. Their restraint and reverence for seasonality and ingredients at their best and the honesty of presentation is comparable to that of domestic and commercial kitchens the length and breadth of Japan.
A favourite recipe from that first book, and one I have lost count of the number of times I have made, is for vignole, a Roman stew of fresh spring vegetables. Also known as vignarole, the vegetables traditionally used are artichokes, broad beans and peas. However, regardless of how good a spring we have or what countless restaurant kitchens would have you believe, these could never really be considered spring vegetables in Britain, so it is a dish I normally make in early summer. The vegetable garden got off to a very slow start this year and, although we have had artichokes for several weeks, it is only now that all three primary ingredients are cropping together. Given the lateness of the season we now also have the first Florence fennel, shallots, courgettes, bush beans and new season garlic, so this dish, based on the method used for vignole, uses everything that is at its best in the vegetable garden right now.
Recipes like this are infinitely adaptable. The only thing to remember is to add the vegetables to the pan in the order of those requiring the longest cooking first. Quartered baby turnips, carrots or the tiniest new potatoes near the start of the cooking time. Earlier in the season, asparagus spears make a fine addition. Add them at the same time as the broad beans. Young chard leaves or spinach can be added at the last minute or tiny radishes. Although mint is the customary herb to use for vignole, at this point in the year I like to combine it with basil which is growing in profusion in the polytunnel, the aniseed flavour of which complements the fennel well.
Serve warm to allow full appreciation of the different flavours and textures, this can be eaten alone as a starter with grilled bruschetta, accompanied perhaps with a melting burrata or fresh mozzarella or to accompany a piece of firm white fish such as halibut.
10 small artichokes with stalks
400g of peas in their pods or a mixture of peas and mange tout – 150g shelled weight
400g broad beans in their pods – 150g shelled weight
150g fine French beans
4 banana shallots – around 300g
4 baby Florence fennel – around 125g
3 small courgettes with flowers – around 250g
2 Little Gem lettuces
2 fat cloves of new season garlic
A small glass of dry white wine, water or stock – about 120ml
A small bunch of Genovese basil
A small bunch of fresh garden mint
The juice of two lemons
Serves 4 to 6
Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Cook the whole artichokes for 5 minutes. Drain and allow to cool.
Shell the peas and broad beans and put in a bowl.
Cut off the stalk ends of the French beans.
Remove the roots, outer leaves, stems and foliage from the Florence fennel. Cut lengthways into eighths.
Peel the shallots and trim off the roots, retaining enough at the base, however, to hold the pieces together when cut lengthways into eighths.
Peel and finely chop the garlic.
Remove the flowers from the courgettes and retain. Cut off the top and bottom of the courgette. With the courgette lying horizontally on the chopping board cut off a diagonal piece from left to right. Roll the courgette a quarter turn away from you and make the same diagonal cut again. Keep turning and cutting until you have wedge shaped pieces of comparable size.
Remove the outer leaves from the lettuces until you are left with the hearts. Keep the leaves for a salad. Trim off any thick stalk, then cut the hearts lengthways into eighths.
In a heavy bottomed large pan gently heat the olive oil over a low heat.
Make a cartouche from a piece of dampened greaseproof paper large enough to cover the inside of the pan.
Add the shallot and garlic to the pan. Stir to coat with the oil. Lay the cartouche over the top, tucking it in to the sides so that no steam escapes. Put the lid on the pan and leave to cook on the lowest possible heat for about 10 minutes until the shallots are translucent and lightly coloured.
Remove the cartouche. Add the fennel and stir. Replace the cartouche and lid and cook for another 3 minutes
While the shallots and fennel are cooking remove the outer leaves from the artichokes and scrape any fibres from the stalk with the edge of a knife. Cut the spiny tops from the inner leaves. Cut the artichokes in half, remove the chokes with a teaspoon and then drop the hearts into a bowl of water to which you have added the juice of one lemon. When they are all done remove them from the water with a slotted spoon and add to the pan of shallots and fennel with the courgettes and French beans. Stir gently. Pour over the glass of wine. Replace the cartouche and lid again and cook for a further 3 minutes.
Lay the lettuce hearts on top of the other vegetables, add the broad beans and peas, replace the cartouche and lid and cook for another 3 minutes.
Remove the pan from the heat and allow to stand for 10 minutes to cool slightly. Then season with salt and lemon juice to taste. You can add some more olive oil now too if you like.
Coarsely chop the basil and mint. Remove the bases from the courgette flowers and discard. Slice the flowers lengthways into thin ribbons. Add all of these to the pan and stir everything together very gently so as not to break up the vegetables.
Leave to stand for another 5 minutes for the flavours to develop before serving.
Recipe and photographs | Huw Morgan
Published 17 July 2021
In 2014 I was appointed as Garden Advisor to Sissinghurst, which was then under the careful guiding hand of Head Gardener, Troy Scott-Smith. The role involved an annual walk round the gardens with Troy, acting as a sounding board for his plans to relax the garden and to steer it gently towards its original vision. Over time, and without the owners at the helm, the gardens had been managed to provide their very best for the swell of visitor numbers. I agreed they no longer resembled the gardens of Vita’s writings or her freedom of spirit.
Troy had spent hours immersing himself in Vita’s imaginings, hopes and plans for the gardens, and had written a manifesto that called for a return to a more relaxed and wild, romantic vision closer to Vita and her husband, Harold Nicolson’s, original intentions.
Every time I visited we skirted around Delos, a garden that had originally been built in response to a visit that Harold and Vita had made in 1935 to the ruins of the Greek island of this name in the Cyclades. The garden had been lost, planted in the wrong place, facing north on heavy Wealden clay. It was a place that had come to be more suited to the site and was now part woodland, part lawn with rose beds lining the boundary. The very name felt like an anomaly.
It was in 2018 that Troy asked me if I would work with him and his team to re-imagine the garden. It was daunting making changes to a garden as universally loved as Sissinghurst, but we set to and looked carefully into the history to understand why Harold and Vita had felt compelled to bring something of the ruined island back to Sissinghurst. Troy had sent two members of his team on a field trip to study the vegetation and record the mood of Delos. The time that I too have spent in Greece provided rich inspiration with regard to the planting. We worked carefully with the National Trust historians to test our ideas as they emerged and spent the best part of a year planning. Visiting a local quarry with Nigel Froggatt, the masterful craftsman who built the garden and taking time to mock up the walls so that they felt authentically of the island.
The design made some bold moves that perhaps Harold and Vita did not have the know-how to make at the time. We made light by editing the existing trees back to a Quercus coccifera from the original planting and harvested the sun by battering a number of terraced walls back into the sun to face south. The original axis was reworked to feel like the stepped ruins we had seen in photographs of the garden taken not long after it was made. The terraces that moved away from it became rougher to invoke the hillsides into which the ruins had fallen. We made the old well the centre of the garden, a communal meeting place as it would be in a Greek village and made a seating place amongst columns where Vita had imagined that the blue of the distance could conjure the sea.
I went on my own research trip to workshop the palette of Greek natives with Olivier Filippi at his nursery in the south of France. His knowledge and plant selection is superlative. Some plants were untested in this country, others entirely familiar. On returning to the UK I worked up the planting areas. Goat paths where the aromatic plants would brush your legs and shade-loving drought lovers that would sit happily in the shadow of Judas trees. A mature pomegranate forms a gateway from the White Garden. A fig and the rough twist of cork oaks will, in time, provide height and volume. Aromatic evergreens are already hugging the terraces and perfuming the garden on a hot day and the ephemerals, the annuals that make a Greek spring the spectacle it is, are already beginning to find their niches to make the garden feel lived-in.
Last week, over a year since my last visit for the final planting day in the week before the first lockdown, I returned for the official opening. The garden felt settled and possibly better for the enforced pause of the lockdown and Saffron Prentis, who has been in charge of the garden, has tended it beautifully. The volunteers who man the garden every day have been there to communicate the story behind it and its reimagining.
In 1953, Vita wrote of Delos, ‘This has not been a success so far, but perhaps someday it will come right.’ I know that the changes have not been liked by all who have seen the garden in the flesh or online, but when I returned last week with the planting already looking established after just 18 months, it was possible to see that Vita and Harold’s vision of a Grecian isle transported to the Kentish Weald is once again alive at Sissinghurst and coming right.
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When we first started work, Adam Nicolson, Vita and Harold’s grandson, was immensely helpful in facilitating our understanding of the deep-seated cultural motivations of both Harold and Vita to create this garden. At the opening last week he very kindly offered to write a piece giving his perspective on Delos, then and now and I am delighted to share it with you here.
Dan Pearson, Hillside, 8 July 2021
The official opening of the new Delos at Sissinghurst last week is only a beginning. The new cypresses will soon stretch and thicken, the new figs will sprawl and lounge across their neighbouring boulders and walls and the individual plants of Dianthus cruentus will spread and merge into rivers of deep pink, bee-happy colour. A long future awaits this garden, as something to take its place alongside the Purple Border and the White Garden as the brightest of stars in the Sissinghurst constellation.
It has been a long time coming. Throughout my childhood at Sissinghurst, we always knew that in the 1930s Vita and Harold had wanted to make a Greek garden in this most unpromising of clay-wet, north-facing and very very Kentish corners. They attempted it, assembling some of the Elizabethan stones they found lying there into stepped platforms that vaguely recalled temple foundations in the drought of the Aegean. But the soil was wrong, the site was wrong and over the years a series of efforts were made to redeem it. My father removed all those stones to make the foundations of his gazebo; a very American grove of birch-like magnolias was planted to preside over a carpet of scillas and chionodoxias through which a few peonies poked their heads; new brick paths were laid. Delos had essentially been lost.
It has now been found and in the richest possible way: the silhouette of a flowery garrigue billows up in front of big country rocks; rubble-terrace walls firm up into what might be the foundations of buildings along the central street of this forgotten city; the half columns of an abandoned temple stand on the slope above.
It is pure theatre, as it was always intended to be, entirely dependent on a big, hidden drainage system and an especially free-running soil, with plenty of grit and crushed brick to make the Mediterranean plants feel at home. Clay is nowhere to be seen.
There is one element that reaches further back into history than the dreams of the 1930s: three cylindrical Greek marble altars, originally carved in the 3rd or 4th century BC, decorated around their waists with swags of grape, pomegranate and myrtle suspended between garlanded bull-heads — boukrania—which now stand at key intervals along the central street of the garden. Perhaps almost unnoticed among the blaze of life and colour around them, these altars remain the core of the garden and its meaning. They are the reason it is called Delos, as they came originally from that famous island in the Cyclades, sacred to Apollo, and represent an element of the story that was undoubtedly close to Harold Nicolson’s heart.
His mother’s grandfather was Commodore William Gawen Rowan Hamilton, a naval commander in the first years of the nineteenth century, a heroic and romantic figure and passionate Philhellene, who spent the years from 1820 onwards in the eastern Mediterranean, winning the title of ‘Liberator of Greece’ by protecting the Greek rebels against the Turks and spending much of his private fortune in their cause. There is still a street in Athens named after him in gratitude.
From time to time during his cruises attacking pirates and fending off the Turk, he would land on an island or a piece of the Turkish-occupied mainland and quietly liberate an antiquity or two, sending them back to his liberal father-in-law in Ireland, Major-General Sir George Cockburn, a flamboyant antiquary who had made a collection of Greek statuary at Shanganagh, his castle outside Dublin.
These Delian altars arrived there in the late 1820s, dripping with Greek-loving, liberty-loving significance, and when in 1832 the British government promised in the Great Reform Bill to democratise the corrupt state of British politics, Sir George erected them in a column to Liberty outside his front door. They stood there for six long years, during which the government entirely failed to reform the basis of British politics, and in rage and frustration, Cockburn had carved on the base of the monument the grand reproach: ALAS, TO THIS DATE A HUMBUG.
In 1936, when the contents of Shanganagh were sold up, Harold Nicolson bought the elements of his great-great-grandfather’s column and had them transported to Sissinghurst. The HUMBUG base and one altar is still in the orchard; the three others are in Dan’s new Delos, still in my mind radiating everything which that long, Rowan-Hamilton-Nicolson tradition valued most: a love of liberty; an internationalist, pan-European vision; a cosmopolitan grasp of and engagement with world culture; and a treasuring of those dry, beautiful, ruin-scattered landscapes sacred to Apollo which this Kentish garden now recalls.
Adam Nicolson, Perch Hill, 3 July 2021
Photographs | Eva Nemeth
Published 10 July 2021
Nothing smells like early summer quite like a sweet pea. Fresh and intoxicating, innocent and sensual in equal measure. The scent of my grandparent’s garden, which wafted through the windows of my bedroom on hot summer nights in Swansea. The vines planted at the ends of the runner bean supports, which brought the sweet peas down to earth while exalting the beans. They were never cut for the house, just allowed free reign to scramble and scent the vegetable patch. Now that I grow my own the house is filled with their scent as long as I can keep up with picking them, although there is always a point in the summer where the stems get so short or you have better things to do (like bottling tomatoes, freezing soft fruit, making jams and chutneys) that it is finally better to leave them on the plant and allow them their natural decline.
This year, for the first time we got our sweet pea seeds sown early. Before the arrival of the polytunnel we had always waited until late March before sowing, but we got a head start this year and planted them in early-February. The seeds were soaked in cold water overnight, which is reputed to make them faster to germinate, although it is difficult to ascertain whether this is the case or not. Three seeds of each were sown in a 9cm pot with two pots of each variety and put into our unheated toolshed, which has the frost kept from it by virtue of also being where the boiler is located. When we posted news of the seed sowing on Instagram some queried why we weren’t using root trainers and, although it is true that all legumes tend to benefit from deep pots due to their searching root growth, we have never had an issue with pot-grown sweet peas, as long as you get them in the ground before they become pot-bound. That said we have been collecting the insides of our toilet rolls to use next year to see if it makes a difference.
As soon as the seeds started to germinate they went into the Milking Barn, where we have a dedicated propagation shelf set up in the picture window, which gets direct light for most of the day. A week after germination, to prevent them becoming etiolated, I would ferry them down to the polytunnel every morning to get as much light as possible, before bringing them back up to the heated barn every evening. By early March the polytunnel was warm enough to leave them in there overnight and soon they were large enough – with four sets of true leaves – to pinch out the tops, which encourages strong root growth and stockier plants.
Once the seedlings had reached a height of 15cm they were brought up to the cold frames by the barns and hardened off for a week before planting out. However, this was delayed by the prolonged frosts in late March and early April and so, when we did eventually get them in the ground in the second week of April, they were protected with fleece for a few days until the cold snap had passed. Sweet peas are hardier then they look and although one frost was hard enough to get through the fleece, despite their wilted appearance the plants recovered very quickly.
We have grown sweet peas every year since we moved here and have tried a wide range of varieties, but we always return to the Old Fashioneds and Grandifloras. These are the smaller flowered varieties, many of which are very old, and which have the strongest scent. They have a tendency to shorter stems, which means that they are not so popular with flower arrangers and florists, but I simply cut longer stems from the plants with leaves and tendrils intact. The Modern Grandiflora varieties were bred in the 20th century to provide the scent of the old varieties with the larger flowers and longer stem length of the more popular Spencer types, which have large, more ruffled flowers and long stems, but little scent. As with roses there seems little point in growing sweet peas unless they overpower with perfume.
I’ve tried several of the text book methods for prolonging the flowering season, including one year following the wisdom of the professionals and pinching out every single side shoot to encourage upward growth which, when it reaches the top of the hazel poles, is then trained down the neighbouring pole to double the height of the plant and, therefore, the number of flowers it produces. All very educational, but frankly life’s too short. Now I simply ensure that each time I pick a flower (and regular, daily, picking is the best way to ensure longevity) I snip out the side shoot that develops at its base, as the energy required for these prevents the main stem from reaching its full height and the flowers produced on them always have much shorter stems.
Each year we plant a range of colours and, although we have some stalwart favourites like ‘Cupani’, ‘Painted Lady’, ‘Almost Black’ and ‘Lord Nelson’, we always trial some new varieties. Here is this year’s selection.
Words and photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 26 June 2021
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