The hungry gap is almost upon us. The last of the stored root vegetables are becoming wrinkled and dry. We are eating our way through the remains of the pumpkins in a race to beat the mice, which have discovered them in the tool shed. The kalettes and kales in the outdoor vegetable beds have almost been stripped bare, having provided for meals over the winter and we have just finished the last of the Pink Fir Apple potatoes. And yet, as the tide goes out on the winter veg, there is a countermovement in the polytunnel. A green tsunami that has been building for the last couple of weeks, is now breaking and every meal features leafy greens of one kind or another.

It is five years since we got the polytunnel and it has proven to be just as useful for overwintering crops, as it is for the customary hot climate vegetables – tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and more – that we initially bought it for. The first few years saw me experimenting with various winter crops, but for the last three I have settled on a reliable selection of winter salads and herbs to be eaten in the darkest months, and a selection of oriental greens and brassicas intended for consumption right now.

Three years ago Mary Keen gave me a plump envelope of downy anemone seed, labelled A. hortensis syn. A. stellata. She had already split the seed and taken a third for herself and, in typically generous spirit and with the maxim that the best way to keep a plant is to give it away, she passed the rest on to split between myself and Derry Watkins at Special Plants Nursery. The writing on the envelope was John Morley’s, who had in turn been given the seed by his friend, the plantsman and artist Cedric Morris. He of the Benton Iris and many other treasures that we grow here, which originated from his garden at Benton End in Suffolk.

It would have been wonderful to hear Cedric’s stories of the rocky hillside in Greece on which he no doubt scrambled to find them and of his experience of growing the anemone back home. I missed the opportunity to ask Beth Chatto about the anemone sold through her nursery, which was also gifted to her by Morris, but I did get the chance to talk to John and his wife Diana Howard at the opening of his exhibition of paintings at The Garden Museum earlier this week. John recounted that Morris had expressly said “Don’t let the botanists tell you anything else. It must be called Anemone stellata.”. Diana told me that their experience of growing them in their Suffolk garden is that they move around according to where the sun falls. If you see pictures of them growing there, they stand cheek by jowl like a field of delectable sweeties.

Tending a garden is a cyclical process. A series of loops that are mostly without a break so that, as the seasons roll one into the next, you return to where you started. A place that is familiar and every year more so, for the knowledge of the last revolution and the ones that came before. With every cycle our relationship with the garden deepens, we become wiser and better able to predict the next move, but every season is different and we must remain open to change. The impact of a cold winter, for instance, and the repair of unexpected damage, or simply the inevitable change that comes with evolution.

The garden here has grown by about a third in the last two years, with the extension of the Sand Garden and the bank above it, beyond the barns. Last summer was their first full growing season and the first revolution of getting to know the new ground. To stay on track with the maintenance of the additional garden we took on one extra day of help a week, so that between them John and Johnnie do four days a week. Now that the days are once again getting longer, Huw and I make up the difference at the weekends and in any time we can find. It is a carefully calculated operation and, with the knowledge that we need to start the big cutback in the main garden in the last two weeks of February, the Sand Garden areas had been cleared of spent growth and weeded by mid-February. Bar a final prune of any winter damage to tender sages and phlomis, once we feel the worst of the winter is over, we are done there until things start growing.

When I left university in Manchester in 1988 I returned to London, where my first job was as a Wardrobe Technician at the English National Opera. At that point I was set on becoming a costume designer and thought that this would be a good way into the industry. However, I quickly became aware that there exists an ‘upstairs downstairs’ hierarchy in the theatre, which meant that that door would never be opened to me from backstage. My days were spent ironing shirts, washing socks and underwear, removing stains and mending tears to get everything ready for my floor of the men’s chorus when they arrived to start preparing for the evening show.

The 18 months I spent working there were an education on many levels, not least in the variety of cuisines that were available just a step away from the theatre. Most meals were taken in the theatre canteen, but when there were breaks between performances a group of us would head out to Covent Garden or Soho to eat. Many of the places we would go to don’t exist any longer. Lorelei, the tiny pizza restaurant where you had to bring your own wine, Gaby’s Deli on the Charing Cross Road where I first experienced falafel, The Stockpot and Pollo Bar on Old Compton Street, which had long queues well before ‘no bookings’ culture made them ubiquitous and the New Piccadilly Café where a Full English fried breakfast was served in an interior that hadn’t been touched since the 1950’s. All now gone.

A week ago the frogs started spawning, an audible orgy in the brooklime in the pond and a marker in the last week of February that it is finally time to get things moving, now that winter is nearing its end. We have been working towards this moment for an industrious three months, strimming the ditch ahead of the snowdrops, narcissus and primroses, clearing and logging a fallen tree and coppicing this year’s hazels to open up ground for more primroses and to keep us in sticks and twigs for the garden.

Next week we will start the big cut back, having left the skeletons standing for the life we share the garden with and for being able to witness not only their rise, but also their fall in the growing cycle. But before we start, we’ve made a push to complete the last of the winter pruning. In early January, whilst the sap was still in the roots, the grape vines were cut back to hard knuckles and their wall trained framework and the mulberry raised gently where it is beginning to overhang the paths. Cut much later and they bleed, the vine a clear sap, the mulberry’s milky, the nutrition for spring growth all too easily wasted with bad timing. The roses were completed in January, since their buds begin to break here in mild weather in February. Then on to the autumn fruiting raspberries, which are simply razed to the ground and mulched and the thornless blackberry and tayberry, which are intricately woven onto a framework.

The sting of young nettles is never more so than now, when ignited by the first stirrings at the end of winter. The familiar ringing that lingers on my hands into the evenings is something I know well from splitting the snowdrops. I do this as soon as their flowers dim and there is a window before the nettles get away in earnest and suddenly there are demands back up in the garden. This close and detailed work is something I savour for the opportunity to witness the first signs of life on my knees and with time to take in the environment down by the stream. The smell of the wild garlic as you bruise its first leaves and the close-up observation of sprung celandines, pressed flat against the earth, with their distinctive shiny leaves like miniature waterlilies. The first green hellebores, green upon green, with ivy and moss and dog’s mercury. And, as we come up the ditch and out into the light, precocious primroses and the gold of early marsh marigolds offering up flower to early bumblebees where the sun hits the warmest flanks.

With the repetitiveness of a simple task, you begin to see that winter is waning, one cycle overlapping the next in a quickening surge towards spring. Primroses appearing as the snowdrops lose their lustre and the first wild daffodils taking the snowdrop’s place as if the timing had been planned for. I make a note to myself to remember to plant more Narcissus pseudonarcissus. The small group by a fallen oak that I planted in-the-green a decade ago have seeded and the seedlings are just beginning to flower. The heavy seed from the parent plants dropped at the reach of the seedpod and a little more where the seed tumbled downhill. Five or six years to flower and then another drop from the second generation and seedlings to follow on in a slow but sure expansion of their territory.

In October last year I spent a day sowing seed. It is an activity in which time plays a significant role. Time spent observing a seedpod, the wait until it is ripe enough to gather, but not so ripe it is already cast, flung or taken by wind or bird. Time spent in cleaning and sifting and in understanding how a plant invests in its future. The profligacy of an annual, the weightlessness of those which are designed to carry on the wind or those quite literally catapulted into new territories. Some seed is gathered from the garden, some collected from further afield or gifted with stories attached to provenance. By the time of the actual day of sowing and the lighting of the blue touch paper, you are already invested in a future.

A day of sowing is an intimate day of communing. Each plant with its own story and life cycle. Some short and for which you are safeguarding against loss. Some that are rare and hard to come by. Sometimes you simply want more, and seed is such a fine way to produce more if you have the patience to invest in the wait. A wait that will help to hone how you might use a plant or extend its reach in real time.

My name is Dan Pearson and I am a galanthaholic. It has crept up on me and now I find I have more than a hundred varieties. A small number in comparison to those who are truly addicted, but nevertheless, I am hook, line and sinkered.

My current dalliance with the named varieties started with a gift from our friend Tania Compton while we were still living in Peckham. A bundle of ‘Dionysus’, one of the best and most reliable doubles, and a couple more that didn’t survive the move to Hillside. Once here, with the prospect of more ground and the dreams that come with it, we were invited to one of Mary Keen’s snowdrop lunches and were generously gifted another half dozen varieties, each with stories of provenance and the opportunity of seeing them perform in her garden. The beautiful green leaved G. nivalis ‘Anglesey Abbey’, for instance, originally gifted to Mary by John Sales, the National Trust’s Head of Gardens, and Galanthus gracilis which, Mary explained, crosses easily and is exciting for the potential of your own seedlings one day.

In October 2023 I was approached by Stephanie Mahon, Editor of Gardens Illustrated magazine, to be this year’s writer of their long-running series, Plantsperson’s Favourites. The task, to choose my top ten Hillside plants for each month of the eleven issues running from February to December. The series has always been interesting for the opportunity to see a selection of plants through the eyes of a particular expert. Previous writers have included Tom Coward of Gravetye Manor, Marina Christopher of Phoenix Perennials, Hans Kramer of De Hessenhof, Derry Watkins of Special Plants and Andrea Brunsendorf of Lowther Castle. Nursery people specialising in a palette that is particular to them and gardeners whose experience and long-term knowledge is pulled together in a collection that is hard won through time and intimacy with plants. Experience that can be translated directly into trust. 

It has been a privilege to be invited into this stable of plantspeople and a challenge to hone one’s thinking, despite the complexity of whittling down an impossibly long list. To give an idea of the challenge, none of the plants featured at the top of this article made it onto my list. As a plantsman, identifying your favourites is not an easy task, because they change from season to season and as you go through the inevitable process of falling in love with something new and then maybe falling out of love once you know more. When you look back with time behind you, you begin to see that some infatuations are not much more than a brief dalliance – a plant might not ‘do’ like you need it to or you simply fall out of love with it – while others, the love of umbellifers for instance, become longterm relationships that take years or probably decades to get to know. The perennial Angelica genuflexa that does away with the need to manage the vociferous seeding of the biennial A. archangelica, being a fine example.

At secondary school I was the only boy in my year to take Cookery as a practical study subject. Woodwork and Metalwork were definitely not my thing and although I enjoyed art lessons and pottery particularly, given the option of only one practical subject at ‘O’ Level, it had to be cookery for me. I knew I was unusual amongst my male peers for being interested in cooking and, thinking about it now, I was doubtless bullied in part because of it, but when pushed to choose I didn’t think twice.

Lessons took place in a huge, high-ceilinged room in a new wing built in the 1970’s. Linoleum floored in a shade of petrol blue, banks of double-sided counters, each accommodating two students per side and each with a cooker set into it, were arranged perpendicular to the exterior wall. Plate glass windows running the length of the room offered an expansive view onto the sports field and the suburban landscape beyond. One day in 1980 we saw the smoke rising from Alexandra Palace as it burned.