As a teenager I already knew it would be important to expand my horizons and, in turn, the way that I saw the world. As a student studying horticulture, it was my ambition to see the über-meadows of the Valley of Flowers in Northern India. It was an adventure to travel into the Himalaya and the valley was unlike anything I had ever experienced in terms of magnitude. Whilst standing in the midst of cypripedium orchids, persicaria and potentilla that lapped the mountains soaring above me into the clouds, I had an epiphany. That I wanted to garden with the freedom of these wild plant communities. To do it at scale and for the plantings to feel as if they had grown out of the place, were in tune and felt right there. 

A decade later, I was drawn to Japan to witness a culture of garden-making that drew from nature, but in an altogether more stylised and formal manner. I was moved first by the culture of animism and then, as the differences fell into place, the exquisite soft minimalism that was employed to emulate a wild place and distil a moment. This was the first time I had encountered the feeling of being taken somewhere very particular by a designed space, where every detail spoke to the next and where images were conjured and composed. A dry waterfall of rocks summoning the energy of a choppy watercourse, the dynamism of the imagined water moving clearly in the mind. The best Japanese gardens have soul. The spirit to take you somewhere, to fine tune your senses and put you in the here and now.

This week I returned from my travels in Chile. The seared and otherworldly deserts of the Atacama in the north and the primordial highlands in the south where the araucaria forests literally step you back in time. The feeling of being so very far from home was driven in part by being tucked on the other side of the Andes, but mostly in the diametric reversal of the seasons. Where meadows were in full sway, jacaranda in neon blossom and the growth in the forests rushing to the longest day of their year. My return was to our shortest. A sensory jolt into dimly lit mornings, darkness descending in the middle of the afternoon and a garden giving in to its deepest and most peaceful sleep.

The lack of light is what carries winter’s weight for me, but I welcome the season in this country for its relative ease and the ability to keep working. Winter at Hillside is beautiful for being in landscape and exposed to all its nuance. To ground laid bare, to leaf mould mouldering and to the emerald green of the moss-covered paths. Even on the dullest of days, the sky is a myriad of greys, the folds in the hills differing saturations of greens, browns and sepia with low cloud hanging in the trees on Freezing Hill and moisture in the air. There is time to look in the winter and time to see what has been happening during the growing season now that branches are once again unclothed and revealing all.

In 2022 Clare Foster, Garden Editor at House & Garden magazine and photographer, Andrew Montgomery, self-published their first book, Winter Gardens. Despite the challenges of conceiving of, researching, writing, photographing, editing, designing, distributing and promoting the book themselves they have now published the fruit of their second collaboration, Pastoral Gardens.

This beautifully designed 480 page tome looks at a range of gardens that put nature and wildlife at their heart and has been a labour of love for them both. Focussed on 20 gardens and natural environments both designed and nurtured, rural and urban, in the UK and overseas, the book features work by renowned designers Tom Stuart-Smith, Sarah Price, Nigel Dunnett, Luciano Giubbilei and Julian and Isabel Bannerman as well as places gardened by notable people such as Jasper Conran, Arthur Parkinson and Umberto Pasti. Two gardens designed by Dan are featured; Little Dartmouth Farm on the south west coast of England and Robin Hill in Connecticut, USA. 

We had our first hard frost on Thursday and I woke to a sugared landscape dusted with ice crystals. These are the mornings we long for in winter, when the garden becomes like Narnia, frozen and glittering, the skeletons of plants magically transformed into icy sculptures and the still-standing grasses into petrified fountains.

Once I had taken my fill of the enchanted garden as the sun rose, I went down to the polytunnel to check on the vegetables we have growing down there. The polytunnel is located on the slope below the vegetable garden and, although it is well protected here from wind – Storm Bert last weekend caused no damage, but brought down a nearby tree – and is south-facing it is also far enough down the slope that by early afternoon, it is shaded from the winter sun by the tall poplars in the wood to the south. The crops inside are protected but, when a frost is particularly hard, the temperature within can still drop substantially and the soft-leaved salads and brassicas can suffer. The thermometer showed the night temperature had got down to -2°C, but there was very little sign of damage, just a few late seedlings burnt beyond resuscitation. Everything else had slumped, but ready to come back as soon as the temperature rose.  

The freeze came hard this week to make ice on the troughs and suspend the water lilies in the pond. Light bounced brilliantly from the frozen surface and for the first time the landscape was united by white and glisten and a proper crunch underfoot. In the thaw, as the tawniness returned, the remains of the autumn colour came tumbling down from the branches to patter the stillness and accelerate this turn in the season.

The dahlias were instantly blackened where they had been eking out their last few days and the vulnerable nasturtiums melted to practically nothing. The profusion of foliage they always put on in the cool of the autumn extends their reach defiantly beyond the beds as if to say, ‘We are willing to keep going.’, but the full stop of freeze marks an abrupt end to their growing season. Under the wreckage and waiting for next year they leave their plentiful seed, plump and fleshy and easy gathering.

In the month of September, as a soft start to my autumn sabbatical, I took a fortnight in Europe to visit new places, old friends and nursery people. I last visited Olivier Filippi and his Jardin Sec near Montpellier in 2019, when researching the planting for the restoration of Delos at Sissinghurst. I’d gone to see his collection of plants for a Mediterranean climate, many of which were originally wild collected and to gain from Olivier’s intimate knowledge about where they grew and what with. In just two days I’d been enlightened enough by such nuanced knowledge to feel confident about the plants we were going to use in Delos, but our conversations also fuelled an internal and ongoing dialogue about the need to understand how we might respond to our changing climate.

I had vowed to get back to the nursery sooner, but in just the short time since my last visit, the changes we had discussed five years ago already feel firmly upon us. The visit this autumn was sobering, for the climate shift that has already gripped this area of Southern France with record-breaking temperatures hitting 45°C in June 2021. The extreme summer heat has continued, cementing the encroaching drought that stretches down into Morocco. Drought that has persisted, with forest fires following the heat and low rainfall preventing the successful germination of endemic species, which are adapted to fire, but need winter rains to grow into the open ground the fire leaves in its wake.

Today the first morning with a nip in the air. For the past week the clouds have sat low over the surrounding hills, skimming the treetops. Skeins of mist snake along the bottom of the valley, drawn by the colder air down there by the stream. The line of beech trees on Freezing Hill shrouded, sometimes invisible. Strange to lose the focus they provide to the west. The ‘caterpillar’, as locals call it, erased to a blank horizon.

Everything is drawing in, not least the evenings. The time for afternoon dog walks becoming earlier every day. I avoid the gloaming, as that is when the deer are abroad, and suddenly you find the dogs have disappeared, charging through undergrowth in the wood, unresponsive to call or whistle as the sky darkens. Tramping through the brush to find them the smell of rot, mould and fungus fills your nostrils. The ground slippery underfoot with wet leaves.

This week it is exactly fourteen years since we left London and moved to Hillside. Although a lot has changed since then, this time of year still takes me back very strongly to that week. The sense of excitement as we drove along the ridge above our valley through heavy mist illuminated by a hidden sun. The astonishment of having long views to east and west after the claustrophobia of city skylines. And the magic of lying in bed with a view of sky and the treetops. Morning sun lit up the yellowing foliage of poplar, hornbeam and hazel, on the flank of the opposite hillside. The vista animated by the passage of rooks, crows and ravens, black as voids in the glowing backdrop.

The farmer before us had kept all trees away from the grassland to maximise grazing for his cattle. All that remained were an old holly, an exhausted damson and dying plum. In that first winter, determined to make our own mark on the landscape and eager to get a head start on growing food to eat, we planted our westernmost field with an extensive orchard of apples, pears, plums, gages and damsons. However, it was another two years before we got the long planned for nuttery planted, and we wished we had done it sooner, as the hazels were so slow to get away. Seven varieties were chosen, both cobnuts and filberts, with three or four of each variety, to make a total of twenty four trees. Their rate of growth was a little dispiriting for several years. In fact, some varieties looked as though they might fail, but now, twelve years later, all of them are thriving and threatening to burst through their tree guards next year.