When we arrived here fifteen years ago, the barns sat perched on the edge of the fields falling immediately away and below them. A string of barbed wire kept the cattle in the field and the bare minimum of ground was left around the barns to provide for their function as winter shelter. A broken concrete yard to the back made a space on the leeward side and a muddy track with the jutting angles of hardcore pushing through it led up from the field. The barn is not a good-looking building, but we loved its collage of rusted corrugated tin, lichen encrusted asbestos and thrown together nature.

That first summer we pulled the line away from the barn to give it a breathing space and re-fenced the field to graze sheep in what would soon be planted as orchard. Nature came back immediately to fill the void of the empty barns. The bindweed from the banks at the back crept across the dried mud of the hoof indented floors and brambles that had been kept in check sprung their thorny wands, which cascaded through the windows. Grasses and nettles and the high summer flare of epilobium leapt from the rubble and threw their shadows on the tin and once the interlopers began their pioneering the ugliness of the buildings took on a certain charm.

Last week was fierce, the sun beating down on our south-facing slopes from the moment it nosed over The Tump to finally relenting as it sank behind Freezing Hill. To be honest, and despite the blue skies, it felt brutal and I couldn’t help but feel worried by a garden that in places was beginning not to cope. Burned leaves on the gunnera that have as much water as they need at their feet, but simply couldn’t get it to their leaves quickly enough. The same with the tetrapanax, which I have never seen scorch in all the years I have been growing them. We brazened it out in the crackling heat, noting the plants that might need help later and then retreated into the shadows for the afternoon to sow, pot up and tidy in the hot, still air of the barn.

By six, and with the angle of the sun tipping into the top of the valley, we ventured out to hand water, attending to wilting beans and hydrangeas that were hanging and exhausted even in the shade. Hessian shade covers were lifted from the frames and the temperature checked in the polytunnel where we fear tomato trusses have aborted in the 45 degree heat, even with all doors open. By nine and with the prospect of a good sunset, we made our way back to the open barn to eat. Heat radiated from the walls, but a cool breeze pulled the day’s perfumes from the herb garden. Smells that you experience more often in the Mediterranean than the usual cool, damp evenings here. The perfume of lavender, fennel, dry dusty rosemary and sage.

As I have written before, when I was a budding cook, given free reign of the kitchen after the Sunday lunch dishes were done, I would turn to mum’s Marguerite Patten recipe cards. The cards, published in the late 1960’s, were in a teal plastic box with an embossed silver knife and fork on the front and were stored on top of the fridge freezer. The clear plastic lid allowed you to read the divider cards which had headings like Supper Dishes, Casseroles, Salads and Vegetables, Meal Starters and Egg & Cheese Dishes. However, as a child with a sweet tooth and an interest in producing something for afternoon tea the sections I turned to most often were Pastry, Family Cakes, Tea Cakes, Bread & Scones, Gateaux and Traditional and Celebration.

In this last section was a recipe for Pavlova, subtitled Meringue Gateau. In the corner of the card the New Zealand flag showed the origin of this unfamiliar dessert (although Australians will insist it was invented there). The photograph on the front showed a meringue shell filled with anaemic and glistening sliced, tinned peaches and, although the serving suggestion also mentioned passion fruit pulp, there was only a tantalising half passion fruit in a basket in the background to give a hint of what this exotic fruit – at that point, unseen in the wilds of north London – looked like.

When we arrived here fifteen years ago, the ditch was a festoon of bramble, the remains of a hedge with more teeth missing than in place and a huge crack willow with its feet in the wet. The cattle were allowed to come to the water on this side in the lower sections and on the side of The Tump up at the top. A simple move of taking a twisted strand of rusted barbed wire across the ditch to divide the two worlds at the willow. Where the cattle came to the water there were muddied ruts so deep that you were likely to lose your boots and without them there was certainly no crossing, rain or shine.

It took a couple of winter’s repair work to strim back the bramble and carefully wind up the barbed wire and pull the motley assortment of fence posts from the mud. The surviving hawthorns, flailed to the height of the barbed wire, were carefully thinned to remove the worst of their wounded limbs and allowed to grow away. The hazels, which had rebranched into ugly knuckles at the height of the flail, were coppiced to the base and allowed to regenerate. The silvery line of water was thus revealed in the fold between the two fields. Dipping four times over natural tufa falls, diving into the deep shade of the crack willow in the middle and then again where the water meets the stream that runs in the wood at the bottom.

The garden of my childhood home in North London backed onto an abandoned piece of land which we referred to as ‘The Lottie’. Long before my parents moved there in the early 1960’s, it had been used by local residents as an allotment and, for my brother and I, it was an exciting wilderness beyond the tamed confines of our garden. With ruined greenhouses, abandoned beehives and overgrown shrubberies it was the perfect place to act out adventure games and in which to secrete ourselves during games of hide and seek. I discovered early on that one area of undergrowth was not what it first appeared to be. Hiding from my brother and some friends one day I pushed myself further back into the thicket to avoid detection, but instantly gave away my location as I yelped out in pain. I had backed into a gooseberry bush and spent the next five minutes carefully extricating myself in an attempt to avoid any more scratches and pricks from its fearsome thorns.

The gooseberry patch had merged with a stand of raspberry canes on one side and several blackcurrants on the other, while wilding brambles threaded their way between them all. Once we had learned to beware of the gooseberry, me and my brother would often be found there on summer mornings gorging on the soft fruit, the musky scent of raspberry and blackcurrant foliage all around and sticky juice running down our chins and staining our fingers and clothes. When I started cooking in earnest I would head down there to pick fruit to make raspberry buns, a blackcurrant crumble or to fill a meringue nest or Victoria sponge cake. Eventually this abandoned piece of real estate was bought by the neighbouring tennis club and the site cleared to make space for more courts, but I have never forgotten the scratch and sniff of fruit picking on a hot summer’s day, like finding buried treasure in the undergrowth.  

The longest day of the year is already here. The dawn chorus starts whilst the clock still reads four and the fade of the gloaming lasts well after ten. We are rising early to be part of it and then eating too late, for it is hard to leave the garden to prepare supper. These light-filled days see growth literally reaching towards it and the fecundity is as its zenith on the right here and right now of the solstice. 

This time last year we were preparing for a big party that we held on the crown of The Tump on this special day. In the run up and with the moment focused, we became acutely aware of the time elongating and then slowing before we leaned into the other side. The three days before, when the energy in the garden was at its most expectant, and the three days after that saw it relax and spill and burgeon into the next phase of summer. The meadowsweet in the ditch exemplifies this tangible shift here at Hillside, the creamy luminosity and sweet perfume being at its height and the last flower to fade into the shortest night.

The Delphinium elatum are standing tall, head and shoulders above most of their present company. They exclaim, with their bolt of blue, upward motion and mood of their own, “It is summer, we are here and do not walk by without marvelling.”

I must admit to not having been drawn to delphiniums until recently. The garden forms made me think of the rigour and horticultural excellence that is required at the Chelsea Flower Show to make them stand to attention in ranks against a canvas backdrop. Vita Sackville-West famously grew them at Sissinghurst in her time there, where staking and the careful attention they might need to remain perfect carried a weight of horticultural expectation. I always pictured them in a more traditional country garden or at the back of perennial borders arranged by height, rather than the naturalistic setting of Hillside, where plants are chosen for feeling on the wild side.

Last year, in the latest chapter of making the garden, we completed the walls that made it possible to continue the planting of the area above the Sand Garden. First a drystone wall on the upper level and inclined into the old bank, replaced a stockproof fence we had installed not long after arriving here to protect the broken hedge above it. We’d repaired and replanted the hedge as one of the first tasks, removing tangled bramble and failing elder, replacing with indigenous shrubs and trees and letting it grow out to provide shelter. The field above now sits in its shadow, and bats now have a flight run where the insects collect in the still of the leeward side. Common spotted orchids have colonised in the damp and cool that remains there throughout summer and so our influence as gardeners shifts from one side of the wall to the other, managing the land for indigenous diversity.

The sunny side of the new wall harvests the sunshine and the bank below it, reclined like a deckchair, makes the most of the sun as it falls onto its flanks for the duration of the day. The bank has the weight of the hill behind it and the soil is a deep, rich loam and riddled with winter springs. These make the slopes too wet, too steep and too heavy to walk over in winter, but in summer the springs dry up and drain fast, so fast that cracks wide enough to put your fingers down remind you of their split persona. We held the base of this bank with a seating wall that was poured just over a year ago and runs the length of the track to the barns. The track is a breathing space between the Sand Garden and the bank, but in my mind’s eye, I always saw the two as one.

The smell of elderflower is everywhere. Rain followed by sunshine has produced moist air that carries its flowery, musky perfume in drifts across the fields and down the lanes. It is strongest in the mornings when the air is still. It pools in the glades down by the stream and by the barns where it mingles with honeysuckle and eglantine to produce an intoxicating blend.

As with many other things this year, the elder is earlier into flower than usual. And, as with the blossom of plum, pear, cherry, apple and hawthorn, it also seems that it will be a bumper year for elderflower. Its more normal flowering time in mid-June always happens at one of the busiest times for us, with annuals to plant out, vegetables to sow and manage and a number of group garden visits, meaning that our focus gets pulled to the areas closer to the house. Combined with a run of wet Junes this means that for several years we have missed the opportunity to gather elder for cordial. Since many of our bushes are on the woodland fringe down by the stream and north-facing, we sometimes miss them completely, putting off to tomorrow what should be done today, lulled into a false sense of security that they will hold onto their flowers for some time yet in the cool. This season’s early start means that I have been able to gather the first blossom to appear and plan on making a batch of cordial this weekend.

Geraldine Noyes, my childhood gardening mentor, always had a posy on her kitchen table. In winter it might have been no more than a sprig of witch hazel and the first spearing Iris unguicularis but, as the season went on, the posies would become more complex, always changing according to what was happening in the garden. They were not overly considered compositions, but distillations of the season and an opportunity to observe the garden at close quarters. The posies were a moment caught and savoured, always humble and delightful for the plants being on the wild side and particular to her loves and sensibilities.

When I started gardening at scale and growing the garden at Home Farm for my client Frances Mossman, I kept up the tradition and very quickly found that the posies were very instructive. Not only did they capture a micro-season or mood, they also allowed you to combine plants in often unexpected ways. Things from different parts of the garden that I hadn’t ever thought of using together or colour combinations that I’d never considered in these spontaneous couplings. When Huw came to stay when I was gardening there, Frances would let him loose to fuel his love of combining the plants and thus began this interesting cross over of me doing the garden making and he the reinterpretation through the arrangements.