Flowers & photograph: Huw Morgan

Published 26 October 2024

I have always thought of the autumn as the beginning of the gardening year. A time to take stock whilst everything is still standing and memories are fresh from the growing season. A gentle pause before winter works and plans can be put into action.

This autumn is special, because I am taking a three-month sabbatical. I have worked consistently hard since starting my working life, taking very little time for myself in pursuit of the next step. Increasingly, and as the garden here grows and gently demands my attention, it has become a useful reminder that my energy should not always be directed outward. A garden needs time, not only in the tending, but also in the quiet of reflection. Which is the right way to steer one’s energy to shape future outcomes and, if you take the time to listen, which path is the right path, the one that reciprocates for the choices being meaningful?

We will be up at an ungodly hour on Monday morning to catch a plane for a fortnight’s retreat to Greece. It is the time we prefer to go away. When the harvest is mostly in, and we can leave the garden to relax into autumn. There will be a push over the weekend to harvest seed that will have dropped by the time we return and to pick the pears and the apples that will become windfalls if we don’t. But it will be important in the flurry to put a moment or two aside to look at what we are about to miss. At the first perfectly formed goblets of the Colchicum autumnale and the gold of the Sternbergia lutea that have just begun their season.

Though for years now we have made this our time to be away, I have always planned for continuity. For the relay of the new and the succession of interest that can run the duration of the growing season. As we leave, the first asters are already waning, pulled down by the rain or simply having had their day but it is good to know that the late forms, which are still in bud and standing tall, will have the energy in them yet to claim October.

For the past month and more, the kitchen garden has been reaching an ever-intensifying crescendo of production. Despite a very disheartening start to the growing year, with successive sowings and crops succumbing to the cold, wet and ensuing molluscs, things have picked up in recent weeks. Although there have been some abject failures – a garlic crop badly impacted by rust; the sudden ripening and rotting of all our plums and gages simultaneously in early August; every single chicory, chard and late lettuce seedling and young plants of Cavolo Nero eaten by slugs – there has been enough produce to balance the disappointments. As the harvests start coming in, the preserving keeps me busy in the kitchen day and night.

First were what we could rescue of those precocious plums which, due to the scarcity of the yield, were mixed up, stewed and put straight into the freezer. There they joined what remains of last year’s plum harvest, which was fortunately more impressive, so we will still have mirabelles and greengages for winter puddings.

Although this is the second article of the autumn issue, the cold nights and mornings this week have felt a little premature. Instagram is already full of images of ‘cozy’ autumn dishes made of pumpkin, potatoes and root vegetables, but I am not ready to turn my back on the produce of summer quite yet. The pumpkins will remain on the vines for another couple of weeks, taking up as much of the remaining sunshine they can. There are many months of roots and brassicas ahead, and I’m in no rush to get there. What we are harvesting and eating right now are considered to be the quintessential summer vegetables – tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, chillis, sweetcorn. Together with the last courgettes and beans, this is the food of this early autumn season.  

When you grow your own food, eating really seasonally sometimes feels out of step with what you see on social media or restaurant menus. Wild garlic in February, broad beans in March, asparagus in April, courgettes and new potatoes in May. But these jumps on the real season are not what is actually happening in most people’s vegetable patches. The very earliest wild garlic comes from the warmer gulfstream-influenced woods of Devon and Cornwall, while the broad beans, asparagus, courgettes and potatoes, even if local and not shipped in from overseas, come from polytunnels that are also in the southernmost parts of England. This can lead to the slightly frustrating feeling that you are behind in your vegetable growing and can lead to you berating your growing abilities or wishing the weeks away. I am not keen on this mad rush to get to the next season and much prefer the gentler bridges between seasons where, facing both backwards and forwards, you can eat the best of each season. Celeriac and spinach alongside the first broad beans, or potatoes and kale with the last tomatoes and first squash.

As I write, with the door open in the milking barn, the rain is falling in a deluge. The surrounding hills have vanished behind a veil of stair rods and the drains are gargling and guttural. We wait for the sound of a crack and a crash as the poplars lose a limb or worse, their entire footing. Never heavier than now in full, late season foliage. 

The garden bows, weighted, wet and heavy with seed. Overhanging the paths that just a couple of days ago, in dry September weather, were passable. We push our way through, drenched from the waist down to find free footfall in the clearings that still allow us to take it all in. The verbena, which just last weekend were so full of air, are bent as if touching their toes and the bedraggled pennisetum now soaked and motionless.  A dry day will see the planting mostly bounce back, but autumn is surely upon us.

The season has turned. The Japanese anemone covering for a host of companions that have been and gone and will continue for the month of September and more. One of the most beautiful months of the year with its low golden light and the promise of pears and rosehips and the first autumn colour.

It is good to have plants that have their moment and mark the season, as cow parsley marks the turning point of spring to summer and now, here at Hillside, the wood asters light the paths and make up for a tired August. But the plants that you can depend upon to gently sail through are equally valuable for the bridge they make between seasons.

Wishing you all a warm and restful bank holiday weekend.

Flowers & photograph: Huw Morgan

Mid-August, high summer and the swing of the harvest season. The meadows have just been cut, later than is good for the best hay, but good timing for the orchids and later-flowering scabious and knapweed to seed. The silence that follows the hay cut is a stark and uncomfortable contrast to the life and rustle of tall grass standing. So we will leave the steep slopes behind the house a fortnight yet for the moths and for the wild carrot to run to seed.

The greens of August are particular to now. Dark in the hedgerow a contrast to the ripening plums. Golden mirabelle, inky damson and blue-green greengage, a reminder that the next season is already upon us. The garden has relaxed, the grasses pushing through in a countermovement to the meadows beyond losing their sway. The rush towards flower that was so much in evidence even just a month ago has also slowed. The last flowers dropped on the Digitalis ferruginea and their spires quietened of the hum of bumble bees as they run to seed. In relay the echinops reach their full and final height , the bees moving on to their perfectly spherical globes. It is heartening to look up and see them suspended in the blue of the August sky and the life that accompanies them.

On one of the hottest days last week, as I walked along the back of the herb garden where the Benton irises sit at the base of the breezeblock wall, I was suddenly aware of a strong scent, which at first I couldn’t place. Mingled with the musky spearmint of calamint and resinous tang of lavender was a warm, fruity perfume that stood out. The afternoon sun beating down on the wall had created a hot spot alongside one of the granite water troughs and it is at this junction, just before the steps to the upper level, that our Afghan fig is planted.

The unfamiliar smell was coming from the leaves of the fig. Green and floral like freshly cut hay, but with a distinct undertone of coconut. Instantly I was reminded that last summer I had dried some fig leaves to be used as a flavouring for winter desserts. As well as coconut, the flavour that fig leaves impart has something of both almond and vanilla and so lends itself very well to milk and cream-based desserts; panna cotta, rice pudding or clafoutis. But in the long-awaited heat of last week, what I immediately had a hankering for was fig leaf ice cream.