After the big cut back that took place at the end of February and beginning of March, I made all the edits that needed to happen ahead of the summer. Splitting and moving plants and making additions and edits where changes might be needed for the sake of the new energy they provide. Next came the mulching, the finishing protective eiderdown which keeps moisture in and weeds and seedlings down. These tasks were happening right through until the end of April and just last week I was winkling plants in that I’d had sitting in the cold frames needing a home.

As apple blossom gave way to hawthorn in the last fortnight, the garden has reared up and away into the growing season. Bare soil and visible mulch swallowed up in fresh new growth and the handover from spring to early summer. If you haven’t caught those last few weeds in this window, they will become part of the borders and gaps that just a fortnight ago felt large enough to receive something new have quickly closed over. This is the moment you realise that, if you haven’t done it yet, then spring jobs are now best left until autumn.

Spring is rearing headlong into the growing season in this brightly lit week that could be summer. Brilliant blue skies, the crabapples in full sail, cow parsley spilling from the hedgerows and buttercups rising in the meadows, taller and more plentiful from one day to the next.

In the garden we have already begun a series of micro-seasons where favourite groups of plants cluster together to make these times all about them. One of the first are the peonies, which have already made their early start so markedly with spearing growth pushed from their deep, tuberous roots. Molly-the-Witch with lipstick red shoots breaking open to push smoky, damson-coloured foliage. ‘Merry Mayshine’ with filigree new leaves that flare in spring sunshine, a luminous ruby red. The new shoots of ‘Mme Gaudichau’ are the deepest plum, you’d think it liquorice black until you peer closer.

On the Mexican leg of my sabbatical last autumn, I made the journey to visit to Las Pozas, the surrealist landscape of the English eccentric, Edward James, the heir to West Dean House in East Sussex. I had been immersed in Mexico City for a week by then, visiting the works of Luis Barragán and, as the Dia de Los Muertos approached, two friends and I took to the road. We were heading for Xilitla, a mountain town buried deep in jungle where James exiled himself in the pursuit of making this garden. A garden not as we might know it, but a lifework of minarets and fantastical spaces that manifested his singular vision.

To get there in a day was ambitious and felt far longer than its actual duration, for the landscape changing so much as we journeyed. Leaving the smog and hubbub of the sprawling city behind, we started the ten hour drive north-east towards Pachuca, passing through the agricultural plains of maize in the central valley and heading towards the Gulf of Mexico. After about four hours the flat land suddenly gave way to dry valleys scored with the cartoonish upright of cactus and ocotillo. We stopped in a layby to take in the change and witness the startling silence and enormous reach of seemingly hostile vegetation. Emerging from dust and rock, without road or habitation and completely still, bar dark raptors soaring on thermals above us.

Wishing all of our readers a very happy Easter.

In this mantel arrangement are;

The land is having a moment here, alive after slumbering, with no turning back and blossom lighting the way. It is at its very peak as I am writing, in a week of blue skies, still days and moonlit nights, with frost so far staying to the hollows. Spring as you dream it to be. Onward and surging.

When I cast my mind back to our arrival fifteen years ago, the fields were very different. Grazed tightly to their very margins and hedgerows pared back to the bones. There was a curious silence with the land stripped to the essentials. Walk the fields now and you move in a soundscape enabled by the land having been relaxed and allowed to be more itself. In hedge trees rising from hedges that were once tightly trimmed and from spinneys of self-seeded hawthorns that step up the hill from the woods, bringing the birds with them. Follow the blossom trees or the willows in catkin and you walk into the drone of bees working or the chattering flurry of long-tailed tits, the very opposite of the stillness that we found when we first came here.

Today’s recipe is a departure from the usual. It contains nothing home grown, nothing seasonal and yet it is one of my favourite and most frequently made recipes. The reason for this change of tack is that my Dad died a few weeks ago, his funeral is on Monday and I have spent every evening this week reading through his handwritten memoirs piecing together the eulogy I will give.

Dad was a proud Welshman and his memories of his childhood are vivid and emotive. He was born in Swansea on April 25^th 1935 and was brought up in the suburb of Cockett by his father, Herbert, who worked for an iron and steel merchant, and his mother, Winifred (née Lewis), who left school at 14 and was a maid in the Mayor’s Parlour in Swansea, until she married my grandfather in 1929. The house was on a road on the top of the hill (Town Hill) above Swansea Bay, and you had a fine view of its golden sweep from the upstairs back bedrooms. When we went there as children during the summer holidays, the sound of seagulls and the smell of the sea were ever present.

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.