The hollyhocks mark high summer, punching through July and into the harvest month of August. Heaving the tarmacadam and springing up in the tiniest crack in the pavement of our nearby village, they run from the darkest plum red through pinks and off mauves, some with a dark eye that singles them out. When I was working at the Jerusalem Botanic Gardens for a year in the early eighties, it made all-at-once sense that they took to the Mediterranean climate, running out of control in the Eurasian section that pooled together plants from this incredible meeting point of Europe and Asia. There was an eccentric Englishwoman who had emigrated to Israel to immerse herself in the religious capital who volunteered in this section of the garden. Bathsheba would mostly be found sleeping in their shade rather than gardening, for they grew thick and tall to provide good cover and her relaxed approach to weeding probably contributed to their dominance in this area of the garden.

It was the first time I had seen them at home, where they were truly happy as pioneers and it recalibrated my association with them as a mainstay of the English cottage garden. They have probably become such a part of this relaxed form of gardening for being an interloper and for making do where there is space or a crack in a pavement. Being short-lived and plentiful with their flat disc shaped seed as a survival mechanism, they are adept at finding the chinks and in-between places. This is where Alcea do best, in a position where they can bask in sun all the way to the base and where the ground drains freely. Hollyhocks quickly fail where the soil lies wet and dwindle with less than six hours of direct sunlight a day, so their very requirements also bring a feeling of summer. They are as profligate with seed as they are promiscuous, so it is very much a pot-luck aesthetic, while their ability to soar without taking too much space at ground level gives even a small garden a feeling of generosity.

The sand garden has already settled in since it was planted just over a year ago and is having its influence in the pull to move west towards the evening light that pours from the end of the valley. With its top dressing of free-draining sand, batter into the sunshine and associated planting palette, it has quickly become somewhere with its own distinct identity. Spending time there has opened up a new way of looking at this place and the walk to the barns is no longer the terminus, but a point of gravity. A new chapter and an enrichment of the whole.

Over the winter we completed the dry-stone wall that backdrops the bank above and, in a long and convoluted exercise, we rammed a low seating wall at the base of the bank. Cast in an arc that steps down with the slope, we dry-packed a local aggregate so that it remains porous and we hope in time, a better home for lichens, mosses and invertebrates. The wall was made in response to a colleague who noted that there is nowhere to sit in the garden. Something which, until it was pointed out, I hadn’t clocked, because I am mostly doing and probably don’t spend enough time pausing. The seating wall is something of a revelation in my sixtieth year and from this vantage point we have the opportunity of slowing down and taking in the newly focussed view down the valley. A local church we have visited, but had never noticed from our land before, suddenly appeared as an eyecatcher amongst the trees and a whole new connection to the barns reframed our relationship to this corner of our land.

I was in Greece last week, where the temperatures topped 32°C and it was impossible to think about moving from the shade until 6pm. Any time spent in the kitchen preparing food had to be brief and undemanding, requiring as little additional heat as possible. Cooking big meals was the last thing on anyone’s mind. I was staying with an old friend who was shortly heading back home to New Zealand and the challenge was to use up as much of the food as possible that she had left from her stay. One evening I was tasked with making a dish for a small dinner party of locals.

Felicity pointed me towards a bunch of island grown beetroot, a couple of red onions and a handful of mint that had seen better days and said, ‘Can you make something with that, darling?’. There were oranges and lemons in the fruit bowl, a well-stocked spice cupboard and a huge tub of Greek yogurt in the fridge. I started to think about how to combine them. Given our location it would have been easy to have made a simple knee jerk salad with yogurt and walnuts or olives and feta, but I cast around for a different approach. For less predictable Mediterranean flavours.

The Meadow Cranesbill are throwing their luminous blue throughout the top meadows where the soil is thin and limey. A violet-blue that is most vivid in the gloaming, once the sun goes down and before darkness and then again first thing in the dew of morning. Gathering in strength so that they now flood the crown of the top field, they extend their range by about four generous strides a year. Seed that is literally catapulted by the ingenious dispersal mechanism, shaped like a crane’s bill, which gives them their common name. Sit close on a still warm day when the seed is ripe and you hear it being flung from the parent plant, but catching a plant in the act is almost impossible and the reason it makes it difficult seed to gather.

Our neighbours, Jane and Donald, who grow wild seed commercially on the other side of the valley, have a strip of one field given over to Geranium pratense. It is vibrant in its intensity when planted en masse and my parent plants came from them as a tray of seedlings for my birthday 11 years ago. They were added to the top meadow that April and have proven to be a good way of introducing the cranesbill into the once-was pasture. We had already oversown the field with a local meadow mix that contained Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor), the semi-parasitic annual that lives in part off the grasses and is vital in restoring pasture to meadow. The rattle weakens its host enough for the floral content of a meadow to find a window of opportunity and my little plugs were found a place where the rattle seedlings were in evidence and the grass was already showing that it was weakened. 

The flowering of the grey-leaved form of the meadow rue marks the longest days of the year. Rising steadily and with much optimism they hit their luminous stride in the fortnight that bridges the solstice. Hopping and skipping from the narrow bed in front of the house to gather in a concentrated colony around the corrugated tin barns, we follow their sulphur-yellow trail to witness the evenings caught in their plumage.

My original plants were given to me many years ago by our friend Isabelle, who had them running freely in her front garden in the Cotswolds. They came with a warning that they are prone to seeding and that you should grow them ‘hard’ to keep them lean and from flopping. Thalictrum flavum subsp. glaucum is a distinctive selection of the species. As blue-grey in leaf as sea kale, but with a finesses and filigree that stays with them throughout adulthood. The clutch of robust seedlings which Isabelle winkled from the cracks in her pavement were initially worked into the garden in Peckham and came here in the ark of treasures that could not be left behind when we came to Hillside.

This weekend we are celebrating our joint 60th birthdays.

Best wishes to you all and see you on the other side.

Eleven years ago, almost to the day, our good friend Anna called, “Come over this evening. I want to take you to visit a garden I’m looking after while the owners are away”. Anna knows a good thing when she sees it and has a nose for a too-good-to-miss moment. And it was exactly that. A perfect June evening with the sun still well above the tree tops and hours of daylight still ahead of us. After a short drive through dappled lanes we parked the car and walked along the rough, grassy track that led to the gateway at the beginning of a wood. We moved from the open ground and followed the now mossy track some considerable distance into the shadows. A series of glades began to open as we approached the house, which was nestled in a secret garden of wild and wonderful informality. An occupation of the wood and somewhere with a heightened mood that you might dream about, but rarely experience in reality.

My lasting memory, which has eclipsed the remembrance of more detail, was of the enormous stands of a silver-leaved rose, hunkered into the edges of the glades and scrambling into the trees. Bathed in the evening light that poured from the oculus in the glade and backed by the mysterious darkness of the wood, they glowed in their moment of June perfection. Still more bud than flower, the pale, ivory blooms lit up the approaching dusk. Although the owners were away, Anna said they would be more than happy for me to take a cutting (or two), for it would have been impossible to leave without a memento to mark what I already knew would be an indelible moment.

Every year we open the garden to a small number of organised tour groups, some of which come from as far afield as Australia, Argentina and the United States. These visits must be carefully planned and orchestrated. We have precious little on-site parking and our single track lane, which is winding and high-sided, wends precipitously downhill from the main road above us. Last year the transport provider for a tour operator failed to heed our carefully worded advice regarding access and managed to wedge a 48 seater coach on the way down. It was a hot July day and the visitors had to clamber through the hedges to get out of the bus. The driver was red in the face with anger at having to scrape the bus out of its jam and then continue a further hair-raising two miles down the lane before reaching a more suitable road. Our policy now is to encourage groups to first pay a visit to Derry Watkins’ Special Plants Nursery, a crow’s flight away, and then ferry visitors down here in people carriers. A visit to Derry’s wonderful nursery never disappoints and is a win-win for everybody.

Sharing the garden in this limited way feels important to us, now that our efforts are beginning to chime. This is a place that we have evolved over time. We have deliberately not rushed and the slow burn, the importance of taking time to look before acting, has allowed us to gauge the right moves and measure our resources and energies. It took six years here before we started the garden proper. Repairing hedges, planting orchards, woodland and field trees and oversowing the pastures to convert them to meadow all took precedence. The trial garden I put in place to test what worked here during that time was a luxury in many ways and certainly not something I could do for a client, but it allowed me to see what did well here and what felt right and in context.

The garden is always in flux, shifting from season to season and year to year. This time last year there were cracks in the soil wide enough to put your hands down and I was already having to water. This year the spade plunges deep into soil that is still damp to the core and throwing a voluminous beginning to summer.

We respond to this flux. The achillea hated the winter, then the army of slugs grazed weak growth to leave unplanned for gaps and a missing component. The Cleome that were slated to plug the last minute holes failed to germinate and the Nicotiana mutabilis that were my only back up to take their place will have to be watched with the slugs, which have reproduced like never before in the wet. The flux – for it is inevitable, wet winter, cold or dry – is covered for mostly with the self-seeders. I depend upon their opportunistic behaviour, but you need to keep an eye on them if they are not to suddenly overwhelm. Innocent looking Shirley poppies that in just a fortnight will outcompete the perennial company around them and the creamy Eschscholzia that look harmless enough with the bearded Iris, but then prevent the sun from falling to ripen their rhizomes. You do not know until next year that they have missed the sun they need and learn to remember to pull the Californian poppies, leaving the merest handful for their smattering of flower and seed for next year.

As we prepare to get the garden ready for the summer we wish you all a restful holiday weekend.

Flowers & photograph: Huw Morgan