A week ago the frogs started spawning, an audible orgy in the brooklime in the pond and a marker in the last week of February that it is finally time to get things moving, now that winter is nearing its end. We have been working towards this moment for an industrious three months, strimming the ditch ahead of the snowdrops, narcissus and primroses, clearing and logging a fallen tree and coppicing this year’s hazels to open up ground for more primroses and to keep us in sticks and twigs for the garden.

Next week we will start the big cut back, having left the skeletons standing for the life we share the garden with and for being able to witness not only their rise, but also their fall in the growing cycle. But before we start, we’ve made a push to complete the last of the winter pruning. In early January, whilst the sap was still in the roots, the grape vines were cut back to hard knuckles and their wall trained framework and the mulberry raised gently where it is beginning to overhang the paths. Cut much later and they bleed, the vine a clear sap, the mulberry’s milky, the nutrition for spring growth all too easily wasted with bad timing. The roses were completed in January, since their buds begin to break here in mild weather in February. Then on to the autumn fruiting raspberries, which are simply razed to the ground and mulched and the thornless blackberry and tayberry, which are intricately woven onto a framework.

The sting of young nettles is never more so than now, when ignited by the first stirrings at the end of winter. The familiar ringing that lingers on my hands into the evenings is something I know well from splitting the snowdrops. I do this as soon as their flowers dim and there is a window before the nettles get away in earnest and suddenly there are demands back up in the garden. This close and detailed work is something I savour for the opportunity to witness the first signs of life on my knees and with time to take in the environment down by the stream. The smell of the wild garlic as you bruise its first leaves and the close-up observation of sprung celandines, pressed flat against the earth, with their distinctive shiny leaves like miniature waterlilies. The first green hellebores, green upon green, with ivy and moss and dog’s mercury. And, as we come up the ditch and out into the light, precocious primroses and the gold of early marsh marigolds offering up flower to early bumblebees where the sun hits the warmest flanks.

With the repetitiveness of a simple task, you begin to see that winter is waning, one cycle overlapping the next in a quickening surge towards spring. Primroses appearing as the snowdrops lose their lustre and the first wild daffodils taking the snowdrop’s place as if the timing had been planned for. I make a note to myself to remember to plant more Narcissus pseudonarcissus. The small group by a fallen oak that I planted in-the-green a decade ago have seeded and the seedlings are just beginning to flower. The heavy seed from the parent plants dropped at the reach of the seedpod and a little more where the seed tumbled downhill. Five or six years to flower and then another drop from the second generation and seedlings to follow on in a slow but sure expansion of their territory.

In October last year I spent a day sowing seed. It is an activity in which time plays a significant role. Time spent observing a seedpod, the wait until it is ripe enough to gather, but not so ripe it is already cast, flung or taken by wind or bird. Time spent in cleaning and sifting and in understanding how a plant invests in its future. The profligacy of an annual, the weightlessness of those which are designed to carry on the wind or those quite literally catapulted into new territories. Some seed is gathered from the garden, some collected from further afield or gifted with stories attached to provenance. By the time of the actual day of sowing and the lighting of the blue touch paper, you are already invested in a future.

A day of sowing is an intimate day of communing. Each plant with its own story and life cycle. Some short and for which you are safeguarding against loss. Some that are rare and hard to come by. Sometimes you simply want more, and seed is such a fine way to produce more if you have the patience to invest in the wait. A wait that will help to hone how you might use a plant or extend its reach in real time.

My name is Dan Pearson and I am a galanthaholic. It has crept up on me and now I find I have more than a hundred varieties. A small number in comparison to those who are truly addicted, but nevertheless, I am hook, line and sinkered.

My current dalliance with the named varieties started with a gift from our friend Tania Compton while we were still living in Peckham. A bundle of ‘Dionysus’, one of the best and most reliable doubles, and a couple more that didn’t survive the move to Hillside. Once here, with the prospect of more ground and the dreams that come with it, we were invited to one of Mary Keen’s snowdrop lunches and were generously gifted another half dozen varieties, each with stories of provenance and the opportunity of seeing them perform in her garden. The beautiful green leaved G. nivalis ‘Anglesey Abbey’, for instance, originally gifted to Mary by John Sales, the National Trust’s Head of Gardens, and Galanthus gracilis which, Mary explained, crosses easily and is exciting for the potential of your own seedlings one day.

In October 2023 I was approached by Stephanie Mahon, Editor of Gardens Illustrated magazine, to be this year’s writer of their long-running series, Plantsperson’s Favourites. The task, to choose my top ten Hillside plants for each month of the eleven issues running from February to December. The series has always been interesting for the opportunity to see a selection of plants through the eyes of a particular expert. Previous writers have included Tom Coward of Gravetye Manor, Marina Christopher of Phoenix Perennials, Hans Kramer of De Hessenhof, Derry Watkins of Special Plants and Andrea Brunsendorf of Lowther Castle. Nursery people specialising in a palette that is particular to them and gardeners whose experience and long-term knowledge is pulled together in a collection that is hard won through time and intimacy with plants. Experience that can be translated directly into trust. 

It has been a privilege to be invited into this stable of plantspeople and a challenge to hone one’s thinking, despite the complexity of whittling down an impossibly long list. To give an idea of the challenge, none of the plants featured at the top of this article made it onto my list. As a plantsman, identifying your favourites is not an easy task, because they change from season to season and as you go through the inevitable process of falling in love with something new and then maybe falling out of love once you know more. When you look back with time behind you, you begin to see that some infatuations are not much more than a brief dalliance – a plant might not ‘do’ like you need it to or you simply fall out of love with it – while others, the love of umbellifers for instance, become longterm relationships that take years or probably decades to get to know. The perennial Angelica genuflexa that does away with the need to manage the vociferous seeding of the biennial A. archangelica, being a fine example.

At secondary school I was the only boy in my year to take Cookery as a practical study subject. Woodwork and Metalwork were definitely not my thing and although I enjoyed art lessons and pottery particularly, given the option of only one practical subject at ‘O’ Level, it had to be cookery for me. I knew I was unusual amongst my male peers for being interested in cooking and, thinking about it now, I was doubtless bullied in part because of it, but when pushed to choose I didn’t think twice.

Lessons took place in a huge, high-ceilinged room in a new wing built in the 1970’s. Linoleum floored in a shade of petrol blue, banks of double-sided counters, each accommodating two students per side and each with a cooker set into it, were arranged perpendicular to the exterior wall. Plate glass windows running the length of the room offered an expansive view onto the sports field and the suburban landscape beyond. One day in 1980 we saw the smoke rising from Alexandra Palace as it burned.

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.