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.

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.