One of the joys of gardening in real time is the process of being part of the evolution. To have a vision in your mind, to set up a planting with all the best intentions about balance and compatibility and then to wait and watch it find its own feet. Like a conversation that comes of a well posed question and the trust that something interesting will come of it.

One such area is developing at the edge of the drive, where I planted the black-catkinned willow. The growing conditions here are driven by two things. The summer shade and shelter provided by the salix and the lack of soil, where the rubble of the drive provides us with hard standing. When we constructed the drive, putting in a low retaining wall to ease the steep slope, we backfilled a trench behind the wall with good topsoil. The hardstanding was made up with scalpings over the subsoil and a top-dressing of self-binding gravel. Together with a Scotch briar rose, the willow was given the topsoil to hold the garden back from view when you swing off the lane.

A garden becomes more complex as it ages, with each successive season adjustments made of necessity or simply the way the garden wants to go. The layer upon layering is a push and pull conversation that deepens with what you find as the garden comes to life after its slumber. The successes and failures, the spontaneity of mingling that comes with self-seeding and one plant’s ability to assert itself over another’s.

We are now at the beginning of our eighth growing season after the garden was planted and it is good to now understand the rhythms and its needs. Over the last few years, and in response to the trees and the shrubs now having presence, I have been planting early spring ephemerals under their skirts. First flowering cardamine, galanthus, hellebores and narcissus that will light the garden early whilst we are still enjoying the remains of the last year in skeletons. Not having bulbs amongst the skeletons makes for easier cutting when they are finally felled. The bulbous additions have demanded we start the spring clearances in carefully choreographed moves to work freely whilst the bulbs are still below ground. As the winters get milder, these first clearances have shifted forwards to the last couple of weeks of December and I can see our actions will need to move forward again once the new sand garden starts to establish.

Since the burgeoning of last May, the water in the ditch has been all but invisible, shrouded for the growing season, but never quietened. Our first cutbacks start with these banks, revealing them in sections and working closely with what grows there. We cleared a swathe in September to plant another thousand snakeshead fritillaries and moved on in early November to put the winter hats on the gunnera ahead of the first frosts. We paused and went back in during December in the areas where we know the snowdrops would soon be nosing, revealing the constancy of the water, section by section until we completed its silvery line.

The ditch is the first place to awaken as winter passes to spring and the lifeline provided by the water sustains and shapes the life that thrives there. Though it is an extension of the garden in terms of the feeling, it is way beyond what we could manage if we were to try and garden it. It also feels inappropriate to override the habitat on these wet slopes, so I work with the natural vegetation and the only significant work we do is the annual cutback. Adding bulbs, splitting primroses and keeping the sturdy perennials such as the Inula, Telekia and the Persicaria polymorpha from being overwhelmed until they are established are targeted extras.

This is the time of year when mum comes to mind. It is six years since her health took a turn for the worse and, after a rapid decline, she left us in late February as the Beast from the East swept across the country. February, the cruellest month, is now associated with this time. Those weeks spent back at my childhood home, taking turns with my brother to look after her. Sitting by her bedside, as the first stirrings of spring were held in check by the freeze, time seemed to stop. To stop and yet also to cast me back into my childhood and family memories, even as I now had to parent her.

­­Memories of mum, a seamstress’s daughter, sitting at the dining table running up a new outfit on the sewing machine and teaching me how to do the same. Of dad reading Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ aloud on Christmas Eve. Of the home-decorating and DIY projects that filled weekends and holidays; wallpapering, painting and tiling, stripping and re-upholstering furniture, clearing out and organising the attic and garden shed. And of our yearly holidays on the Gower in South Wales, where we would stay with our grandparents.

On the first of February we reached the halfway mark between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. In Pagan ritual the day is named Imbolc and, appropriately, I have a snowdrop of that name to mark the day here. This midway point is certainly something you can feel. In the shift in the light as darkness finally loosens its grip on the afternoons and in the new life stirring. In the woods the nosing wild garlic and in the garden, where first flowers are gathering in number in these mild, damp days.

At this midpoint, we mark the moment by gathering what has graced the garden so far for the mantlepiece, windowsills and bedside tables. We are at peak snowdrop at the moment, a week earlier than last year, but curiously there is less for the posies than a year ago when the freezes were harder. Last year’s cool summer and the endless wet we experienced until just recently must have had their influence, but regardless, we have surely turned a corner.  

The winter always seems shorter for the winter work. The tasks that mostly lie beyond the garden and are out of sight and out of mind in the growing season. Our orbit shifts with the land laid bare and we venture down to the stream again where the silvery water shimmers in light falling through branches and the nettles have retreated to ground and allow us once again to get to the water. The down season tasks in the areas where we deliberately exercise a lighter touch are rougher and readier than the detailed work in the garden, but there is always a long-term outcome in the heavier work and the land always gives back if it is tended with care.

When the poplars were at their most laden and weighty, two of the vetarans came crashing down to spread their length across the stream. One we heard, with an explosive crack, on a perfectly still day in August. The slimmer of the two, it fell nimbly amongst its companions to strike a fence post like a hammer, gathering up the tension in the wire so that we couldn’t open the gate to the crossing. The second tree, not so very far away and the bigger of the two came down silently, its enormous limbs pressing themselves into the soft earth, taking out a hornbeam and whiplashing my grove of young alders. It was almost impossible to make our way to the bridge over the stream for the carnage of broken limbs and weight of vegetation, so we left it until November when the garden demanded less, and time felt apparently in our hands.

Although I have long given up making new year’s resolutions – spring and autumn feel like more appropriate times to focus on setting goals and ambitions – January is always the moment to start forward planning the new season’s vegetable garden.

So, with the raised beds rock solid after consecutive hard frosts this week, out come the old wooden boxes inherited from my great Aunty Megan (former Land Girl and expert vegetable grower well into her 90’s) containing all of my seeds, and the process of sorting, discarding and note taking begins.

To the south of our property, where our land jumps the lane and then runs above it to the east, there are two fields marked on the deed maps as Upper Tyning and Lower Tyning, and which we call collectively the Tynings. They are both roughly triangular with their longest sides touching along a precipitous bank, called a lynchet. Lynchets are medieval earthworks (some are believed to be neolithic) which were made by ploughing the hillside to form banks to ease the steep slopes. In the mind’s eye the bank is a little like a diagonal fold made from corner to corner on a handkerchief. A crease in a continuous surface that divides the one thing distinctively into two with an above and below and a steep slope between.

The lynchet is fifteen metres or so at its deepest point and tapers to both ends where the fields meet again as the contours connect and allow free movement of stock and tractors. There are four mature sycamores on the banks and a hedge at the top comprised primarlily of elder, blackthorn, hawthorn, elm and dog rose. Being too steep to manage, the slope has a vegetation all its own with cowslips, hypericum, oregano, knapweed and scabious that escape the heaviest of the grazing. In the time we have been here we have allowed the bank to rewild. It was regularly sprayed by the previous owner to keep bramble and dog rose in check and was barren when we arrived, consisting of little more than rough grass and seedling sycamores. The blackthorn, or ‘Mother-of-all-woods’, has created protective thorny thickets where briar roses, spindle and seedling trees are now pushing through.

thank you for all of your support this year

with our wishes for a peaceful new year

The grass in the fields is deep and plentiful after a mild autumn and the farmer who owns the sheep that graze our land looks on it with a little gleam in his eye. The grass only stops growing for a short window in the winter, but as soon as the weather cools we see the sheep making their impact. Eating faster than the grass can grow, the lap of lushness slowly diminishes, and the winter green of dormancy is with us.

The berries that have hung on to now bare branches are also subject to the falling temperatures. A frosty morning brings flurries of birds that strip a species successionally; dunnock, blackbird, goldfinch, song thrush, mistle thrush and fieldfare. The bead-like berries of Malus transitoria last just a fortnight before they are suddenly gone. One day a tree that has been shining with fruit will be stripped back in a frenzy and for no apparent reason one hawthorn will be targeted, but not another. Perhaps it is a ripening that needs to hit an optimum moment of nutrition or depth of colour or sweet perfume. We shadow the progress, noting a tree that is suddenly bare and that there is a rhythm and a staggering in the ripening to make sure the plenty is drawn out a while yet.