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

One of the joys of being part of this place is in the doing and the making good and the betterment. When we arrived, we started by disentangling the runs of barbed wire and removing the old bedsteads that had been pushed into the broken hedges. It was good to replace these missing teeth. In some cases whole runs of hedge that had been eaten away by the livestock or overwhelmed by elder. A decade on and the hedges run in unbroken lifelines to join the high ground with the low and our hedges with the ones that connect away into the distance.

Of note, we uncovered an old springhead with a rough hewn stone trough that had been all but submerged by years of trampling hooves, but there was little else to suggest that the land had been invested in as it had been in the older houses that surround us. You can trace the prosp­erity of the old manor houses in the walls that run back up the hill to the older properties. They mark an earlier time where boundaries were laid down in the stone that was cleared from the fields. The old walls each bear the signature of their maker and now the patination of time. Most are neglected and crumbled, lichened and overtaken by signs of the ancient woodland that once would have dominated the valley. Dog’s Mercury, bluebell, archangel and wood anemone and a cage of bramble that hides them entirely in the summer months.  

The camassia have risen, spearing into spring and soaring skyward to link us with the early days of summer. Their first ascending colour eclipses the last of the spring bulbs as the meadows quicken to swallow the Pheasant’s Eye narcissus. Spires that leave their fleshy foliage behind to blink one and then a succession of starry flowers. Each star lasts just a day as they fizzle up the stems, still ahead of the grasses – but not for long – to ride this pristine and to-be-savoured moment.

Camassia provide first height in a border, rising simultaneously with Thalictrum aquilegifolium and cow parsley. I have learnt a lesson or two over the years, having regretted planting the profligate Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba’ in a border setting (not my own I might add, but a client’s) without having grown the plant for long enough myself to know its habits. The single form seeds into open ground if you do not deadhead it, so densely that you might have sown a lawn come the following spring. Seedlings that burrow fast into the crowns of anything that isn’t fast enough to eclipse their early growth, then forming a network of bulbs that are impossible to disentangle.

I have just returned from a week overseas. A week of spring at its most exuberant, and one in which so much accelerates. First leaf in the trees, the meadows on the rise and the garden surging. On the morning I left, I rose early to walk, absorb and to try to be present. To slow time by looking, rather than planning the next move to keep ahead or on top of the perpetual motion of garden tasks. Our given state as gardeners, despite the fact that one of the primary reasons we garden is to be in the here and now. In spite of best attempts to be witness to the very morning, my early walk was tinged by the pathos of what I might miss during my absence. A complete chapter that in our case here, is marked by the first blossoming of the crab apples.

Their presence on the banks behind the house has been carefully planned and, twelve years after planting, they are beginning to be greater than the sum of their parts. Significant enough to have the gravity it takes to be the happening on the hill that I had imagined when I staked out their positions in the winter of 2012. More than a decade on and the young trees are in their first flush of adulthood, reaching to touch and beginning to arch over the back track to make a tunnel between the hedge on th eother side and the open slopes that rise up behind us.

In the vegetable relay race of early spring, last year’s crops are now starting to flower on their mission to set seed. The leeks have sent up their flower spikes and the radicchios and chicories are finally coming to the end of their season and are about to follow suit.  The kales and purple sprouting broccolis have handed the baton to the spring greens, while the autumn sown chard is having its last gasp before being replaced by the plugs that I planted out last weekend. In the polytunnel, the autumn sown salads, spinach, herbs and spring onions are still producing but, with the lengthening days and higher temperatures, they too are starting to flower and are beginning to flag. So the aim has been to eat as much as we can, before everything bolts and is cleared out in advance of the tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.

This means we’ve been eating a lot of meals where greens are the primary ingredient. Pasta with a sauce of blanched and liquidised ‘Hungry Gap’ kale. Creamed kale. Kale in a cheese sauce. Kale risotto. Kale curry. Chargrilled and roasted spring cabbage with a dressing of tahini, garlic, lemon juice and mint or smothered in chopped olives, preserved lemon and parsley. Every lunch features a salad of spinach, mustard greens and the last of the winter lettuces. While we’ve had wild rocket for days. In salads, pestos, sandwiches, risotto. We can’t eat it fast enough, as it lives up to its name in exponential growth. It’s the first year I’ve grown it in the polytunnel and it has been so successful it will now be a regular feature.