I have always gardened with euphorbia and it would be hard to imagine removing them from my planting palette. Look at the tribe as a whole and they span several continents, shape-shifting within their huge genus as they navigate their chosen habitat. They have adapted to cool, leafy woodland, wet stream edges and modified their surface areas and foliage so that they can withstand extremes of drought and exposure in their most succulent incarnations. For this reason they are a genus that I return to in my uncertainty about what will happen next with our ever-changing climate and need to be adaptable.

The spurges are included in almost all the plantings in the garden here, though you might not always be drawn to them first, when they are sitting back and out of season. Their season is long and varied and their particular vibrancy is something that always brings with it new energy when they come into flower.

April, this most delicate of months. Soft with new growth, poplars silvering and wild cherry lighting the valley. We can be sure now in the knowledge that we finally have momentum. An unstoppable push with the flash of yellow dandelion, cowslip and cuckoo flower. Ahead of the grass in the meadows for these few days they have their moment, but not for long now that the rush is with us.

This second week of the month, the one just past, is a reliable moment to take in this brief and wonderful window. A time when the newness is as fresh as it ever will be, untarnished by the elements and at its most vital. As green, as shiny or downy and often saturated with an inky stain and bronzing. A colouring that is ephemeral, particular to now and to be savoured for the hand full of days it is at its best. This year we took a fortnight to be in the garden and to be part of it, to look and to do.

Wishing you all a very happy and peaceful Easter weekend.

Flowers & photograph: Huw Morgan

For our Japanese visitors last week, foraging for spring greens is a very natural part of the reawakening that takes place after the long Hokkaido winter. The gathering of sansai (mountain vegetables) is an ancient tradition and one that, unlike here, is seemingly unbroken from its hunter gatherer origins. Indeed, sansai provided an important means of survival even up to the 19^th century as the large population struggled in the face of wars, famines and earthquakes without well-developed agricultural systems. Wild foods are still a fundamental part of the Japanese diet with cultural importance.

Midori told us how one must be very careful foraging for sansai in the forest in early spring, which there comes in late April. When the brown bears awake they are hungry and grumpy after their long hibernation, leading to the dangerous combination of them being both confused and aggressive for food. Foragers wear bear bells to alert the animals to their presence and must keep one eye and ear on the surrounding undergrowth in case they should need to run. Not quite the relaxed and bucolic scene we might experience when gathering wild garlic in the woods here on a spring morning.

Dan Pearson

This week we welcomed our friends from Hokkaido, who have travelled all the way from their snowbound island to steal a march on spring and reconnect with their British gardening fraternity.

Spring is suddenly with us and with it a few days without rain have allowed the primroses to finally lift their heads. Since finishing the cutback in the last week of February, the stirring which we could then feel but barely see has sprung. New life, where just a fortnight ago we were looking at bare earth and imagining what is now vital and clear. The patterns and groupings in plan view, yet to be three dimensional, as you see them when working out a planting plan and having to imagine the volumes and interconnectedness.

In this brief window – which in my opinion is the perfect three weeks of the planting season here – I go back into the garden to assess where I need to make changes. Are the sanguisorba in need of splitting? They will resent it if you try to do this in the autumn. Can I get away with one more season without dividing the Iris sibirica? They also prefer division in the spring, but this needs to be done right now – preferably last week – before the shoots rush away further and are easily damaged. A monkish bald patch in the centre of the plant lets you know that it is time to replenish the vigour at the heart as it grows away in each direction. With the garden maturing this task alone is a good day’s work, so we pace ourselves, taking one or two groups a year and leaving some to provide a show whilst the new divisions catch up and can cover in relay for splits in future seasons. I note the plants that demand little or no attention. The amsonia, peonies and hemerocallis that rarely need division. These are the members of the community that allow you to give attention to those that need it most.

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.