Though it is just in its infancy and unfinished, with more open ground than planted, the new garden beyond the barns has already deepened our connection with this place. Dubbed the Sand Garden, the working title which will probably stick, it has provided me the same opportunities as the sandpit my father made for us when we were children. I think it was Jung who theorised that if you could find the place where you lost yourself as a child, you could find a place of deep meditation and calm as an adult. And sure enough, the familiar feeling of being lost in a world of my own making, enhanced in this case by the very sand I’ve used as a top dressing, has rewarded me with the same opportunity for play all these years later.

I have always known that the act of gardening is my place of retreat and contemplation, but somehow the sand has emphasised the connection in this extension to the garden. The sand radiates light and is warm to the touch and I can already see plants that would struggle on our heavy loam responding favourably. When writing earlier in the summer and to reiterate, part of my experiment in the sand garden has been to cope with our increasingly polarised weather patterns. Drier growing seasons and wetter winters are a challenge when selecting drought tolerant plants and few are adapted to both. The sand should provide free-draining conditions in winter to open up a range of plants that simply aren’t possible on our heavy clay loam.

On March 11^th 2020 we received an email from a photographer named Kate Friend asking if Dan would be interested in participating in an ongoing project. At that point it had the working title ‘A Book of Flowers’ and was the development of a series of photographs Kate had been taking over the previous two years. At the start she had asked gardeners from Great Dixter, Chelsea Physic Garden, Houghton Hall and Fern Verrow biodynamic growers to select some of the best flowers they grew. Then, with medium and large format cameras she then photographed them on film using only natural daylight against simple, painted backdrops in colours of her choice. The resulting portraits were strong, sensitive and compelling.

In 2018 Kate exhibited some of them at the Garden Museum in an exhibition titled ‘Botanical Portraits’. We had seen the exhibition and were intrigued by her process and so Dan was very happy to agree to be involved. Kate explained that she had since asked a number of creative people that she admired to choose their favourite flower including Margaret Howell, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Maggi Hambling, Penny Rimbaud and George Harrison’s wife, Olivia, and that she was was looking to include more people in her selection. We emailed about identifying potential dates for her to shoot at Hillside when some of Dan’s favourite flowers would be in bloom and then…

Last month I made the long journey back to the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Hokkaido. My annual visit, which was curtailed by the pandemic, had run to three years of absence and the impact of Covid had made the distance feel more profound than usual. In this time, isolation during lockdown, two snowbound winters and the garden closed and running on a skeletal staff for two growing seasons, brought a particular kind of quiet to the foot of the mountain.

Nature continued to run its course, uninterrupted and growing thickly in the brief northern summer. The Sasa bamboo that the garden team keep carefully in check in an orbit around the more cultivated parts of the garden, returned like an incoming tide. Cut once a year in the autumn to encourage the indigenous flora of the forest, the clearances had a dual purpose. Firstly, to recalibrate the woodland flora after the initial clearances by the 19^th century settlers created an imbalance, allowing the Sasa to overwhelm the forest. Secondly to impose a managed domain. The bears that live on the mountain and use the bamboo as cover are not to be confronted, but they are also respectful of the open ground created by its removal. The garden team has been careful to only take as much ground as it could tend with available labour and a balance was struck that worked without having to erect fences. But during the pandemic the landscape took on another life and with energies pulled back to the essentials and the silence of a garden quietened by closure, the bears came back with the Sasa.

Wishing you all a wonderful August bank holiday weekend

Flowers and photograph: Huw Morgan

And so, once again, the courgettes are on the march. No matter how quickly we think we are eating them – and with house guests for the past three weekends we have got through a fair few – there are always more than we can manage. Every week the largest are liberated and put in a crate on the verge by the front gate for passersby to take. More often than not they are gone within the day. 

A couple of years ago, during the height of the pandemic, we witnessed the entertaining sight of a cyclist removing the water bottle attached to his bike frame and offering up each courgette in the crate to the bottle clamp to see if it would fit, like Prince Charming trying slippers on Cinderella. With the match finally made he tucked the water bottle into the back of his Lycra shorts and off he went, unaware of our spying. We were delighted to think we had provided a free supper for someone who had just gone out for an evening ride.

The last few weeks of wet has had its influence. The meadows remain uncut and the long grass that we allow to lap up to the garden paths has cast seed far and wide. The wet has seen the seed germinating a whole month earlier than usual in a green haze that shows where the wind has blown. The tomatoes are only just starting to ripen in the polytunnel, for the cool that has come with this summer’s wet has checked the plants that need warmth to flower and ripen. Compare with the heat and drought of last summer, a tomato glut in a polytunnel it was a struggle to keep cool and worrying signs of stress in trees that were dropping foliage prematurely. It is becoming increasingly difficult to predict our new weather patterns and what to plan for, but what does seem clear is that we are bound to have to deal with change. 

The wet has been kind to the trees that looked so threatened last year and we have seen a weight in their branches and a second round of growth where they have had the moisture. A halo of new green on the young oaks and vigorous shoots on the shrub roses that have put another notch on their belts. In the garden the paths have narrowed so that we emerge wet from the August overhang after our morning inspection. One such moment, where the Hydrangea aspera crowds the lower steps to the east of the milking barn, has seen it all but obscure the way and I can see that it won’t be long before we start to feel overtaken. 

I am a firm believer in finding the niche. The place where a plant might naturally be most at home. Where the right amount of sunlight falls, be it plentiful or dappled or none and where the shadow counts. The same applies to shelter, for the difference between an airy place or one where there is a still shelter might be the make or break and opportunity.

Our conditions here on the hill are all about the light and free air movement. The sun rises in the east and swings around in a great all-day arc across our slopes until it sets at the top of the valley. There is very little shadow and very little shelter, so for most of the day the garden is exposed and at the whim of whatever the weather decides to throw at it. The places where the air is still or where there is reliable shadow are few. In the lea of the buildings where you can see the light falling differently and where it is worth taking the time to observe where the wind fingers and where it doesn’t.

The milking barn yard used to be a very different place. The access track to the barn descended at a perilous angle down the slope, with everything on the angle to save digging into the hill and making up the ground with retaining walls. The yard itself was poured in a patchwork of concrete slabs by the farmer before us in characteristic ad hoc fashion. It was an ugly place, but we liked it in spite of that and although I always knew the yard itself would have to go, the space it carved out for the little barn was important. 

When I brought in the granite trough to provide the centre of gravity and frame the yard, the concrete buckled like a pie crust under the weight of the forklift and, in the hiatus whilst we were doing up the buildings, seeding weeds grew back into the cracks. The interlopers were not noteworthy in themselves, but the airiness of these pioneers refined the roughness of the broken concrete and the feeling that this place was being reclaimed had resonance. I watched and thought and took away from living with the yard in this halfway state the importance of it being a place that felt gently occupied. 

The last few weeks of whipping wind and rain have been painful. It has torn at the poplars at the bottom of the slope, their enormous limbs as heavy as they ever will be in leaf weighted by rain. The tell-tale crack and pregnant pause before the impact saw three limbs the size of trees come crashing to earth. A whole tree gave up a few nights later, to lay between and fortunately not on my young hornbeams, as if the fall had been planned. We will wait until autumn before beginning the enormous task of clearing the wood from where it has shattered amongst the slumbering snowdrops for fear of the weight still up there in the remaining trees and this not being the last limbs down. 

The garden has stood the test of our exposed position remarkably well. I stake lightly, preferring the garden to be composed of plants that are not reliant upon us to keep them upright. The wiry stems of the hemerocallis and dierama and the pliable Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ were almost made for wind and withstand even the rain-laden gales, but the plants that topple when in the full sail of summer growth need assistance. Taller than me, sanguisorba that would splay in a great cartwheel without support and echinops that would derail an area as wide as they are tall if they broke loose from their metal hoops. Staking takes valuable time in the rush to finish the garden work before growth starts in earnest in the spring, but our metal hoops work and are fast to install. 

It’s been a great year for the gooseberries. Our two bushes – one ‘Hinnonmaki Green’, the other ‘Hinnonmaki Red’ – have produced the largest crops we have ever had from them. Over 6kg from each. These dual purpose culinary and dessert types can be used when immature for cooking in pies, jams, sauces and chutneys, while the fully ripe fruit is sweet enough to be eaten straight from the bush. Originally bred in Finland these cultivars are reliably hardy and resistant to powdery mildew and have cropped reliably for us since we planted them seven years ago. In the case of the red, being thornless they also make for easy picking, unlike the green which bears the familiar needle-like thorns that lacerate your hands, however carefully you go.

Although the first to bear fruit in the vegetable garden, gooseberries have not always been our first fruit of choice for eating. Too many childhood memories of the pale green, seedy pulp floating in a bowl of curdled custard or evaporated milk and the disappointment of Nana’s buttery, sugary, shortcrust giving way to undersweetened (to my child’s palate, at least), sour and watery fruit. Gooseberry fool (gooseberries, Bird’s Custard and cream) was one of the first desserts I was taught to make in ‘O’ Level Home Economics but, by the time it had been carried home in Tupperware on a hot summer bus, it was not the most appetising of puddings and, with fears of an upset stomach, neither I nor the family could bring ourselves to eat it.