Last week, on the very last day of February, we began the big cut back. I sent out a little prayer to the rain gods to provide us a dry window, for we had planned ahead and committed to a dozen pairs of hands to make a day of it. John and Johnny prepared for the big day the evening before with barrows, dumpy bags and a stack of planks to help us spread our weight as we ventured onto the heavy, wet soil. I fell asleep that night as the rain pattered once again on the windows and tried not to fret, but woke to quiet, grey skies and the task ahead made easier for being dry. 

Each year, the winter seems shorter and the mild wet weather this year has seen new growth beginning to push in the middle of February. It feels right not to interrupt the cycle by removing the cover and forage the skeletons provide, but there comes a moment when the push of new growth flushes and the spent growth from the last year begins to feel redundant. The giant fennels have been burgeoning for weeks now, seizing the winter as they would in their homeland of Greece. The hemerocallis are the real litmus, pushing through the splay of last year’s foliage, now mostly decomposed and pulled to earth by the worms. This is time and there is spring work to do. Splitting and adjustments whilst plants are waking from slumber, and the moment is optimum for change. 

It is a good feeling to be starting the cycle of working the trees and hedges which we planted in the first few winters after moving here. It has now been fifteen growing seasons and the hard-grazed fields that stood still and empty are now boundaried with hedges that have had their gaps replanted and run plump and continuously into the distance. We look proudly onto the young orchards which are hunkered into the slope and provide shade for the sheep and fruit that litters the ground in the autumn. The pockets of woodland, which we planted as knee high whips to provide habitat, are grown enough to need thinning and down in the shelter by the stream, the young hazels in the coppice are ready to live up to the name we have given this area of productive woodland and begin their rotation of cut and renewal. 

In a decade and a half, we have had enough time to get to know the land by observing what we have planted and in turn to make educated decisions about where to go next. The perplexing failure of one of the medlar trees in the garden was monitored for the last four years as progressively the branches yellowed and then declined. I wondered if the roots had hit something under the new ground we had laid over the site of the old farm track. Or whether our ground might be too alkaline. Or perhaps it had fallen foul of a fungal infection. I foliar fed and applied sulphur pellets to acidify the ground with little effect and the tree continued to decline, showing no improvement.

In the nebulous few days between Christmas and New Year I broke the spell of inertia and spent a day getting back up to speed in the fruit garden. With the light slipping behind the wood on its furthest arc and wintery incarnation, it becomes hard to see the detail by three in the afternoon, so a day of pruning is a measured exercise from start to finish and the measure in the day is a gentle way to reflect upon time.

I like to finish once I have begun a task and it is impossible to rush the detail of unpicking and then reassembling the end of year tangle of pruning and retraining the climbing berries. The tayberry is the more vigorous of the two plants that mark the beginning of the soft fruit garden and I wonder as I work what would become of this plant if it were left to layer itself as it touched down to form a great colony. A birthday gift layering was how our plant arrived from my friend Jane across the way and we love the tayberry for its tart, juicy fruit, which reflect its hybrid parentage, the summer raspberry and the blackberry, which follow on neatly once the tayberry goes over. Its neighbour, the ‘Oregon Thornless’ or parsley-leaved blackberry is always pruned second, for its stems are brittle and I want to know I have the measure of things before making a start. 

After the big cut back that took place at the end of February and beginning of March, I made all the edits that needed to happen ahead of the summer. Splitting and moving plants and making additions and edits where changes might be needed for the sake of the new energy they provide. Next came the mulching, the finishing protective eiderdown which keeps moisture in and weeds and seedlings down. These tasks were happening right through until the end of April and just last week I was winkling plants in that I’d had sitting in the cold frames needing a home.

As apple blossom gave way to hawthorn in the last fortnight, the garden has reared up and away into the growing season. Bare soil and visible mulch swallowed up in fresh new growth and the handover from spring to early summer. If you haven’t caught those last few weeds in this window, they will become part of the borders and gaps that just a fortnight ago felt large enough to receive something new have quickly closed over. This is the moment you realise that, if you haven’t done it yet, then spring jobs are now best left until autumn.

Tending a garden is a cyclical process. A series of loops that are mostly without a break so that, as the seasons roll one into the next, you return to where you started. A place that is familiar and every year more so, for the knowledge of the last revolution and the ones that came before. With every cycle our relationship with the garden deepens, we become wiser and better able to predict the next move, but every season is different and we must remain open to change. The impact of a cold winter, for instance, and the repair of unexpected damage, or simply the inevitable change that comes with evolution.

The garden here has grown by about a third in the last two years, with the extension of the Sand Garden and the bank above it, beyond the barns. Last summer was their first full growing season and the first revolution of getting to know the new ground. To stay on track with the maintenance of the additional garden we took on one extra day of help a week, so that between them John and Johnnie do four days a week. Now that the days are once again getting longer, Huw and I make up the difference at the weekends and in any time we can find. It is a carefully calculated operation and, with the knowledge that we need to start the big cutback in the main garden in the last two weeks of February, the Sand Garden areas had been cleared of spent growth and weeded by mid-February. Bar a final prune of any winter damage to tender sages and phlomis, once we feel the worst of the winter is over, we are done there until things start growing.

A week ago the frogs started spawning, an audible orgy in the brooklime in the pond and a marker in the last week of February that it is finally time to get things moving, now that winter is nearing its end. We have been working towards this moment for an industrious three months, strimming the ditch ahead of the snowdrops, narcissus and primroses, clearing and logging a fallen tree and coppicing this year’s hazels to open up ground for more primroses and to keep us in sticks and twigs for the garden.

Next week we will start the big cut back, having left the skeletons standing for the life we share the garden with and for being able to witness not only their rise, but also their fall in the growing cycle. But before we start, we’ve made a push to complete the last of the winter pruning. In early January, whilst the sap was still in the roots, the grape vines were cut back to hard knuckles and their wall trained framework and the mulberry raised gently where it is beginning to overhang the paths. Cut much later and they bleed, the vine a clear sap, the mulberry’s milky, the nutrition for spring growth all too easily wasted with bad timing. The roses were completed in January, since their buds begin to break here in mild weather in February. Then on to the autumn fruiting raspberries, which are simply razed to the ground and mulched and the thornless blackberry and tayberry, which are intricately woven onto a framework.

In October last year I spent a day sowing seed. It is an activity in which time plays a significant role. Time spent observing a seedpod, the wait until it is ripe enough to gather, but not so ripe it is already cast, flung or taken by wind or bird. Time spent in cleaning and sifting and in understanding how a plant invests in its future. The profligacy of an annual, the weightlessness of those which are designed to carry on the wind or those quite literally catapulted into new territories. Some seed is gathered from the garden, some collected from further afield or gifted with stories attached to provenance. By the time of the actual day of sowing and the lighting of the blue touch paper, you are already invested in a future.

A day of sowing is an intimate day of communing. Each plant with its own story and life cycle. Some short and for which you are safeguarding against loss. Some that are rare and hard to come by. Sometimes you simply want more, and seed is such a fine way to produce more if you have the patience to invest in the wait. A wait that will help to hone how you might use a plant or extend its reach in real time.

This week I returned from my travels in Chile. The seared and otherworldly deserts of the Atacama in the north and the primordial highlands in the south where the araucaria forests literally step you back in time. The feeling of being so very far from home was driven in part by being tucked on the other side of the Andes, but mostly in the diametric reversal of the seasons. Where meadows were in full sway, jacaranda in neon blossom and the growth in the forests rushing to the longest day of their year. My return was to our shortest. A sensory jolt into dimly lit mornings, darkness descending in the middle of the afternoon and a garden giving in to its deepest and most peaceful sleep.

The lack of light is what carries winter’s weight for me, but I welcome the season in this country for its relative ease and the ability to keep working. Winter at Hillside is beautiful for being in landscape and exposed to all its nuance. To ground laid bare, to leaf mould mouldering and to the emerald green of the moss-covered paths. Even on the dullest of days, the sky is a myriad of greys, the folds in the hills differing saturations of greens, browns and sepia with low cloud hanging in the trees on Freezing Hill and moisture in the air. There is time to look in the winter and time to see what has been happening during the growing season now that branches are once again unclothed and revealing all.