The Delphinium elatum are standing tall, head and shoulders above most of their present company. They exclaim, with their bolt of blue, upward motion and mood of their own, “It is summer, we are here and do not walk by without marvelling.”

I must admit to not having been drawn to delphiniums until recently. The garden forms made me think of the rigour and horticultural excellence that is required at the Chelsea Flower Show to make them stand to attention in ranks against a canvas backdrop. Vita Sackville-West famously grew them at Sissinghurst in her time there, where staking and the careful attention they might need to remain perfect carried a weight of horticultural expectation. I always pictured them in a more traditional country garden or at the back of perennial borders arranged by height, rather than the naturalistic setting of Hillside, where plants are chosen for feeling on the wild side.

Spring is rearing headlong into the growing season in this brightly lit week that could be summer. Brilliant blue skies, the crabapples in full sail, cow parsley spilling from the hedgerows and buttercups rising in the meadows, taller and more plentiful from one day to the next.

In the garden we have already begun a series of micro-seasons where favourite groups of plants cluster together to make these times all about them. One of the first are the peonies, which have already made their early start so markedly with spearing growth pushed from their deep, tuberous roots. Molly-the-Witch with lipstick red shoots breaking open to push smoky, damson-coloured foliage. ‘Merry Mayshine’ with filigree new leaves that flare in spring sunshine, a luminous ruby red. The new shoots of ‘Mme Gaudichau’ are the deepest plum, you’d think it liquorice black until you peer closer.

Three years ago Mary Keen gave me a plump envelope of downy anemone seed, labelled A. hortensis syn. A. stellata. She had already split the seed and taken a third for herself and, in typically generous spirit and with the maxim that the best way to keep a plant is to give it away, she passed the rest on to split between myself and Derry Watkins at Special Plants Nursery. The writing on the envelope was John Morley’s, who had in turn been given the seed by his friend, the plantsman and artist Cedric Morris. He of the Benton Iris and many other treasures that we grow here, which originated from his garden at Benton End in Suffolk.

It would have been wonderful to hear Cedric’s stories of the rocky hillside in Greece on which he no doubt scrambled to find them and of his experience of growing the anemone back home. I missed the opportunity to ask Beth Chatto about the anemone sold through her nursery, which was also gifted to her by Morris, but I did get the chance to talk to John and his wife Diana Howard at the opening of his exhibition of paintings at The Garden Museum earlier this week. John recounted that Morris had expressly said “Don’t let the botanists tell you anything else. It must be called Anemone stellata.”. Diana told me that their experience of growing them in their Suffolk garden is that they move around according to where the sun falls. If you see pictures of them growing there, they stand cheek by jowl like a field of delectable sweeties.

In October 2023 I was approached by Stephanie Mahon, Editor of Gardens Illustrated magazine, to be this year’s writer of their long-running series, Plantsperson’s Favourites. The task, to choose my top ten Hillside plants for each month of the eleven issues running from February to December. The series has always been interesting for the opportunity to see a selection of plants through the eyes of a particular expert. Previous writers have included Tom Coward of Gravetye Manor, Marina Christopher of Phoenix Perennials, Hans Kramer of De Hessenhof, Derry Watkins of Special Plants and Andrea Brunsendorf of Lowther Castle. Nursery people specialising in a palette that is particular to them and gardeners whose experience and long-term knowledge is pulled together in a collection that is hard won through time and intimacy with plants. Experience that can be translated directly into trust. 

It has been a privilege to be invited into this stable of plantspeople and a challenge to hone one’s thinking, despite the complexity of whittling down an impossibly long list. To give an idea of the challenge, none of the plants featured at the top of this article made it onto my list. As a plantsman, identifying your favourites is not an easy task, because they change from season to season and as you go through the inevitable process of falling in love with something new and then maybe falling out of love once you know more. When you look back with time behind you, you begin to see that some infatuations are not much more than a brief dalliance – a plant might not ‘do’ like you need it to or you simply fall out of love with it – while others, the love of umbellifers for instance, become longterm relationships that take years or probably decades to get to know. The perennial Angelica genuflexa that does away with the need to manage the vociferous seeding of the biennial A. archangelica, being a fine example.

We will be up at an ungodly hour on Monday morning to catch a plane for a fortnight’s retreat to Greece. It is the time we prefer to go away. When the harvest is mostly in, and we can leave the garden to relax into autumn. There will be a push over the weekend to harvest seed that will have dropped by the time we return and to pick the pears and the apples that will become windfalls if we don’t. But it will be important in the flurry to put a moment or two aside to look at what we are about to miss. At the first perfectly formed goblets of the Colchicum autumnale and the gold of the Sternbergia lutea that have just begun their season.

Though for years now we have made this our time to be away, I have always planned for continuity. For the relay of the new and the succession of interest that can run the duration of the growing season. As we leave, the first asters are already waning, pulled down by the rain or simply having had their day but it is good to know that the late forms, which are still in bud and standing tall, will have the energy in them yet to claim October.

The season has turned. The Japanese anemone covering for a host of companions that have been and gone and will continue for the month of September and more. One of the most beautiful months of the year with its low golden light and the promise of pears and rosehips and the first autumn colour.

It is good to have plants that have their moment and mark the season, as cow parsley marks the turning point of spring to summer and now, here at Hillside, the wood asters light the paths and make up for a tired August. But the plants that you can depend upon to gently sail through are equally valuable for the bridge they make between seasons.

Mid-August, high summer and the swing of the harvest season. The meadows have just been cut, later than is good for the best hay, but good timing for the orchids and later-flowering scabious and knapweed to seed. The silence that follows the hay cut is a stark and uncomfortable contrast to the life and rustle of tall grass standing. So we will leave the steep slopes behind the house a fortnight yet for the moths and for the wild carrot to run to seed.

The greens of August are particular to now. Dark in the hedgerow a contrast to the ripening plums. Golden mirabelle, inky damson and blue-green greengage, a reminder that the next season is already upon us. The garden has relaxed, the grasses pushing through in a countermovement to the meadows beyond losing their sway. The rush towards flower that was so much in evidence even just a month ago has also slowed. The last flowers dropped on the Digitalis ferruginea and their spires quietened of the hum of bumble bees as they run to seed. In relay the echinops reach their full and final height , the bees moving on to their perfectly spherical globes. It is heartening to look up and see them suspended in the blue of the August sky and the life that accompanies them.

The hollyhocks mark high summer, punching through July and into the harvest month of August. Heaving the tarmacadam and springing up in the tiniest crack in the pavement of our nearby village, they run from the darkest plum red through pinks and off mauves, some with a dark eye that singles them out. When I was working at the Jerusalem Botanic Gardens for a year in the early eighties, it made all-at-once sense that they took to the Mediterranean climate, running out of control in the Eurasian section that pooled together plants from this incredible meeting point of Europe and Asia. There was an eccentric Englishwoman who had emigrated to Israel to immerse herself in the religious capital who volunteered in this section of the garden. Bathsheba would mostly be found sleeping in their shade rather than gardening, for they grew thick and tall to provide good cover and her relaxed approach to weeding probably contributed to their dominance in this area of the garden.

It was the first time I had seen them at home, where they were truly happy as pioneers and it recalibrated my association with them as a mainstay of the English cottage garden. They have probably become such a part of this relaxed form of gardening for being an interloper and for making do where there is space or a crack in a pavement. Being short-lived and plentiful with their flat disc shaped seed as a survival mechanism, they are adept at finding the chinks and in-between places. This is where Alcea do best, in a position where they can bask in sun all the way to the base and where the ground drains freely. Hollyhocks quickly fail where the soil lies wet and dwindle with less than six hours of direct sunlight a day, so their very requirements also bring a feeling of summer. They are as profligate with seed as they are promiscuous, so it is very much a pot-luck aesthetic, while their ability to soar without taking too much space at ground level gives even a small garden a feeling of generosity.

The Meadow Cranesbill are throwing their luminous blue throughout the top meadows where the soil is thin and limey. A violet-blue that is most vivid in the gloaming, once the sun goes down and before darkness and then again first thing in the dew of morning. Gathering in strength so that they now flood the crown of the top field, they extend their range by about four generous strides a year. Seed that is literally catapulted by the ingenious dispersal mechanism, shaped like a crane’s bill, which gives them their common name. Sit close on a still warm day when the seed is ripe and you hear it being flung from the parent plant, but catching a plant in the act is almost impossible and the reason it makes it difficult seed to gather.

Our neighbours, Jane and Donald, who grow wild seed commercially on the other side of the valley, have a strip of one field given over to Geranium pratense. It is vibrant in its intensity when planted en masse and my parent plants came from them as a tray of seedlings for my birthday 11 years ago. They were added to the top meadow that April and have proven to be a good way of introducing the cranesbill into the once-was pasture. We had already oversown the field with a local meadow mix that contained Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor), the semi-parasitic annual that lives in part off the grasses and is vital in restoring pasture to meadow. The rattle weakens its host enough for the floral content of a meadow to find a window of opportunity and my little plugs were found a place where the rattle seedlings were in evidence and the grass was already showing that it was weakened.