I remember as a child trespassing around the grounds of a derelict house in our nearby market town like it was yesterday. The Vicarage was due to come up for auction and curiosity had got the better of my mother who liked nothing more than a house in disrepair and a project. We had already moved into one of our own a few years earlier, with its 50 years of neglect and acre of wilderness that was literally pressing up against the windows. Taking that project on had made my mother’s mother cry, but the excitement of decay and dereliction lives on in me now. The imaginings of a time lost and then the process of careful restoration, identifying what has value from the old chapter and life in it for the next.

Builders had bulldozed a break in an overgrown hedge and barricaded it with temporary fencing, which we easily breached. To mum’s dismay, and my rather less adventurous relief, we couldn’t break in, but we circled the house peering in through the windows we could get to until I lost interest and wandered into the overgrown garden. A place I knew how to explore from our experience of unearthing our own long forgotten garden and from being a scout for my parents, who were too grown up to burrow into impenetrable thickets.

Suddenly it is September, a month of most beautiful light and a forgiving falling away of the growing season. After weeks without rain, recent deluges have seen us replenished. Brown lawns already greened up and first growth on the meadow banks where they were cut back hard just last week. The cyclamen are doing what they do best in these cross over weeks between late summer and autumn proper, huddling in the shadows and moving now to show you where they really want to be, which is not always where you planted them. I step over their tight huddles where they are beginning new colonies in the gravelly edges of the path away from too much competition. Happy to enjoy them now that I have given in to the reality that we have begun the autumn.

As the energy wanes, there is a notable shift in the perennial plantings. The autumn bloomers begin to cover for plants that have come and gone, the Japanese wind anemones rising and making it their time and asters joining them as the evenings draw in. In these weeks between seasons there is a significant surge from the late season annuals, which proclaim loudly as they rally to complete their life cycles. Right about now, when they flare and make themselves felt, we remind ourselves that the effort of sowing them in the busiest weeks of spring, pays out now and most handsomely.  

We have started cutting the meadows. The Tump and the Tynings baled first for hay at the beginning of the month. Nineteen bales this year compared to last year’s forty six, where the meadows ran thin after a long, dry spring and, until just this week, an endurance without rain.  The dry weather made for easy strimming and so we started on the banks in front of the house, whilst waiting for our man who has the kit and the courage to cut the precipitous meadow field behind the house. It is an inevitable process, which I always find sad, for I like the light and the life in the meadows even when they are spent, But slowly, and it is time now, we work our way back to the smooth contours of the land, leaving the steepest slopes as sanctuary for wildlife and enjoying the flush of autumnal regrowth that comes with the cool and the dew and the penetrating rains.

The Ditch we leave until December and only cut the areas where bulb planting is planned to bulk up the snakeshead fritillaries in the meantime. This wetland is still brimming with life and the last flush of hemp-agrimony and loosestrife. The Eupatorium cannabinum arrived here on its own once we fenced off the banks of the Ditch and let it grow long. First one clump and then seedlings from the mother colony. Some much further down the ditch and a fair number up in the garden where its windblown seed must have moved uphill on an easterly. I monitored the seedlings, with their distinctive, hemp-like foliage and hearty root system, as I could see they were going to be trouble in the garden without the usual competition to keep them in check. Flowering in their first year, like the pioneers they are cut out to be, they were deflowered to prevent them from seeding and moved in the autumn to the margins of the pond to join the other natives there.

The garden in August begins a shift towards the next season.  Eased gently in with the first asters and towering Echinops exaltatus, with its pale, silvery globes, alive with bees, that you have no choice to look up into and always see against sky. Skies in which the light is already changing. The greens in the trees being the darkest they ever will be, the meadows and verges the palest.

Almost everything from the first half of summer is at its tallest or toppling after a rain laden squall and it is now that we notice the steadfast plants that take us safely through into September. The first of many cyclamen, mulberries ripening and already on the ground and the prospect still in the Japanese wind anemone with first flower and promise built into their seasonality.

Last week was fierce, the sun beating down on our south-facing slopes from the moment it nosed over The Tump to finally relenting as it sank behind Freezing Hill. To be honest, and despite the blue skies, it felt brutal and I couldn’t help but feel worried by a garden that in places was beginning not to cope. Burned leaves on the gunnera that have as much water as they need at their feet, but simply couldn’t get it to their leaves quickly enough. The same with the tetrapanax, which I have never seen scorch in all the years I have been growing them. We brazened it out in the crackling heat, noting the plants that might need help later and then retreated into the shadows for the afternoon to sow, pot up and tidy in the hot, still air of the barn.

By six, and with the angle of the sun tipping into the top of the valley, we ventured out to hand water, attending to wilting beans and hydrangeas that were hanging and exhausted even in the shade. Hessian shade covers were lifted from the frames and the temperature checked in the polytunnel where we fear tomato trusses have aborted in the 45 degree heat, even with all doors open. By nine and with the prospect of a good sunset, we made our way back to the open barn to eat. Heat radiated from the walls, but a cool breeze pulled the day’s perfumes from the herb garden. Smells that you experience more often in the Mediterranean than the usual cool, damp evenings here. The perfume of lavender, fennel, dry dusty rosemary and sage.

When we arrived here fifteen years ago, the ditch was a festoon of bramble, the remains of a hedge with more teeth missing than in place and a huge crack willow with its feet in the wet. The cattle were allowed to come to the water on this side in the lower sections and on the side of The Tump up at the top. A simple move of taking a twisted strand of rusted barbed wire across the ditch to divide the two worlds at the willow. Where the cattle came to the water there were muddied ruts so deep that you were likely to lose your boots and without them there was certainly no crossing, rain or shine.

It took a couple of winter’s repair work to strim back the bramble and carefully wind up the barbed wire and pull the motley assortment of fence posts from the mud. The surviving hawthorns, flailed to the height of the barbed wire, were carefully thinned to remove the worst of their wounded limbs and allowed to grow away. The hazels, which had rebranched into ugly knuckles at the height of the flail, were coppiced to the base and allowed to regenerate. The silvery line of water was thus revealed in the fold between the two fields. Dipping four times over natural tufa falls, diving into the deep shade of the crack willow in the middle and then again where the water meets the stream that runs in the wood at the bottom.

The longest day of the year is already here. The dawn chorus starts whilst the clock still reads four and the fade of the gloaming lasts well after ten. We are rising early to be part of it and then eating too late, for it is hard to leave the garden to prepare supper. These light-filled days see growth literally reaching towards it and the fecundity is as its zenith on the right here and right now of the solstice. 

This time last year we were preparing for a big party that we held on the crown of The Tump on this special day. In the run up and with the moment focused, we became acutely aware of the time elongating and then slowing before we leaned into the other side. The three days before, when the energy in the garden was at its most expectant, and the three days after that saw it relax and spill and burgeon into the next phase of summer. The meadowsweet in the ditch exemplifies this tangible shift here at Hillside, the creamy luminosity and sweet perfume being at its height and the last flower to fade into the shortest night.

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.