The last time I visited Ashwood Nurseries to look at their hellebores was fifteen years ago. We’d just made an offer on Hillside and, despite the fact we had yet to sell our house in Peckham, it felt timely to tentatively celebrate. I remember that grim February day very clearly. The rain beating down on the polytunnel where the hellebores are housed and the delight in seeing such high horticulture in practice. We left with a selection of spotted whites and yellows and drove alongside a double rainbow on the hissing motorway on the way home. I wished upon it whilst glancing in the rear-view mirror at my nodding purchases, wishing, without wanting to jeopardise luck, that our deal would go through and that the hellebores would somehow weight destiny. 

In the intervening years, and with the good fortune of now having room to grow them, I have purchased a small number every year to build the colour range of the collection. Combing the Ashwood website, greens one year, with spots, dark nectaries or thundery stained outers. Picotees the next, with the finest of cherry red rims or deeply veined interiors. Yellows – for they have got better – a couple of years running and last year a grey and the best black I’ve ever seen with inkiness pervading the foliage. February, however, is a short and always busy month and in all this time I have not made it back, but this week I attended one of their hellebore talks and had the privilege of hand picking this year’s purchases. 

Last weekend, on the first of the month, we celebrated Peak Snowdrop, which fell most appropriately on Imbolc, the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. That night, the full moon showed itself just for a moment through a broken cloud, but the snowdrops lit the way and lifted our spirits in the half light of day. The early form down by the stream were at their glimmering best and now so numerous as to be visible from the house. The later form on the lane were just showing white and are set to take the baton in the coming week. 

This was the first time we have held a snowdrop gathering here, because it has taken time to feel sure that there is enough to see for keen snowdroppers. I have been collecting the ‘specials’ now for the best part of fifteen years and it takes time to build a clump from a solitary bulb and several growing seasons to know whether you have found a plant that is a ‘doer’. In my book a ‘doer’ should have bulked up enough to split within five years and shown that it is strong and distinctive enough to move from the stockbed on the shady side of the hawthorn hedge and into the garden. 

Our friend Midori, who until last year was the head gardener of the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Hokkaido and whose name means green, would talk about the melancholy associated with “touching green” for the last time before winter arrived. That far north they would be snowbound from late October for the winter months that we continue to garden here and do so with purpose and the spur of the garden never entirely sleeping. The silvery shoals of fattening willow catkins, the emerald green of hellebores and the promise of wintersweet and witchhazel to keep us company and provide optimism. 

Despite the woods being stripped back by the season, what you see as your eye moves through bare branches is the furnish of trunk-hugging ivy and dark holly refracting as brightly as mirrors on a bright sunny day. The lush green of the pasture in January is brighter than a dry August and it laps verdantly to hedgerows that nestle the flat, matt green of bramble. In January, our eye moves to the greens with ease and relief and a feeling that there is a hold of green to soften and foil and remind you that we are rarely without its calming influence. 

This week the sky darkened and snow came in a twenty minute flurry. For a moment the world slowed, the dim garden, blackened by November, appeared to consume the flakes in slow motion. They did not settle, but lit the darkness and then, as fast as the flurry came, it was over.  The nasturtiums which were the most brilliant of greens just the day before slumped limp and lifeless, their vitality gone as winter elbowed autumn from the present and into the past to make the now its own.

Though I love the winter for it being a season of doing and re-evaluation, the next few weeks of long nights and short days are the hardest when our skies remain grey. On a bright day even the shadows at the bottom of the slope hold fast and faster as we move towards the solstice. The days are not long enough if you are not up and out there early to make the most of them, but with a garden slowed, we at least acquire the time to look. We leave the garden in winter, clearing only what we need to to enjoy the cycles being completed and concentrate on the bittercress and the Poa annua that take this down time to grow and seed whilst you are not looking.

Our context here is everything and the biggest driver in considering how to seat the garden and plan for it feeling right within its landscape. The east-west panorama, the roll of one hill against another and the weather that barrels down the valley are all considerations. Big skies, the cohesive sway of meadow and the dark lines of the hedgerow vegetation. You have to be careful how you work with plants that are not from here or part of it.

So, I take time to consider the mood of each and every plant and what they feel right with and are happy to be alongside, but it is not always easy to deny yourself the pleasure of something loved but from a faraway land. The tree dahlias from the temperate mountains of Mexico, that never quite make it to bloom before the first frost, but are so compelling for their strident bolt of upright stem and lush race for the sky this late in the season. The gunnera from Brazil, which I have nestled in a hollow, so they are not visible until you come upon them and then feel dwarfed by their enormity and ability to take you somewhere else entirely. These are the plants that break the rule or make me do so for the love of them.

The feeling of borrowed time becomes more acute from day to day rather than week to week as the poplars at the bottom of the slope become less leaf and more twig and one season rubs up against the next.  We begin to keep an eye on the weather to eke out the last days without a frost and bring the tender perennials to the halfway house under the veranda, so that when the temperature finally plummets it is a swift move to bring them inside.

In the garden the flowers are also waning. The last asters finally smudged by wet weather and with their autumnal mission accomplished. But the shrubby salvias are far from diminished, with a new round of growth and flower after the recent rains and mild weather. This push is welcome, their tiny flowers delivering pinpricks of colour that never overwhelm for being smattered, as in a Pointillist painting. They love the conditions here, with plenty of sunshine and free-draining soils, and have proved their worth over the years, surviving both winter deluge and summer drought.

The time we save ourselves for at the end of the growing season could not be more different from the life we are juggling in our day to day of a year at Hillside. Three weeks away when most of the harvest is in, to a Dodecanese island that we have been visiting for well over a decade now. There is a simplicity in the repeat and the known and in how we then live there. A clarity in the spareness of the landscape and the life that makes its way there for the lack of water. We have old friends on the island with whom we pick up exactly where we left off and the familiarity allows a head start on the elasticity of the time that lies ahead.

If you are prepared for a 3 a.m. start and the first flight in the morning, you can be blinking in the bright light and catching the boat across the water to the island by mid-afternoon. We make our way up and immediately away from the little port, in a weather worn hire car that is waiting for us on the quay. Up and up the single-track switchback road to leave the monastery that grows from the cliff and the whitewashed town beneath us. Up and up until the road forks sharply. One way to the paleokastro, the other to the mountain.

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.