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.

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.