The garden is always in flux, shifting from season to season and year to year. This time last year there were cracks in the soil wide enough to put your hands down and I was already having to water. This year the spade plunges deep into soil that is still damp to the core and throwing a voluminous beginning to summer.

We respond to this flux. The achillea hated the winter, then the army of slugs grazed weak growth to leave unplanned for gaps and a missing component. The Cleome that were slated to plug the last minute holes failed to germinate and the Nicotiana mutabilis that were my only back up to take their place will have to be watched with the slugs, which have reproduced like never before in the wet. The flux – for it is inevitable, wet winter, cold or dry – is covered for mostly with the self-seeders. I depend upon their opportunistic behaviour, but you need to keep an eye on them if they are not to suddenly overwhelm. Innocent looking Shirley poppies that in just a fortnight will outcompete the perennial company around them and the creamy Eschscholzia that look harmless enough with the bearded Iris, but then prevent the sun from falling to ripen their rhizomes. You do not know until next year that they have missed the sun they need and learn to remember to pull the Californian poppies, leaving the merest handful for their smattering of flower and seed for next year.

The camassia have risen, spearing into spring and soaring skyward to link us with the early days of summer. Their first ascending colour eclipses the last of the spring bulbs as the meadows quicken to swallow the Pheasant’s Eye narcissus. Spires that leave their fleshy foliage behind to blink one and then a succession of starry flowers. Each star lasts just a day as they fizzle up the stems, still ahead of the grasses – but not for long – to ride this pristine and to-be-savoured moment.

Camassia provide first height in a border, rising simultaneously with Thalictrum aquilegifolium and cow parsley. I have learnt a lesson or two over the years, having regretted planting the profligate Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba’ in a border setting (not my own I might add, but a client’s) without having grown the plant for long enough myself to know its habits. The single form seeds into open ground if you do not deadhead it, so densely that you might have sown a lawn come the following spring. Seedlings that burrow fast into the crowns of anything that isn’t fast enough to eclipse their early growth, then forming a network of bulbs that are impossible to disentangle.

I have always gardened with euphorbia and it would be hard to imagine removing them from my planting palette. Look at the tribe as a whole and they span several continents, shape-shifting within their huge genus as they navigate their chosen habitat. They have adapted to cool, leafy woodland, wet stream edges and modified their surface areas and foliage so that they can withstand extremes of drought and exposure in their most succulent incarnations. For this reason they are a genus that I return to in my uncertainty about what will happen next with our ever-changing climate and need to be adaptable.

The spurges are included in almost all the plantings in the garden here, though you might not always be drawn to them first, when they are sitting back and out of season. Their season is long and varied and their particular vibrancy is something that always brings with it new energy when they come into flower.

One of the joys of gardening in real time is the process of being part of the evolution. To have a vision in your mind, to set up a planting with all the best intentions about balance and compatibility and then to wait and watch it find its own feet. Like a conversation that comes of a well posed question and the trust that something interesting will come of it.

One such area is developing at the edge of the drive, where I planted the black-catkinned willow. The growing conditions here are driven by two things. The summer shade and shelter provided by the salix and the lack of soil, where the rubble of the drive provides us with hard standing. When we constructed the drive, putting in a low retaining wall to ease the steep slope, we backfilled a trench behind the wall with good topsoil. The hardstanding was made up with scalpings over the subsoil and a top-dressing of self-binding gravel. Together with a Scotch briar rose, the willow was given the topsoil to hold the garden back from view when you swing off the lane.

A perfectly ripe fig, picked fresh from the tree. Heat in the fruit and the energy of a long, hot summer caught in sweet, juicy flesh. I can think back to specific trees that marked a moment in time. On our daily walk to the beach in Andalucia, in a baking courtyard in Seville, a dusty, walled garden in California or standing alone in the boulder-strewn landscape of Greece. Surviving against the odds, but producing such succulent fruit despite the stark contrast of their surroundings.

The equivalent fruit in our moist, forgiving climate might be the pear. At its moment of perfection, they are the most delectable of cool climate fruits. You can taste that they love the land like figs love the sun. However, our quest as gardeners is to always push the boundaries and have what we know might be out of reach. So we experiment, in order to capture a memory, or outmanoeuvre the limitations of our site.

The last few weeks of wet has had its influence. The meadows remain uncut and the long grass that we allow to lap up to the garden paths has cast seed far and wide. The wet has seen the seed germinating a whole month earlier than usual in a green haze that shows where the wind has blown. The tomatoes are only just starting to ripen in the polytunnel, for the cool that has come with this summer’s wet has checked the plants that need warmth to flower and ripen. Compare with the heat and drought of last summer, a tomato glut in a polytunnel it was a struggle to keep cool and worrying signs of stress in trees that were dropping foliage prematurely. It is becoming increasingly difficult to predict our new weather patterns and what to plan for, but what does seem clear is that we are bound to have to deal with change. 

The wet has been kind to the trees that looked so threatened last year and we have seen a weight in their branches and a second round of growth where they have had the moisture. A halo of new green on the young oaks and vigorous shoots on the shrub roses that have put another notch on their belts. In the garden the paths have narrowed so that we emerge wet from the August overhang after our morning inspection. One such moment, where the Hydrangea aspera crowds the lower steps to the east of the milking barn, has seen it all but obscure the way and I can see that it won’t be long before we start to feel overtaken. 

I am a firm believer in finding the niche. The place where a plant might naturally be most at home. Where the right amount of sunlight falls, be it plentiful or dappled or none and where the shadow counts. The same applies to shelter, for the difference between an airy place or one where there is a still shelter might be the make or break and opportunity.

Our conditions here on the hill are all about the light and free air movement. The sun rises in the east and swings around in a great all-day arc across our slopes until it sets at the top of the valley. There is very little shadow and very little shelter, so for most of the day the garden is exposed and at the whim of whatever the weather decides to throw at it. The places where the air is still or where there is reliable shadow are few. In the lea of the buildings where you can see the light falling differently and where it is worth taking the time to observe where the wind fingers and where it doesn’t.

The milking barn yard used to be a very different place. The access track to the barn descended at a perilous angle down the slope, with everything on the angle to save digging into the hill and making up the ground with retaining walls. The yard itself was poured in a patchwork of concrete slabs by the farmer before us in characteristic ad hoc fashion. It was an ugly place, but we liked it in spite of that and although I always knew the yard itself would have to go, the space it carved out for the little barn was important. 

When I brought in the granite trough to provide the centre of gravity and frame the yard, the concrete buckled like a pie crust under the weight of the forklift and, in the hiatus whilst we were doing up the buildings, seeding weeds grew back into the cracks. The interlopers were not noteworthy in themselves, but the airiness of these pioneers refined the roughness of the broken concrete and the feeling that this place was being reclaimed had resonance. I watched and thought and took away from living with the yard in this halfway state the importance of it being a place that felt gently occupied. 

The last few weeks of whipping wind and rain have been painful. It has torn at the poplars at the bottom of the slope, their enormous limbs as heavy as they ever will be in leaf weighted by rain. The tell-tale crack and pregnant pause before the impact saw three limbs the size of trees come crashing to earth. A whole tree gave up a few nights later, to lay between and fortunately not on my young hornbeams, as if the fall had been planned. We will wait until autumn before beginning the enormous task of clearing the wood from where it has shattered amongst the slumbering snowdrops for fear of the weight still up there in the remaining trees and this not being the last limbs down. 

The garden has stood the test of our exposed position remarkably well. I stake lightly, preferring the garden to be composed of plants that are not reliant upon us to keep them upright. The wiry stems of the hemerocallis and dierama and the pliable Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ were almost made for wind and withstand even the rain-laden gales, but the plants that topple when in the full sail of summer growth need assistance. Taller than me, sanguisorba that would splay in a great cartwheel without support and echinops that would derail an area as wide as they are tall if they broke loose from their metal hoops. Staking takes valuable time in the rush to finish the garden work before growth starts in earnest in the spring, but our metal hoops work and are fast to install. 

The garden builds quietly over the first half of the growing season, mustering energy and readying for the point when the meadows that lie beyond begin to go to seed. It is planned this way so that, as the oxeye daisies dim, the garden comes into its own and we circle back in to look more deeply at the cultivated garden, happy in this hand-over. 

The colour comes in waves. First the electric green euphorbia and then, as foliage gives way to flower, the gradual eruptions of colour. One of the first pools of concentration is around the Rosa glauca, which I have used mid-way in the garden. They mark a ripple which moves you from the stronger colours that hold your attention closer to the house to the smokier tones that sit well against far distance. The rose is an old favourite, with its plum-grey foliage and gentle arching growth. There are three straddling the intersection of paths and their structure provides an anchor point to the perennials which move amongst them. A place to work up a combination that drives the area immediately around it.