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. 

The flowering of the grey-leaved form of the meadow rue marks the longest days of the year. Rising steadily and with much optimism they hit their luminous stride in the fortnight that bridges the solstice. Hopping and skipping from the narrow bed in front of the house to gather in a concentrated colony around the corrugated tin barns, we follow their sulphur-yellow trail to witness the evenings caught in their plumage.

My original plants were given to me many years ago by our friend Isabelle, who had them running freely in her front garden in the Cotswolds. They came with a warning that they are prone to seeding and that you should grow them ‘hard’ to keep them lean and from flopping. Thalictrum flavum subsp. glaucum is a distinctive selection of the species. As blue-grey in leaf as sea kale, but with a finesses and filigree that stays with them throughout adulthood. The clutch of robust seedlings which Isabelle winkled from the cracks in her pavement were initially worked into the garden in Peckham and came here in the ark of treasures that could not be left behind when we came to Hillside.

Eleven years ago, almost to the day, our good friend Anna called, “Come over this evening. I want to take you to visit a garden I’m looking after while the owners are away”. Anna knows a good thing when she sees it and has a nose for a too-good-to-miss moment. And it was exactly that. A perfect June evening with the sun still well above the tree tops and hours of daylight still ahead of us. After a short drive through dappled lanes we parked the car and walked along the rough, grassy track that led to the gateway at the beginning of a wood. We moved from the open ground and followed the now mossy track some considerable distance into the shadows. A series of glades began to open as we approached the house, which was nestled in a secret garden of wild and wonderful informality. An occupation of the wood and somewhere with a heightened mood that you might dream about, but rarely experience in reality.

My lasting memory, which has eclipsed the remembrance of more detail, was of the enormous stands of a silver-leaved rose, hunkered into the edges of the glades and scrambling into the trees. Bathed in the evening light that poured from the oculus in the glade and backed by the mysterious darkness of the wood, they glowed in their moment of June perfection. Still more bud than flower, the pale, ivory blooms lit up the approaching dusk. Although the owners were away, Anna said they would be more than happy for me to take a cutting (or two), for it would have been impossible to leave without a memento to mark what I already knew would be an indelible moment.

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.