The bright light in these few high months of summer is too intense for looking at the garden during the day. Our looking times are first thing, when the light is low, and then again later as it dips into the head of the valley. During the middle part of the day we go about the activity of tending and it isn’t until around six, when the light changes, that the garden starts to register once again. If we can, we down tools and make the time to take in the results of our hard work, made visible by the sun tilting into a long evening. Time to watch the colour change as the light yellows and then fades to blue and the dusk of gloaming. 

This is a time of observation and the garden actively settles into a different energy. If we have had a breeze, it often drops now and in this stillness the handover from the day to the night shift begins. From the activity of bees and the drone of hoverflies to the silence of the moths and bats that come to work the evening. Many plants come into their own at this time and the violets and the blues, which by day have sat back in bright light, begin to pulse and vibrate with an energy all of their own. In the main garden the wicks of violet veronicastrum become a point of gravity and rise above pools of denim blue Nepeta ‘Blue Dragon’ and the electric indigo of Salvia patens.

Early summer mornings and the field poppies are blazing. Open and already reverberating with bumblebees as the sun spills over the hill behind us. They are the epitome of these long days and with growth reaching towards the summer equinox, you suddenly find they have elbowed their way in. By afternoon, the flowers that opened that morning will have done their work and shed their petals so that we see past them where they held our attention earlier and prevented us looking anywhere but into them. Next week, as if in response to the light once again tilting in the other direction, the plants will splay, their foliage yellowing as energy goes into making seed in the second half of summer. 

The field poppies (Papaver rhoeas) arrived here when we disturbed the ground. Seed that had sat happily dormant, but marked a time when the ground here was cultivated as market gardens and predated these pastures. Their reincarnation at Hillside is something we celebrate in the cultivation of the garden, for with the garden comes the opportunity of change, both the ephemeral and the more permanent. Pastures turned and ground exposed to give them what they need. Pioneer territory, light and, for a couple of years, the upper hand an annual needs in the perennial mix. 

It has been a good year for the yellow rattle and we are happy to see it so clearly making its space in the meadows. This humble annual is the vital ingredient that has allowed us to begin to reinstate richly diverse meadows on our heavy, nutritious ground. An annual that is semi-parasitic upon grasses, Rhinanthus minor diminishes the vigour of its host to allow diversity in the sward to re-establish; creating windows between the grasses where the wildflowers can flourish. 

When we arrived here twelve years ago, the fields had been grazed hard and it had been many years since they had been allowed to run to meadow. Our fields make good ‘grub’ – the local term for rich grazing grass – and pasture had been the sole objective of the cattle farmer who lived here before us. Years over which the diversity in the fields diminished due to continual grazing. The opportunity missed again and again for the meadow plants to seed. 

This first week of June marks the last week of our bearded iris. Their energy, stored in the rhizomes from a baking last summer, gives them the stamina to sprint as soon as spring is warm enough to make them stir. All their growth is vertical as they move towards flowering, their fan shaped foliage backlit in the bright new light and fattening where they show promise of flower. 

As April spills into the month of May, the leaf sheaths part to allow the ascent of the flowering stems which draw us out daily to check for first colour as the upward-facing buds begin to swell. Wrapped in tissue paper tunics to reveal just a glimpse of what is to come, they teeter long enough to build the anticipation. A theatrical pause before their unravelling and scene-stealing opulence. 

The Lunaria ‘Chedglow’ are having their moment and offering the garden its first flare of colour. Welcome this early, their licorice foliage has an iridescent sheen, which adds depth to the surge of spring green as the flowering spikes rise to bloom. A darkness that this selection is famed for and why we keep them in a separate area of the garden from the paler Lunaria annua ‘Corfu Blue’, which would sully their richness if they crossed. First vibrancy, a dark, rich violet, less violent than the more usual mauve of green-leaved honesty. It is this depth of colour, both in flower and leaf, that I love here for not eclipsing the soft, primrose yellow of Molly-the-Witch, but highlighting its paleness. Over time, and as the refining process continues, I have added darkest indigo Camassia leichtlinii to the partnership, which puts a quiet sting into the palette.

I sowed my first plants from seed, which comes as easily as mustard and cress, raising a dozen that I worked into the gaps in the newly planted garden. Biennials and annuals are useful in a new planting to add a lived-in feeling and for filling space whilst slower growing perennials find their feet. I hadn’t bargained on the profligacy of the lunaria on our rich hearty soil.

Every year in August I sit down with a number of bulb suppliers’ website pages open and start to formulate a selection of tulips for the coming spring. This has customarily been an enjoyable process, with little more on my mind than assembling a good colour selection alongside consideration of a range of flowering heights and times to ensure a longlasting display. I must admit to never having given the means of production of the bulbs much thought, although in recent years there has been a growing niggling doubt, which I have shamefully chosen not to examine too closely.

In 2021 approximately 14,400 hectares of Dutch farmland was dedicated to the production of tulip bulbs. This is where almost all commercially grown tulip bulbs come from and the majority of them are treated with a range of phosphate fertilisers, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides. All of these chemicals persist in soil and water and have a seriously damaging effects on soil-living creatures and mycorrhiza. In the case of systemic insecticides(although the use of three key neonicotinoids has been banned in the Netherlands since 2021) these can persist in the bulbs after lifting, so that bees visiting your tulip display will be directly affected and transport poisoned pollen back to the hive. Dutch studies have also shown that people living in the vicinity of commercial bulb growers have higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies with as yet unknown effects on biology and health, although in animals they are known to affect reproductive health and the respiratory system. The more you look into it the reasons to only grow organic bulbs are legion.

In the twelve years we have been at Hillside, I have deepened the gardener’s journey of learning. The process of trial and error that can only strengthen your knowledge in the doing.  My mind’s eye vision of how I’d imagined the narcissus here is a good example of why time is so important in the equation. It takes time to understand where a plant wants to be and time for it then to create its own domain. 

Meeting established colonies of plants that have found their niche allows you to see them in all their true character, with mother colonies raining younger generations that have found their way. Pattern making which, when you see it playing out on the ground, is distinct to the plant. This vision of self-determined purpose brings its own kind of joy. 

Today is not a day to look at the crocus. Battered and tattered by a strong south-westerly with drizzle on the wind to weight and tear at their delicacy. In fact, it is best to look the other way, because the season can be cruel. You have to bask when it’s good and two days ago was quite different, their tapering buds revealing quite another story from their interiors as they blinked open in sunshine. Held from us for weeks now, your whole body welcomes this flood of saturated colour, freedom and abundance.

Though I love the spare winter, the first crocus spearing the grass are genuine magic. First one, then several flashes of mauve, silvery on the outside like a shoal of fish or hatch marks made repeatedly with crayon. Crocus tomassinianus are the first to show here and the repeat and the abundance are what I am after beneath the crab apples. It has taken a number of false starts to get to where we are now and, until relatively recently, it was possible to source the true form with the pearly coat and the flash of pale mauve that contrasted the interior. The species has poise and slenderness and a colour that is compatible with the first of the gold eranthis or the early narcissus and the silvery grey of the season.  

This very weekend in 2010 we came to visit Hillside for the first time. We walked down the north-facing slope where our friends live on the other side of the valley, crossed the stream in the woods that runs the boundary and strode up the hill into the long shadows of the poplars. When we reached the house and its assemblage of makeshift outhouses, we turned around, faced into sunshine and surveyed our potential prospect. The uninterrupted view up and down the valley and fertile ground that in our minds eye represented dreams of being part of somewhere. 

It was a very different place back then, with its runs of barbed wire bringing the grazing to the very foot of the buildings. Bleak and exposed without any protection if you took it at face value, but already we carried the dream that one day the open slopes would carry orchards and a garden would nestle the buildings. We took five years to plan how we’d go about making change and in this time we ruminated. Noting where the light fell and the wind didn’t blow and where the shelter might afford us a warm corner in the sun or a cool one in the shade. I knew immediately that the garden should feel subservient to the view and to be part of it, but it was important that it allowed us to hunker into the slopes. The garden would provide us a sanctuary and a little sensuality as a counterpoint to the exposure.

The leaves are finally torn from the poplars to reveal their grey, wintry outlines. The last of the autumn colour hangs in the hazel understorey. The Molinia ‘Transparent’* wait until now to do their very best and, as the wood becomes bare, the grasses in the garden begin their blaze.

I first saw Molinia ‘Transparent’ in the mid ‘90’s, growing in the garden of the late Mien Ruys in the Netherlands. I’d gone with my friends Izzy and Gabriela to meet this great designer and to look at her garden, which was ground-breaking for its juxtaposition of loose, naturalistic planting to the geometries of the layout. It was several weeks earlier in the autumn and the molinia were planted alone and in gravel so that you could appreciate their reach and the fullness of filamentous flower. They were spaced so that you could walk between the plants, which arched up and out and towards each other. Planted just as they should be to reveal their form and to make a place of their own. The flowers, which were yet to go to seed, were plum-red forming a dark halo at their extremities. Everything moved as we walked amongst them, swayed by the slightest breeze and our caresses.