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.

Earlier in October I posted an image of my first autumn snowdrop. Reactions ran high for this apparently out of season anomaly. Surely the snowdrop is an emblem of deep midwinter, a welcome sign of life in a grim February, but out of place for showing its head in the wrong season? Being thoroughly under their spell and wanting the spell to last for as long as it can, I was surprised that people were not as delighted as I am by the first of the season.  

I never meant to fall so hook, line and sinker and for years stood by a self-imposed rule that I had to be able to spot the difference between one snowdrop and another from a sensible distance in order to justify acquiring them. To a point this is still true, but the more you go deeper, the more you understand that galanthus are as varied as a room full of people. Some rise early, others with the crowd or fashionably late and their differences in character are as nuanced as anyone on the spectrum of galanthophilia could possibly need them to be. 

The Amicia zygomeris are eking out the good weather in this last mild chapter before the inevitable frost. They have taken this long to all but come to fruition with a flurry of pea flowers which are surprisingly opulent in their appearance at this closing moment of the growing season. Tilting outward and down from a yoke-like ruff of ink-stained bracts and glowing a warm, golden yellow in low sunshine. 

My first plants originally came from Great Dixter when I was a teenager, but I do not remember where Christopher Lloyd grew them before he replaced the old Rose Garden with the Exotic Garden. This is where you will find them today, juxtaposed with other exotics and reaching boldly skyward. Hailing from Mexico, best advice in this country is to provide this sturdy perennial with a winter mulch, as you might a dahlia that you intend to leave in the ground. I followed these rules with my first plant, growing it against the only warm wall where the light fell into our woodland garden in Hampshire. I remember this plant with the same delight I feel about the ones here at Hillside all these years later, but I have grown in confidence about their hardiness and now grow them in the open with just a little shelter from the wind. Out of habit I mulched the plants here in their first few years but, now they are fully established, have found them to be perfectly hardy on our free-draining slopes and indeed they are reputed to be hardy to -10°C . 

We take our summer holiday late to be in the here and now of our growing season. We have honed the dates around the harvest now the orchards are grown, to bring in the plums as August comes to a close and the pears begin to drop, which they do in sequence. ‘Beth’ first, then ‘Beurre Hardy’ and ‘Williams’, which is done by the middle of September. There is a pause then for the best of them all, ‘Doyenne du Comice’, which will hang on for a month, so we seize this window for a fortnight in search of the last of a Dodecanese summer. 

The softness of September is perhaps the most beautiful time in the garden, so we depart with a little wrench. Where it feels wrong to leave the fruit to the birds, the compromise of missing a flowering is weighted differently. One year will be different from the next but my absence has never prevented me from planting with asters and autumnal grasses and a host of late season bulbs that make this time their own.

September is surely one of the most beautiful months. Evenings cooling, grass wet again with dew, but warmth still in the sun. The tiredness that sometimes hangs over August is now refreshed after rains. The meadows flushed with new green and germination happening everywhere. A rash of poppy seedlings seizing the moment to establish themselves before winter and, of course, the sea of dandelions. The very moment I thought about back in May when the airborne seed moved in silken clouds down the valley, but I’d all but forgotten whilst they lay dormant in the dry weeks of summer.

With the change we welcome a new wave of energy in the garden. The first of the asters, the sudden emergence of naked colchicum and smatterings of autumn flowering cyclamen, the harbingers of this shoulder season. Most lovely of all on this particular September day is the Clematis ‘Sundance’ which has been readying itself for autumn. I have it on the edge of the garden close to the milking barn veranda where, if ever we do sit and look, we are inclined to catch the warming, morning rays. The covered veranda is our breakfast place, so it is a moment in the garden which affords close scrutiny and where we need the detail to satisfy the time we take to pause there. In spring we have Paeonia mlokosewitschii, followed by navy blue camassias twinned with the blackest Iris chrysographes.

When we arrived here, the milking barn that sits just below the house was marooned in a patchwork of concrete slabs that the farmer before us had poured to hold the slopes around the building. We had plans for the barn to be renovated as my workspace and for the old yard to become a place for the barn. Somewhere to take in the view up the valley and for the planting here to capture the evening light. 

The trough that is now the anchor point in the yard was the catalyst. We hired the largest forklift to lift the trough from the waggon that parked in the layby at the top of the hill, but as we edged down the single-track lane, we quickly saw that maybe we had bitten off more than we could chew. Weighing in at about twenty tonnes all in, the concrete patchwork buckled like a pie crust as we inched the trough down the slope and into the old yard. We were a way off yet from doing the renovations to the buildings, so the trough sat marooned in the remains of the yard and, in the time that followed, the interlopers that found their way into the cracks and gave the yard grace, spawned the idea for the mood for the planting. Herb Robert and hogweed, Timothy grasses and willowherb. Plants that could survive on very little and, whilst we were waiting to make our next move, made the place their own.