The Agapanthus inapertus, which are kept in pots for their late summer display, are slow. They take time to decide when they want to flower, making you wait until they are settled in, sometimes a year or more after planting, producing nothing but foliage in the meantime. They are sluggish when breaking dormancy, keeping you on edge as the spring burgeons around them whilst they wait for the warmth. Once they get away I start a weekly seaweed feed to encourage flower and impatiently part their strappy foliage to see if they are going to reward me, for it’s not until the longest day or so that they let you in on their plans. 

When the tapered sheaths – pointed like skyward arrows – begin to ascend, I move them to the front of the house from the holding ground by the cold frames before the stems are long enough to be damaged. Anticipation continues throughout July, as the flowering growth slowly draws itself out well into August and up to the teetering point between the seasons.

If you didn’t know and had to take an educated guess at where zinnias originate from then it is quite likely that Mexico would come near the top of the list. With their kaleidoscopic colours and searing vibrancy they speak of a hot climate and it is no surprise to discover that Frida Kahlo grew them in her garden at Casa Azul, the home she shared with Diego Rivera in Mexico City, where they honoured indigenous culture and planted only native species. Visitors at the time would recall the blood red zinnias that decorated the dining table and, if you look at the many self-portraits and photographic portraits of Kahlo, alongside dahlias, tagetes and bougainvillea, zinnias also feature in some of the dramatic floral headpieces that were her trademark.   

Despite a love of colour, for many years I could not see the attraction in them. Their stiff habit, dry, papery petals and outlandish colours reminded me too strongly of the depressing vases of cloth flowers my grandmothers and great aunts had gathering dust on mantelpieces and windowsills when I was a child. In the past few years, though, I have begun to appreciate the shot of energy they bring at this time of the year, when many perennials in the garden are on the wane. Picked for the house, in combination their colours intensify and play off each other and, like a good firework display, provoke an instant rush of childlike joy.

The Field Scabious are high summer flowers. Hovering, lilac-blue and dusk-luminous once the meadows turn tawny. They arrive as the heat comes into July and hold well into August, the month of wild carrot and twisting bindweed. A time of dark greens, pale fields and ripening as the energy shifts towards berry and seed. 

I step a number of cultivated scabious into the garden as the first round of summer perennials pass and begin to change the tone to maintain vitality and provide a succession of forage for pollinators in August. We are lucky enough here to have room to allow them to repeat and the original plantings of Scabiosa ochroleuca have migrated along the paths where they are happiest on the edge of things. I leave the seedlings where there is room, their filigree foliage being distinctive and easy to winkle out if they look like they might overwhelm their chosen company.  When happy, a seedling can make flower in the first year and go on to be in their prime in the second and third. Though they will live longer, the older a plant becomes, the more it is prone to splay and showing its middle, so I keep them on rotation, removing the eldest and editing the seedlings so that I look like I rule the roost and they don’t. 

The day lilies are a celebration of summer, brightly teetering and reaching towards the sun. Each stem holds several buds that come in succession, so the fact that the individual flowers last just a day is neither here nor there, for most have a month’s supply to claim high summer. 

I first encountered their steadfastness when we unearthed a double form of the Tawny daylily, Hemerocallis fulva, in my childhood garden. Several clumps stood strongly amongst the nettles and tangle of bramble to mark a long-forgotten border from another time. They had survived fifty years of neglect and didn’t even thank us for clearing around them. They just carried on as if nothing had happened. 

The first half of summer would not be the same without Lilium regale. Sitting dormant over the winter in pots up by the cold frame, it is always hard to resist a rummage when the promise of their awakening is in the air. I have been stung more than once by such impatience, damaging a new shoot before it has fully broken ground and ruining all the energy stored carefully in the bulb from the year before. Patience learned the hard way sees me waiting now to check the number of stems once they have broken ground, the coppery growth which at first looks not unlike a sea anemone and comes with such promise. 

Over the course of the spring, the stems rise up fast, tilting towards the sun as they grow and festooned along their length in foliage. The buds, which were formed last year and are carried in the growing tip, are held protected in the ruff of foliage until late in May when another moment of restraint is needed not to part it to count this year’s buds. Behaviours I learned as a boy when I fell under their spell, for my father grew two oak tubs of the Regal lily opposite the front door on the drive. I can still remember their charge and expectation and it is every bit as good today as the buds begin to swell and make their presence felt in the run up to the longest day of the year. 

The hogweed have pushed their heads above the meadows and in the rough places where they have taken their hold. Heracleum sphondylium is a brute if it has the conditions it favours and will soar to two metres to eclipse less vigorous companions. We see this happening here on newly disturbed ground and in the rich soils by the ditch, but in the higher, drier meadows it is kept in check and steps nimbly enough in company. We watch it though as it will rain an army of seedlings which, from their lofty position, can travel some distance. If they find a shadowy area where the competition is less the hogweed will soon be king. 

We have watched their evolution in the top meadows, enjoying their creamy flower, but noting their propensity for dominance where they find a niche. Being biennial, or  more usually a short-lived perennial, the simplest control in those areas where they risk becoming dominant is to deadhead the umbels after they have done what they can for the pollinators, but before they run to seed. This is a task that is left until the meadows are already toppled by rain so that you cannot see your tracks and always with gloves as the sap can be an irritant in sunshine. 

For the first year since we have been here the cow parsley on the lane has stood standing on both sides. Previously the neighbouring farmer, who has the fields to the other side of the lane, has cut it on his side just after it starts flowering in the belief that it taints the milk. A sign of the times this year has been marked by this spring phenomenon having its liberty, for he has now converted to beef cattle. For the first time the lanes are unbroken, their lifeline spilling from the banks and continuously along the verges. 

I enjoy the lacing of the lanes and the shadowy parts of our meadows where the cow parsley thrives, but I am not brave enough, as Fergus Garrett is at Great Dixter, to let it venture into the garden. At least not in its wild form, but I have invited the liquorice-leaved Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ into the beds where it is brilliant for rising up early and covering for a discernible gap between spring and summer. The couple of weeks before and then during the Chelsea Flower Show when we suddenly find spring racing and then tipping into summer. 

“A wallflower is someone with an introverted personality type who will attend parties and social gatherings, but will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight.” Not so the blaze that is burning in the pumpkin bed in the kitchen garden. Smouldering, velvety reds and fiery oranges, so sumptuous and at odds with the awakening of a British spring. With their unmistakable perfume, a warm, comforting sweetness of violets and cloves, the garden wallflowers are anything but. 

Erysimum cheiri hails originally from Greece and the wallflower really gets its name from the ease with which it seeds into the crevices of buildings where it lives on apparently nothing. The species is mostly gold-flowered and you can see the flame in the plants that have been selected for the garden and have been adapted to garden culture. Mostly bedding in high Edwardian style for the wallflower comes with tulips.  

The snake’s head fritillaries are early this year, rising up fast while it was still mild, but now witnessing the severity of these last few days of chill winds and freeze. Oblivious to the changeable weather and dancing on wire thin stems on the bank behind the house, they hover amongst an assembly of bulbs to celebrate this moment. Small flowered narcissus and Anemone blanda, Leucojum aestivum, Tulipa clusiana and Star of Bethlehem. I love them in the mix and it is a joyous reflection of change, but once you have seen Fritillaria meleagris naturalised in a wild meadow, you cannot help but think that their subtlety is better when they are in the company of other natives. Celandine, the first cowslips and the fresh new grass of the season.  

Last autumn I took more ground so that the fritillaries could have their own place. Two projects on different time scales, but both in damper places that are more akin to the water meadows where you see them in the wild. The first, the more immediate, is on the spring-laden banks that feed the ditch, where a couple of years ago I moved the fence to give field back to this crease of wild wetland.