I have always thought of the autumn as the beginning of the gardening year. A time to take stock whilst everything is still standing and memories are fresh from the growing season. A gentle pause before winter works and plans can be put into action.

This autumn is special, because I am taking a three-month sabbatical. I have worked consistently hard since starting my working life, taking very little time for myself in pursuit of the next step. Increasingly, and as the garden here grows and gently demands my attention, it has become a useful reminder that my energy should not always be directed outward. A garden needs time, not only in the tending, but also in the quiet of reflection. Which is the right way to steer one’s energy to shape future outcomes and, if you take the time to listen, which path is the right path, the one that reciprocates for the choices being meaningful?

So, after a year of planning for this moment with my team in the studio, I am now stepping into a period of recharge. A hard-won and slightly scary place for its unfamiliarity, but one that will bring with it clarity and new ways of seeing to galvanise the next chapter. The adventure will take me first to Mexico to meet up with a former colleague, Hortense Blanchard, who has a successful landscape practice, Estudio Ome , with her partner, Susana Rojas Saviñón. Together we will visit the work of the great Luis Barragán and the surreal jungle garden of Las Pozas, created by Edward James. Later I travel to Chile to visit landscape designer Teresa Moller, who I first met when I was there twenty years ago, when we talked about projects that have now become reality. We will travel to see some of her dialogues with landscape – her approach is always elegant and only what is needed to tease the essence from a place – and we will go on to see the wild places. To the Atacama Desert in the north to and the ancient Monkey Puzzle forests in the south.

I will also be making some still time to be here. Time I will savour for having it in hand and not having to fight for. The opportunity to stand in the middle of a garden that is maturing and in need of some careful thought to bring back the detail where we have been going through the motions of maintenance and not taken a pause to review. If I give myself the chance to truly look, I will know then where there may need to be more dramatic edits to make way for change. I have a stock bed of plants that have been watched and considered and it is now time to see what they are capable of in this ever-evolving canvas.

The falling away of autumn is one of my favourite seasons for it being forgiving. A push through paths that are now overhung with growth which is no longer a threat to orderliness. It is too late for such concerns and time to let go of the reins a little. The amsonia, that for the summer have simply been foliage, are now lit from within and a foil to a spill of Symphyotrichum ‘Photograph’.  The perfectly flat seedheads on the Chasmanthium latifolium so crisp, as their leaves tatter and butter. It is a moment to savour the imperfection and its juxtaposition with the last flush.

Golden sternbergia and pink nerine throwing all their stored energy forward into October. The brave last spears on the Kniphofia thomsonii and the delicate late buckwheat amongst the plumage of Miscanthus sinensis ‘Krater’. I will be keeping a journal and a sketchbook and will report back as the adventure unravels so that Dig Delve will also be nurtured in these coming weeks. But before I go off on my first leg to Mexico next week, I will be sowing seed gathered from the garden and given to me by friends who make giving easy and meaningful. A featherlight envelope full of promise. The onward journey and a return to first germination and the prospect of the new.

Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 19 October 2024