This week I returned from my travels in Chile. The seared and otherworldly deserts of the Atacama in the north and the primordial highlands in the south where the araucaria forests literally step you back in time. The feeling of being so very far from home was driven in part by being tucked on the other side of the Andes, but mostly in the diametric reversal of the seasons. Where meadows were in full sway, jacaranda in neon blossom and the growth in the forests rushing to the longest day of their year. My return was to our shortest. A sensory jolt into dimly lit mornings, darkness descending in the middle of the afternoon and a garden giving in to its deepest and most peaceful sleep.

The lack of light is what carries winter’s weight for me, but I welcome the season in this country for its relative ease and the ability to keep working. Winter at Hillside is beautiful for being in landscape and exposed to all its nuance. To ground laid bare, to leaf mould mouldering and to the emerald green of the moss-covered paths. Even on the dullest of days, the sky is a myriad of greys, the folds in the hills differing saturations of greens, browns and sepia with low cloud hanging in the trees on Freezing Hill and moisture in the air. There is time to look in the winter and time to see what has been happening during the growing season now that branches are once again unclothed and revealing all.