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.
Look closely though and the garden is never really sleeping. The very first of the Lonicera frangrantissima flowers have pushed from newly naked limbs and the winter-flowering Algerian Iris have speared their first flowers. Iris unguicularis ‘Bleu Clair’ is the first into flower this year after settling down from being split into four two years ago. This has quickly become one of my favourite forms and raised by the great Olivier Filippi and gifted from his Jardin Sec in the south of France, it also comes with a history. A soft grey-mauve, it reads well in the gloom and flowers off and on whenever the weather is mild. It is so much better to now have the plants in repeat than just the one. The gentle luminosity stepping through a low, sunbaked planting of erigeron and osteospermum and the very first welcome on the drive as you pull off the lane.
In their homelands the baking they would naturally endure on rubbly hillsides has to be sought out here for them to flower freely, but they are capable of taking a little shade if the sun can bathe them clearly for a few hours a day. Olivier has them growing under the high canopies of stone pine, so they emerge most pleasingly from a carpet of pine needles. I had them here under a leggy Philadelphus ‘Starbright’, which has since been moved and replaced by an Indigofera potaninii with its rangy growth and sparse filigree foliage. Teamed with Cretan Arum creticum, with its light-reflecting wintergreen foliage and the wide leaved Galanthus plicatus ‘Byzantium’, they make this bed joyful in the down season. The iris stops and starts with the weather and coincides with the galanthus flowers in February.
As the garden has grown, both in maturity and with the westerly expansion of the Sand Garden, I am beginning to have to adjust when we start the winter clear up. We deliberately leave as much habitat as we can for the fauna that share the place with us. Skeletons of summer perennials standing, leaves left to rot down naturally in the beds to feed the worms and the soil and the great clear up held off for the very last weeks of winter. We pace ourselves, observing carefully where tidiness is appropriate and what can be left to complete its natural life cycle.
The weave of bulbs in the beds and my growing galanthus collection prompt the call for action where they are already emerging and make passage onto the ground difficult without snubbing their noses. Every year it seems earlier as the climate shifts their movement forward. It is certain that the reach of my reach is more extensive as I set them free from the stock beds to seize the skirts that are gathering where trees and shrubs are maturing.
Sometimes it is simply good to reinstate a little order and contrast to the deliberate woolliness of the garden we do leave standing. To cut away the tattered tetrapanax leaves to expose the early Galanthus elwesii Hiemalis Group is like uncovering treasure from the wreckage. Clear, knobbly stems exposing the clarity of winter uprights and the tatters left after the first frost put to the compost heaps. We cut the garden hedges also to expose the contrast of their architecture and to clear the way for my snowdrop stock bed under the hedge along the back track. This is where my treasures spend a dry summer and where I am watching what they do to single out the strongest to split and increase and relocate to places in the main garden.Leave it just one more week and we will already not be able to draw a rake across the surface to swiftly clear the hedge clippings.
We cut the mixed hedge that shields the main garden from the lane this week to give us a backbone against which the winter skeletons in the garden can contrast. This is where the beginning of my snowdrop trail begins, the ribbon of the plain Galanthus nivalis that coaxes us out and down to the stream and then draws us out further onto the land and into the winter. For now they are just nubs nosing ground, but very soon the ribbon will be visible, for winter is not even a pause, just a slowing and very soon the shortest of days will be here and then we move towards the light.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 14 December 2024
