Three years ago Mary Keen gave me a plump envelope of downy anemone seed, labelled A. hortensis syn. A. stellata. She had already split the seed and taken a third for herself and, in typically generous spirit and with the maxim that the best way to keep a plant is to give it away, she passed the rest on to split between myself and Derry Watkins at Special Plants Nursery. The writing on the envelope was John Morley’s, who had in turn been given the seed by his friend, the plantsman and artist Cedric Morris. He of the Benton Iris and many other treasures that we grow here, which originated from his garden at Benton End in Suffolk.

It would have been wonderful to hear Cedric’s stories of the rocky hillside in Greece on which he no doubt scrambled to find them and of his experience of growing the anemone back home. I missed the opportunity to ask Beth Chatto about the anemone sold through her nursery, which was also gifted to her by Morris, but I did get the chance to talk to John and his wife Diana Howard at the opening of his exhibition of paintings at The Garden Museum earlier this week. John recounted that Morris had expressly said “Don’t let the botanists tell you anything else. It must be called Anemone stellata.”. Diana told me that their experience of growing them in their Suffolk garden is that they move around according to where the sun falls. If you see pictures of them growing there, they stand cheek by jowl like a field of delectable sweeties.

On the first of February we reached the halfway mark between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. In Pagan ritual the day is named Imbolc and, appropriately, I have a snowdrop of that name to mark the day here. This midway point is certainly something you can feel. In the shift in the light as darkness finally loosens its grip on the afternoons and in the new life stirring. In the woods the nosing wild garlic and in the garden, where first flowers are gathering in number in these mild, damp days.

At this midpoint, we mark the moment by gathering what has graced the garden so far for the mantlepiece, windowsills and bedside tables. We are at peak snowdrop at the moment, a week earlier than last year, but curiously there is less for the posies than a year ago when the freezes were harder. Last year’s cool summer and the endless wet we experienced until just recently must have had their influence, but regardless, we have surely turned a corner.  

Over the years of being at Hillside we’ve worked out that there is a breathing point in the season at the end of September. The apples will stay on the trees, we can delay autumn by heading south and when we return it will be the optimum time to get planting again. So, earlier in the month, we put down our responsibilities and took three weeks in Greece.

To cover for the break we made the usual flurry before leaving to bring in and store the last of the harvest and left instructions with the house sitters to water this and not that and to pick the pears and keep an eye on the seedlings in the cold frames. We also worked hard to ensure the design team in the studio had everything they needed to progress without us while we were away. Busy time. Heads in the future. Heads down to clear the time.

I am a firm believer in finding the niche. The place where a plant might naturally be most at home. Where the right amount of sunlight falls, be it plentiful or dappled or none and where the shadow counts. The same applies to shelter, for the difference between an airy place or one where there is a still shelter might be the make or break and opportunity.

Our conditions here on the hill are all about the light and free air movement. The sun rises in the east and swings around in a great all-day arc across our slopes until it sets at the top of the valley. There is very little shadow and very little shelter, so for most of the day the garden is exposed and at the whim of whatever the weather decides to throw at it. The places where the air is still or where there is reliable shadow are few. In the lea of the buildings where you can see the light falling differently and where it is worth taking the time to observe where the wind fingers and where it doesn’t.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 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.