Have you bought a new notebook yet? Started thinking about sharpening your pencils and filling your fountain pen? I spent far too much of my life in formal education and I think the rhythms of the terms are as ingrained as the rhythms of the earth. I always get the January blues because of all the deadlines that always seemed to fall in the first week back after the Christmas holidays, and I get insomnia in June because of residual exam season anxiety.

And now September is around the corner, I can feel the tingle of fresh starts in my fingertips. A whole new website, everything cleaned and tidied, smart and polished (as polished as I get anyway, I always put rugged beauty and imperfection over the slick).  Feel free to have a look.

New plans for the front garden. New planting plans for the borders. A new biochar kiln.

I rarely show the front garden because although the cottage is absolutely gorgeous (people stop and take photos) and gets absolutely glorious evening light, it is on the main road and much busier than I am comfortable with. My care and investment in it are best described as somewhere between rewilding and benign neglect. I put some gorgeous box balls in it (channelling my inner Charlie McCormick) and then let the ox eye daisies take over. Of course, once they were over, it just became a hay field. I do most of my writing at my kitchen table which looks straight out of the leaded windows towards the front and I see the passers-by look up at the thatch and then down at the ‘meadow’. We inherited a strimmer from a retiring gardener in the village and I took it as a sign.

I am going full Arthur Parkinson. The hens are still up for discussion. Lifting the planting up solves a number of significant problems. Firstly, the road is lined with huge, ancient lime trees. They are glorious and wonderful and often stuffed with mistletoe, but their roots run underneath the front garden and probably underneath the cottage. Even after many years of top dressing with compost, I can’t get so much as a spade blade into the ground. Whatever nutrition and water that hits the garden is sucked up by the trees’ intricate web of roots. Planting into containers means the world is my oyster, or at least a cottage garden is an option. Dahlias. Roses in pots with hazel domes. Sweet peas on tee pees. The other thing is that if the plants are lifted up, they will be visible from the road and people can see them from the road without coming to peer over, and they will form a screen so that I can sit at my kitchen table and type in my pyjamas. Oh, and I am hoping that lifting them above the height of the curtilage wall will help get the last glimpses of light.

The first step is, of course, shopping. I have been trawling vintage sites for troughs and buckets and trying to work out if the compost heaps are going to produce enough for filling them all up (the answer is likely to be no…) and if I can afford a copper wash tub (also no). There are perennial cottage garden seeds being started in the greenhouse and I am eyeing other people’s shrubs in preparation for the hardwood cutting season. I have plans to put the espalier pear in the gap between the eaves supports and dolly tubs along the wall. In short, my mind is fizzing with ideas.

This is September energy.

I adore it.