This week the roses have started to put out their second flush of flowers, especially the hybrid musks and David Austin roses, and the high season perennials are in full swing.

Over the last few weeks, Lucinda, Emma and I have been gathering in little harvests of flowers and seed pods for drying, picking off the leaves, and bundling them up into little posies to dry in the workshop where we pack our letterbox flowers.

June is the month of roses, in particular of the old roses, and these are becoming our grand passion at the Flower Garden.

Wonderfully, the garden is in full flow, heaving with flowers and bustling with picking, planting, potting on, deliveries and collection of flowers. It is lovely.

It is late May but it feels like mid July in the garden - hot hot hot.

Early May is always the 'hungry gap' in the garden, the lull between the sturdy early spring party flowers.

It feels like high summer, except that the flowers are all wrong, the trees are not yet very leafy, and we still need to wrap up warm first thing in the morning.

How grateful we are that deliveries of flowers are continuing, and that we are able to keep the team on and the garden in good order.

These lovely uplifting photos were taken by Kit Young, on her second visit to the Flower Garden to document how things change here as nature pulls us through the course of a year.

This week we are feeling so very grateful for the natural beauty which surrounds us, and for the first flowers which are coming up in the garden ready to pick.

Much of the garden is reaching maturity now, and this means that all our trees, shrubs, roses and climbers need proper care to be taken over their pruning so that they can give us their best flowers and thrive healthily.

Two years ago we made a new bed for hellebores, partly shaded by the high north-facing wall, and overplanted with hydrangea paniculata 'limelight'. The soil here is cool and damp, and we've improved it with two or three lavish applications of well-rotted organic matter.

In the mildest winter I can remember, the garden is still dormant and bare, but everywhere there are quiet stirrings of life.

Although this would be the perfect week to make a start on pruning all the hundreds of rose bushes we now have growing in the flower garden, this wet grey blustery weather is keeping us firmly indoors, except for little bursts of outdoor activity when we have to drive to school/take the dog out/feed the sheep...

The weather is truly wintry now, and the Flower Garden is starting to curl in on itself as the plants focus all their energy underground, before a burst of renewal in the spring.

Although the plants and trees in the countryside around us, and in our garden at home too, are turning from green to gold and gently shedding their leaves, the late flowerers at the Flower Garden are filling the beds with colour and softness.

Usually at this time of year we think of warm oranges and reds, and look for rich autumnal colour in the garden.

The much longed-for rain has begun to fall, reviving the parched garden. Although we've loved the long sunny days - and have once again had quantities of unblemished roses to pick thanks to the dry weather - some of our plants have been showing signs of drought over the last few weeks.

The garden foliages are still fresh and luscious, but there is an umistakable mellow feeling of autumn beginning to pervade the garden now.

The favourite flowers of the high summer English garden are all here now: pillowy roses, scented sweet peas, trumpet lilies, lavender, late foxgloves, early yarrow...