Jimmy Anderson's back is stiff. One can see it in the way he is slow to rise from his stoop as he moves to stand and hear it in the sigh he unthinkingly lets slip as he straightens up. He has bowled 317 overs in 40 days' play spread across 14 weeks, in a summer which he says feels as if it was "non-stop all the way through".

But that, he says, has got nothing to do with it. He aches because he has spent the few days of rest he has been given by the selectors digging a vegetable patch in his back garden, where he plans, he says, to start growing greens and other things approved by the team dietician.

Anderson bowled 206 overs in the Ashes, more than anyone except his great mate Graeme Swann, who got through only 43 more even though he is a spinner. But if Anderson still feels the after-effects of it all, it is in his head as much as it is his back. He is convinced that England's performance was a long way short of what it should have been. And that bothers him.

"Certainly," Anderson says, "from a team point of view I would say we were comfortably 30% below our ability and potential." The 3-0 scoreline, he says, "definitely" did not reflect a series in which England had to "fight and scrap our way to winning the crucial moments in each Test" and at the end of which they felt "just relieved and happy we could get through it with a win".

Right now, Anderson says, the team have all "gone our separate ways to think about how we can improve for the winter". Anderson says it is exciting that they still have "so much room for improvement". But at the same time he knows "we're going to have to make that improvement if we are going to win in Australia, because that is a very different proposition from winning in England". Partly that is because of the conditions and partly because "it was clear as the series went on it certainly seemed like Australia were getting stronger as a group".

When England won there in 2010-11 they played as well as they had done at almost any point in their history and even then the series was tied at 1-1 going into the fourth Test. They are, Anderson admits, a long way short of that form right now.

"You'd start by looking at the individual performances," Anderson says. "In our top three certainly Cooky [Alastair Cook] and Trotty [Jonathan Trott] would have expected to have a better series by their standards. Then Matt Prior didn't have the series that he is capable of." England's aim is always to try to bat for 140 overs in the first innings, "get 600 runs on the board and then roll a team twice, that's the ideal. First-innings score is crucial and that is something we didn't do at all in this series."

Anderson is beginning to sound like the old bowler he is, moaning about having to pick up the batsmen's slack. But he does not excuse himself either. "For the bowlers, barring the odd moment, there were too many times between the stand-out performances where we weren't great." They were too reliant on individual match-winning spells, from Stuart Broad at Chester-le-Street, Swann at Lord's and Anderson himself at Trent Bridge, when he would rather they had all been more consistent through the series. He took 10 wickets in the first Test but after that "I wasn't really up to scratch". He felt he was starting to bowl better again by the fifth Test "but I have high standards and I think I can still get better as a bowler, get more consistent. Performances like at Trent Bridge shouldn't just be one-offs. They have to be more regular. That's my job."

It is a strikingly honest, even overly critical, assessment, balanced by his satisfaction at the fact that England were able to play poorly and still win, a trait he rightly feels is the mark of a good side. "It's great that we've shown that sort of character and fight, that we don't have to play to our potential to beat them."

From the outside the series may have looked lopsided but in the thick of it, Anderson says, it felt anything but. "We won by 14 runs at Trent Bridge, at Old Trafford we got saved by the rain, at Durham it looked like they were cruising until Broady bowled that spell, and they were on top of us at The Oval as well. We were on the back foot for quite a lot of the series."

That, Anderson says, shaped the way England played, particularly at The Oval when their over rate was sluggish and their batting stodgy, an approach which drew slow handclaps from their fans. "Would you rather us be entertaining and lose the series? Or would you rather us win 3-0?" Anderson says.

"As a team we would much rather win 3-0. If we can entertain along the way, then great. We will try and do that as much as we can. But there will be times where you can't be as positive or as entertaining as you want to be, because the situation of the game determines how you have to play." England, he says, "are trying to please the crowd. We are there to win games of cricket so they can enjoy themselves."

The key difference between the two teams, Anderson says, was that "we approach games of cricket thinking we can win from any position". It is interesting that Michael Clarke is often praised for taking exactly that approach in his captaincy and yet his team have won only one Test all year. England, under Cook, are called a conservative side and yet Anderson says their greatest asset is their positive intent. There is more to playing aggressive cricket than canny field placings and cunning declarations.

"Even if we are nine down with 80 runs to win we still think we can win the game," Anderson says. "Even at Chester-le-Street we still thought we could win the game." On that occasion, when Australia were, as he says, "cruising", it was Matt Prior and Jonathan Trott who spoke up in the tea break "and told us we had to start bowling properly", he says, "for want of a better word". His grin suggests that they were not lacking for a better word, or even a few worse ones, at the time.

This "character", as Anderson calls it, grew out of a meeting the team had at the start of the summer, when the team "drew a line under the ups and downs we've had on and off the field in the last couple of years. Before the New Zealand series at the start of the summer we agreed that this was a fresh start for us. We are trying to get to that No1 spot again. The way we will do that is win each series as we come across it. We said: 'This is what we've got ahead of us and this is how we are going to attack it.' Everything else is forgotten about."

That is why, Anderson says, "we really just want to focus on the Ashes in Australia and then a big Test series against India next year".

James Anderson visits Lord's at the end of England's victorious Ashes series. Photograph: onEdition

Beyond that it is irritating, he says, that the schedule means England will not play the world's No1 side, South Africa, until 2015, "because we didn't give a great account of ourselves against them last year, so we would definitely like another go at them. It is frustrating we have got a few years before we play them again." He says he hopes still to be playing then, but "it is difficult to say who will be around by then. I hope I will be, but who knows?"

That focus of becoming the world's No1 Test team again, series-by-series, is helping him deal with the frustration of being rested from the current one-day series. He has had to get used to the idea. "Rotation is creeping into international cricket as a whole. I think you are going to see more and more of it as the schedule gets tighter and tighter, definitely." Next season England play five Tests in 42 days against India. "We had five Testsin 46 days against Australia and that felt like it was as close as you wanted to get.

At the minute I can see the bigger picture, because I just want to be in good condition for the winter ahead to perform well in that."

That is why, he says, he is a little ambivalent about playing in the Indian Premier League. England are not due to play any Tests in May next year, which may open up a window for some of their players to do exactly that. "I would really have to have a good think about whether that was the right thing to do or not. It is difficult, because there is a lot of cricket, so to then go and add to your schedule, from a bowler's point of view, that's something you'd have to have a serious think about."

He would be happier, it seems, using the time to tend his vegetable patch.

Jimmy Anderson is supporting Buxton's 'Who's Got The Bottle' campaign. Follow @GotTheBottle