In Secret Gardens

Dear all,

For this week's MindLetter, as promised, several hours with Sir David.

In Secret Gardens

I’d gone viral. It had taken over my nose, which was about five times its usual size, and simultaneously dry as a desert and weepy as a tap. My head desired to be horizontal at all times, and asleep for a solid fifteen hours a day. My throat, mysteriously, was clear, so cough sweets were out, but steaming with eucalyptus oil was in. An apparent rally – energy! Nose deflating like an old helium balloon! Back to work! – was short-lived. Returning to bed, I listlessly scrolled through Netflix, and then iPlayer, and there I saw it: David Attenborough’s new series.

Secret Garden is a tour of Britain’s loveliest ordinary backyards. There’s no extreme landscaping here, unless you count the furrows made by the wind in the Western Highlands, or the woodland floor in the Wye Valley that doesn’t see the sun for several months over-winter. We will admit, nonetheless, that these gardens are still a far cry from your average Newington gravel patch. We begin with a mill house in Oxfordshire, where the river creeps up to the burrows of iridescent kingfishers, and otters flash through the rising water. Here, a field mouse leaves Hansel-and-Gretel crumbs – a shell, a leaf, a clothes-peg – to guide her journeys across the arid vista of a grassy lawn. She is, reportedly, the only mammal to create landmarks in this way, apart from ourselves.

In a row of verdant Bristol semis, promiscuous hedgehogs go rambling of an evening – they have learned to avoid the busier roads – and blue tits battle to keep their bairns alive in a sky denuded of insect life. There has been a 60% decline in insects in Britain over the last two decades. It’s not only the blue tits in Bristol; the swallows in the Lake District and the dippers in Cumbria must work themselves to the feathery bone to provide for their young. Many don’t make it; the loss of their primary food sounds a slow-motion death knell for some of these species.

But a blue tit fledgeling, fallen from the nest, survives the interest of Mr Fluffy, a cat whose squash-faced stalking of the hedgerows personifies evil intent. The hedgehog rears four healthy hoglets, and in the Wye Valley a happy family of badgers hoovers up slugs after much-needed rain. The barn swallow’s partner returns at last from her long flight north; the dipper chicks all make it out alive. In the West Highlands, we discover that tu witt tu woo is, in fact, a duet. You witt, and I woo. Meanwhile, in Cumbria, the heroine of the whole series emerges: make way for the unprepossessing palmate newt, who devours all manner of unwanted monsters, and carefully, painstakingly, folds a leaf over every one of her perfect eggs.  

Thank goodness for such delicate attention, for the cameramen who sit out in midge-bitten hides and in the middle of rivers, for David Attenborough’s gentle, wry narration, for the good people who let us into their gardens for an entire year at a time, for the strokes of luck like sudden sunbeams. I like the West Highlands episode most, for all that it is mostly buried in snow. Perhaps it is because I am really feeling better by then; perhaps it’s being reunited with cameraman Simon King from Big Cat Diary, which entranced the Sunday afternoons of my childhood; or perhaps it is the quiet, committed presence of Matt Wilson, the naturalist who has watched over this particular garden for forty years.

Matt does not own the garden, he says, he is more like its guardian. Every day he writes down what he sees, large and small. In the midst of winter, when wind and snow scour the land, he puts out a venison bone for the buzzard, and peanuts for the pine marten. These are a lifeline for hungry creatures. There is more: a nesting box for barn owls, and a den under the eaves, with a ladder, for the pine marten. These acts of care, and their quiet daily documentation – those shelves of notebooks – are something magical to see. Slow, unrushed, and yet deliberate, they seem to me to be like haiku, that medium of devotion that catches the attention not for its speed but for its stillness. A haiku, writes American poet Allen Ginzburg, is ‘three lines that make the mind leap’; a good one allows the mind to experience ‘a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God’.

Isn’t this all a person needs, sometimes, to get through the day? To tide oneself from one dose of paracetamol to the next; to glimmer the other side of an existential fog or swamp; to remember, in the midst of things, the heart-beating goodness of life? A snapshot of something other, that is yet deeply known: care, stillness, peace. A haiku, therefore, is where I’ll end. When a moment like this next catches your attention, maybe write your own.

‘Today’s visitors…’

Pen swoops down upon paper

Captured, running free.

Warm wishes for the weekend ahead,

Kitty