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| The garden I've inherited (author's own photo) |
When I was 4 years old my dad sat me down and showed me the atlas. He pointed to Canada and told me we were going on a big boat to live there and that is what we did. In the holidays Mum and Dad took us camping by the lakes in the big Canadian forests. I remember sometimes we went to the Algonquin National Park. Dad liked exploring “virgin forest” and looking for moose. Luckily he never got close to one. He had romantic notions about unspoilt “Urwalt” picked up from reading Karl May books as a teenager.
I remember being scared once when Dad took us all looking for bears. I was glad that we didn't see any on that occasion. When we did it was a mother Black Bear and her two cubs foraging at the back of the campsite garbage dump with us safely on the other side, not far from our car. On another evening when we were eating dinner outside our tent we heard wolves howling in the distance, which was also a bit scary for a little girl who had been brought up in the suburbs of a country where dangerous animals had almost all been exterminated in earlier centuries.
I did find it interesting to see a beaver dam though. It was only a passing glimpse as we drove past but I can still recall that image. Closer to home I liked to see the small jewel coloured hummingbirds which visited the Nicotiana flowers, which my parents had planted in the front garden.
After a few years we returned to England because Mum missed her family and friends. She never learned to drive and the bus service in Burlington wasn’t good. My mum and I were both born in Hampshire as my grandmother, her mother and at least three more generations of my great grandmother’s family had been.
Back home my dad had to make do with walks in the New Forest, a large part of which was plantations between open areas of heathland. The pockets of native trees, some of which were probably the remains of ancient forest, had a much wider variety of plants and birds for me to spot. I went to one of those areas on a fungus foray organised by my school. Thankfully much of the New Forest still remains in tact today.
On country walks in the New Forest or in the countryside around where we lived my mum would tell me the names of the wildflowers and the birds which we saw, just like her mother had done when she was a girl. She had walked for miles with her mother from a young age and then cycled longer distances with her family when she was old enough. My father passed on a love of trees and forests in particular and my mother, her love of birds, butterflies and wildflowers, but they both loved nature and I have inherited that love and respect of the natural world.
I remember flocks of lapwings on fields near my house in the Autumn. Close by is an area named Peewit Hill, so lapwings (aka peewits) had been common there for a good while. I think they continued to visit after the big Tesco store was built, but then the fields stopped being ploughed and were used for car boot sales. The lapwings stopped coming. Now there are houses where the fields once were.
All around me many of the fields and woods of my childhood have been built on. I appreciate that people need to live somewhere and the demand for houses in the South East is very high. It would help everyone in the UK if jobs were spread more evenly over the whole country. As it isn't some areas suffer from high unemployment and empty buildings while others have to suffer the destruction of the countryside and an increase in noise and pollution with regular traffic jams at busy times.
Since the Industrial Revolutions Britain has lost 50% of its biodiversity (wild plants and animals), leaving some key species on the edge of extinction. We have lost much of this in the last 50 years, so in my own lifetime. I mourn the lack of birdsong and the loss of so many wildflowers, and the fact that we're driving hedgehogs, common toads and turtledoves to extinction, but it's not just about sentiment; without a healthy environment, inhabited by healthy populations of a wide range of wildlife, we will be less resilient to climate change and food could become scarcer.
You can read more about what scientists at London's Natural History Museum have discovered about the state of nature in Britain here.
I have been lucky to inherit my parents' garden. I worry what sort of world my children will inherit, so I shall do what I can to improve the environment in my garden to provide what habitats and food for wildlife I can in that space. It already has bushes where birds make their nests and I'm busy adding more flowers to try to provide nectar and pollen for as many months as possible. I've planted some flat open flowers like daisies and single dahlias, as well as penstemons and foxgloves for insects which prefer tubular flowers. Variety is the key to feeding a wide range of pollinators. If everyone in Britain did what they could to help wildlife, nature in Britain would be in a better state.
I'd love to hear what you're doing to help nature.
