I’ve wanted to visit Knepp Wildland since I first heard about it and late last year I was lucky enough to be able to buy the last available ticket for an afternoon visit this spring.
I’d booked a ‘safari’ and together with other lucky visitors, bumped along tracks through former arable fields in an Austrian ex army Pinzgauer,. The Serengeti it isn’t, no exotic animals to look out for, tamworth pigs and long horned cattle stand in for wild boar and long extinct aurochs and the beaver pair are as yet confined within a compound.
What is there is a tantalizing insight into the magic our own British landscape can perform if only we allow it to.
Every thicket seemed to hide a nightingale in full and glorious song, defending his territory against all the other nightingales, there were in fact forty singing males the day I visited.
White storks sailed overhead while more sat on eggs and young in nests, clearly visible despite the densely foliaged crowns of the mature oaks which held them.
Obviously growing there for hundreds of years before the estate was rewilded, the oaks have now taken on a new lease of life and the acorns not devoured by the pigs are able to germinate. Young oaks are growing well within the protective embrace of brambles, blackthorn and wild roses. The saying ‘the thorn is the mother of the oak’ suddenly made obvious sense.
But what has my exciting day out got to do with our gardens? Well just about everything.
My garden sits within its own landscape as all our gardens do. Each unique but sharing a common ability, to be a thriving, functioning ecosystem able to perform its own particular version of nature’s magic.
I did once have a nightingale perch briefly in the big birch tree in my garden, if he was to return, set up a territory and stay to sing, that would indeed be powerful magic.
