Barely 24 hours before, I had been immersed in another world ‒ enjoying an English summer from the terrace of a Sussex home set in 12 acres of deciduous woodland. I reminisce…
The grassland between the house and the oaks that stand sentinel over the hornbeam copse beyond was once a manicured lawn. Now my daughter has let the native grasses flourish, and seeded it with wildflowers; slowly it has metamorphosed into an ancient, herb-rich meadow of bents and blooms. Within the tenebrous wood, the spring carpets of white wood-anemones and ensuing bluebells have vanished into their underworld, but out in the summer sunshine, everything is vibrantly alive.
There are flowers from my childhood – yellow bird’s foot trefoil (which I knew as ‘bacon and eggs’), purple ragged robin, field scabious and head-high umbels of cow parsley and pungent yarrow. The recent rains have left marshy patches – colonised by sedge, tansy and a proud stand of teasels , still holding water in their axils betwixt stem and leaf.
And there is movement, both seen and unseen. The territory is guarded by a flotilla of dragonflies, patrolling the warm air in search of insects; meadow brown and speckled wood butterflies flutter erratically among the grasses. On a purple spike of buddleia fringing the house, I remark a solitary red admiral. Beneath the ground, moles are tunnelling away unseen, their activities marked by morning piles of newly mined earth.
At dusk, a rabbit and a pair of roe deer emerge from the laurel thicket, timorously sampling the long meadow grass. A burnished cock pheasant joins the party. In the hazels, a family of long-tailed tits searches busily for tiny insects. Beyond, I can hear the cooing and clattering of woodpigeons alighting in the oaky canopy, later to be supplanted by the nocturnal to-whit-to-whoo of tawny owls.
There are few hazards in Eden. No serpents in the form of adders, but ‒ surprisingly ‒ there are leeches in the sedges, a nest of hornets in the gables. In the hornbeams lurk grey squirrels and magpies ‒ handsome enough, but on to a good thing in the shape of songbirds’ eggs or nestlings. And the cats are always on the prowl for field mice and voles in the long grass.
I walk to the carp pond, where a sinister-looking heron, motionless in the water, eyes the shallows for fish and frogs.
I am reminded of the heron’s cousins ‒ the egrets of Phuket ‒ and of one in particular, a cattle egret that ravened on my tiny guppies and swordtails. And in an instant, I am transported back to another Eden, a tropical world of sunbirds, sunflowers and scented jasmine. I am home – again.
Patrick Campbell’s book ‘The Tropic Gardener’, described in one Bangkok review as the best book on Thai gardening for 50 years, is available for B500 (half price) to personal callers from 59/84 Soi Saiyuan 13 in Rawai (Tel: 076-613227 or 085-7827551).