WHEN I WAS a small child, when I was not at school, I spent my days living at the beach, or holidaying in the Hills…Idyllic, tv wasn’t even imagined….and in those dreamlike days, the idea of sitting for endless hours watching a screen would have seemed like wasting the day. In the big old two storey house, built by my Cornish Great Grandfather, us kids spent almost all our school holidays…..the neglected two and a half acre European garden, a children’s wonderland. Lavender flowered Rhododendrons up to 20 feet high…. huge Laurel and Pine hedges, the brilliant crimson of Japanese Maples….a long tunnel covered with Banana Passionfruit, water tanks, brimming with clean, ice cold rain water…
And the five enormous Oaks, below the second storey front verandah. Trees so thickly leafed, I could still stay outside in heavy rain, sitting beneath them, staying dry. A Weeping Elm, with an old tram bell attached to its trunk (who thought of this is unknown to me), but if that strange old bell rang out through the garden, we knew the faeries had been….that they’d left gifts for us kids. It was a very good time in my young life….losing myself completely in the wonder and mystery of the big, wild, garden. I still remember…..all those years ago, on a freezing wet early Spring day, passing close by a tree, and seeing the bright eye of a Thrush, sitting on her nest, right there beside me…..a moment of enchantment, seeing her there, so still in the dimness of her leafy shelter. Enchantment and Wildness…..looking into perfection.
Second Site