“It’s chastening to realise the degree of unquestioned licence that possession of a garden gives. Over this finite patch of a finite planet you can do just about whatever you like …” The Accidental Garden tells how Richard Mabey and his partner Polly made room on two Norfolk acres “for both the weeds and the wilderness and the defining human habit of pottering”.
Gardens are unlike other human spaces. They are “borderlands, possessed, designed and controlled by one species … occupied by myriads more” and it’s this acute sense of that borderland that makes this rich volume both instructive and exciting, often ecstatic. “Two of the tenderest lavenders were cut back, but when snow piled up over one of them and formed a kind of igloo, a charm of goldfinches edged inside and shredded the seeds in a cloud of violet chaff.”
Mabey is a great, pioneering nature writer and he writes exceptionally well on nature poetry. Many poets are referenced here but it is John Clare who feels closest to Mabey’s philosophy. He writes of Clare’s “disgust with scientific collectors who ‘steal nature from its proper dwelling place’”, applauding instead “persons ‘of taste’…who appreciate wild things in their context, both natural and cultural … he suggests that ‘taste’ is a faculty enjoyed by all living things.”
Clare’s “taste” comes to mind in an extraordinary passage where Mabey describes “an extra burst of scent” from a gorse bush which “seemed to fill not just my nose but my eyes and cheeks”. He wonders if the sensation is an illusion or is it “rationing its costly scent molecules, emitting specially concentrated puffs as come-ons to insects. But I was struck by a more outlandish thought. Was the gorse smelling me?”
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This slim volume, packed with knowledge, insight and “taste”, is a beacon even as Mabey acknowledges that the “minor victories” on his two acres cannot make up for the worldwide loss of biodiversity. Humans remain “largely wedded to two ingrained ideas: human privilege and nature’s dependency…” Somehow The Accidental Garden manages to be both delightful and serious as Mabey hopes for a human “willingness to learn from the adaptations and solutions of life systems that have been coping with adversity for 3.7 billion years”.
