Inspired by ‘second nature’  I started making a path through my particular wilderness. Cannot use a grass mower – yet – so used a pair of secateurs and their elder brother to do the job. Just about 2 hrs after starting I had the beginning of a path, ending between a couple of overgrown laurels.

Did remind me of  Tim Smith’s story of Heligan, about re-creating a garden that had fallen asleep for 100 years.  This bit didn’t sleep that long, an estimated 10 – 15 years: when Nature puts her finger out things grow big in a whole big hurry.

Quote from ‘second nature’ page 254: “Look at how all of the forms I’ve introduced there – the dead-straight lines and walls and arbors, the symmetries and repetitions and paths – seem to profit from the contrast with the rougher land all around them, acquiring a savor they might not otherwise have had.” “But it’s not only the garden that gains from the rub against rough land –what’s even more surprising is how the rough land seems to profit from the contrast as well.””The simplest, best proof if this idea I know can be constructed with a lawn mower and a patch of overgrown grass, the wilder the better. To look at a freshly mowed meadow path, the way it draws such a crisp, syntactical, human line through the soft and billowy, heedless grass, is, I think, to understand the gift of the garden to the wilderness, and its dazzling reciprocation. This, for me at least, is a fairly new discovery.”