How the Funky Gibbon paid for a very Oddie garden
TALES OF A LUDICROUS BIRD GARDENER by Bill Oddie (New Holland £16.99)
There is a stand-out word in the title of Bill Oddie’s new book. It came from his wife, Laura, when she strode into the North London garden that bears his decidedly singular imprint. ‘This garden is ludicrous,’ she said.
Ludicrous or not, it certainly puts the ‘odd’ in Oddie. About half the size of a tennis court, it contains five ponds, more than 100 gnomes and dozens of fake animals, including elephants, crocodiles and an ‘extremely realistic’ gorilla.
In an area he calls Spooky Corner, a white porcelain hand looks as if it is reaching up from under the earth. Oddie added a dribble of red paint to resemble blood, but disagreed with Laura’s suggestion that his creation was the first outward sign of the clinical depression that has afflicted him at times. Whatever, the weirdness doesn’t stop there.
Nearly 20 mirrors are dotted about, not to mention many more small fragments of glass placed among rockeries and wedged into tree trunks.
All these cause great consternation among visiting dunnocks, the small birds once known as hedge sparrows and famous, in Oddie’s words, ‘for getting in a right tizz when they see their reflection’.
It was a dunnock that first turned him into a birdwatcher as a small child. Crawling through a privet hedge next to the family home in rochdale, he spotted ‘a pair of shiny little eyes peeping over the lip of a mossy little nest’.
It was a dunnock, sitting on three of her own greenish-blue eggs and one other that was white with brown blotches. It’s the only cuckoo’s egg Oddie has ever found, but the discovery changed his life.
he was only six when his father got a new job in Birmingham, providing a slightly bigger garden to play in. he was an only child, and his mother lived most of the time in psychiatric hospitals. Green spaces, and the feathered creatures that inhabited them, became his passion.
When Oddie went up to Cambridge in 1960, he was a fully-fledged bird expert. And by the time he left, he was spreading his own wings as a performer.
In London he married a singer, Jean hart, and in due course, with the royalties from The Funky Gibbon, the hit song he wrote for his comedy troupe The Goodies,
he and Jean bought a house backing on to a pond on Hampstead Heath.
He recalls one ‘moonlit canoodle’ on the water’s edge, risking nettle stings, with a woman who was not his wife. But by then, Jean, too, was involved with someone else and she moved next-door, a very Hampsteadin-the-Seventies thing to do.
Although creating his ‘ludicrous’ garden has taken decades of commitment, the gnomes mostly arrived on one day. Eschewing conventional wedding gifts when he married Laura, Oddie asked all the guests to bring one.
Heaven knows what the neighbours make of all this, but his garden clearly appeals to local wildlife. He describes one nightmarish scene when, disturbed by excavation work next door, more than 100 rats invaded his garden, ‘cascading over the fence like a miniature reconstruction of wildebeest migration’.
It is a relief, after that image, to get back to birds. Oddie lists the 66 species he has spotted in his garden over the past 30 years — though he’s not only interested in ticking them off, but also studies their behaviour. Apparently, ‘blue tits are soppy and great tits are bullies’.
The list includes ring-necked parakeets, said by some to have joined London’s bird population when, in the Sixties, Jimi Hendrix let loose the pair his girlfriend kept as pets.
Oddie prefers to believe they escaped during the filming of The African Queen at Isleworth Studios in 1951. Either way, they are pretty commonplace now. But even if they weren’t, they would be far from the weirdest thing about Bill Oddie’s ludicrous garden.