Healing power of the garden after my marriage ended
THOSE with long memories might recall a delightful 2007 BBC documentary An otter in the Family, about the efforts of tV presenter Philippa Forrester and her husband, wildlife cameraman Charlie hamilton- James, to raise an orphaned otter cub then release her back into the wild.
the couple lived deep in the english countryside with a garden large enough for several otter-friendly ponds. to many viewers, theirs seemed an idyllic lifestyle.
so it comes as rather a shock at the start of this book to find Forrester on her own in the garden, hacking through towering brambles with a machete and sunk in the depths of despair.
her life has taken an ugly turn: she is ‘distraught at the end of my marriage . . . alone and frightened’. however often she tells herself she should be grateful to have three adored sons, a dog and a roof over her head, ‘i was numb. something inside was broken’.
the disasters that have befallen her include ‘menopause, family deaths, cancer in my son’s beautiful brain and, finally, the deepest of betrayals’, all of which has left her feeling ‘fat, boring, ugly, shallow and now too emotional’. What’s more, her beloved garden is a mess, and she thinks back longingly to the time when it was a well-managed wildlife haven and she and her husband were a team. the memory makes her cry: ‘i weep because i miss him so badly, because i can’t bear to raise our teenagers alone.’ she doesn’t reveal why the marriage ended, but it has clearly been extremely painful.
Yet looking around her overgrown piece of wilderness, she wonders whether restoring it could offer a path back to happiness. ‘Nature has a way of creating awe,’ she reasons. ‘Can i find that again?’
Best known for presenting programmes such as tomorrow’s World and Robot Wars, she decides to find out more about other women who are immersed in nature, in the hope that their example will reignite her love for the natural world.
they are a mixed bunch, from the producer of the Netflix documentary My octopus teacher to artists, wildlife photographers and conservationists. the most intriguing is a Zimbabwean, Nyaradzo hoto, who left an abusive marriage and
joined the world’s first all-female armed anti-poaching force.
Women are good at the job, she tells Forrester, because they ‘are not easily convinced or easily bribed . . . I am fearless today because I have been afraid’.
Even the dangers of fighting poachers are eclipsed by the exploits of Frenchwoman Jeanne Baret, the first woman ever to circumnavigate the globe. A talented plantswoman from a peasant family, she joined her lover, a botanist, on a trip around the world in 1765, passing herself off as a man; the linen wraps she wore at all times to disguise her figure gave her painful sores.
But the book is at its best when Forrester is writing about her own struggles. Clearing a silted-up pond with her son, she reflects that ‘it was never going to be perfect, but it is better . . . even if I do stink and my back is killing me, I am doing it’. She returns to the house feeling, for the first time in a long while, ‘just a little bit less of a loser’.
Walking through one of her meadows, she rejoices in the tapestry of flowers, the swifts flying overhead and the buzz of insects all around her. ‘For everything in life and the world that is going wrong . . . this little patch is going right.’
Wild Woman ends with Forrester in a much more tranquil frame of mind; concentrating on nurturing her own piece of land has helped alleviate her depression. ‘There is now joy. Yes, there is still love. And, yes, there is also a deep sadness,’ she writes.
But she will get through it, she concludes, ‘ because the natural world is bigger than the cycles of my life or the agonies of my heart’.