How love blossomed at the bottom of the garden

MY GARDEN AND OTHER ANIMALS by Mike Dilger (Harpercollins £14.99 % £12.99) STEPHEN MOSS

miKE DiLGER describes himself as a naturalist, writer and broadcaster — ‘the BBC one Show’s answer to Dr Doolittle’.

mike’s partner, Christina, is clearly the yin to his yang. While he is haring up and down the country chasing wildlife for the TV cameras, she sits watching the birds, bees and butterflies, and quietly drawing them as they go about their daily lives.

mike and Christina decide to buy a house, though neither of them has exactly fallen in love with the dilapidated former councilhouse they’ve found in a village on the border of Somerset. What mike has fallen in love with is the garden: a fragment of land shaped like a pair of bell-bottomed trousers, leading down to a stream and piece of woodland.

For mike has a dream. Having reached his mid-40s without ever owning a house and garden of his own, he knows this is his one chance to create a wildlife haven. His aim is to turn a dull and neglected patch of green into an oasis for nature.

my Garden And other Animals is the story of how, during the first year in their new home, mike and Christina manage to create their very own ‘field of dreams’.

Creating a wildlife garden from scratch is not without its frustrations: there’s a huge lump of concrete in the exact place they want to dig their pond, a rat sets up home in their chicken coop and the British weather conspires against them.

But there are triumphs, too. minutes after mike finishes digging the pond, a damselfly lands at the water’s edge — clear proof that ‘if you build it, they will come’.

Kingfishers become regular visitors to the stream at the bottom of the garden, and a host of other wildlife — badgers and bullfinches, hedgehogs and even a passing otter — flock to this newly made habitat.

Their hens, April, may and June, provide hours of entertainment and fresh eggs for breakfast.

With commendable honesty, mike outlines the way the garden becomes a symbol of the couple’s relationship. At first, there are plenty of arguments; but as time passes, and the garden starts to take shape, harmony begins to reign. Gradually, this act of creating a space for nature begins to change them, too.

For the first time in his years as a naturalist, mike sits still and spends time watching to see what happens. To his surprise and delight, he soon finds that observing the daily behaviour of ‘his’ wildlife is far more satisfying than being anywhere else.

Christina changes, too. As the months pass, she develops a deeper passion for the wild world. Her new-found love for nature finds expression in her exquisite pencil drawings, which are dotted through the book.

Anyone who has ever fed the birds, watched wildlife in their garden, or simply enjoyed getting closer to nature will find this book funny, uplifting and ultimately very moving.

i won’t give away the ending, but let’s just say that mike manages to come good with a romantic gesture that will leave you wiping away a tear. For although my Garden And other Animals is, on the surface, a tale about gardening and wildlife, it is, above all, an old-fashioned love story.

STEPHEN MOSS’S latest book, Wild Hares And Hummingbirds: The Natural History Of An English Village, is now available in paperback (Vintage, £8.99).

A single garden snail can produce 430 babies a year