Chapter Four, Heatwaves, and Why the Wild Matters More Than Ever

It is, at the time of writing, absolutely roasting!

The kind of heat that makes you understand, viscerally, why shade exists. The kind that sends you into the woods not for romance but for survival. The kind that makes you look at mile after mile of concrete baking in the sun; roads, car parks, rooftops, paved-over front gardens, and feel something between grief and fury.

We are, as a society, beginning to reap what we've sown. Quite literally. Urbanisation without green space doesn't just look bleak; It cooks. It floods. It offers nothing to absorb, nothing to breathe, nothing to hold the water when the storms finally come. Rewilding isn't a lifestyle aesthetic; it's load-bearing infrastructure. It's the difference between a garden that survives August and one that becomes a dust bowl. Between a street that stays habitable and one that becomes an oven.

I have spent the last week doing my level best to stay out of Kent entirely.

At the weekend I climbed Snowdon, Wales being, mercifully, considerably more temperate than the south-east, and stood at the top feeling the kind of clarity that only really comes from having earned a view. Before that, four days on cub camp, deep in the woods, with no technology, cooking outdoors, finding bugs, exploring, and watching my children, still a little young for cubs, officially, but entirely unbothered by that, take to the whole thing with a joy that made my heart embarrassingly full. Not once did they ask to watch television. Not once did they ask to go home. They were simply there, fully and completely, the way that children in woods tend to be, if you give them the chance.

I came home eaten alive, horrendously dusty, and more convinced than ever that this, the outside, the wild, the inconvenient and unglamorous and gloriously alive, is what we should be fighting to protect.

My own rewilding efforts feel woefully behind where I want them to be. The pond is the triumph, pondcam continues to document things I still can't entirely explain, mostly at 2am, and the brambles along the southern border are doing exactly what brambles do, which is precisely the point. But on days like these I find myself making promises to the garden. More cover. More water. More mess. Less tidiness for tidiness's sake.

These things take time. The wild takes time. But it's also astonishing, when you pay attention, how quickly it moves when you leave it alone.

Which brings me, rather naturally, to Chapter Four.

The sparrowhawk hasn't filed her paperwork. Bram has been reassigned. And something is pressing against the back wall of the archive shed from the other side, and is still.

The HRB, characteristically, is treating this as someone else's jurisdiction.

If you're already a subscriber, Chapter Four lands on your doormat very soon. I hope it finds you somewhere cool, with something cold to drink, and ideally a view of something green.

If you're not yet a subscriber and you'd like to follow the story as it unfolds; illustrations, dispatches, bureaucratic correspondence and the occasional pressed botanical curiosity, the snail mail club is open: A letter, once a month, through your actual door.

In times like these, I think we could all do with a little more wild. And a lot more shade.

Well, that's all from the garden for now,

TTFN