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For gardener and author Susie White, the love of nature is a precious heirloom, passed down to her through the generations.

There’s a fuzzy newspaper cutting stuck into my teenage scrapbook, its black and white print faded to sepia. I’m planting trees with members of the then Council for the Protection of Rural England. We’re helping ‘replace scars left on the Berkshire landscape by the M4’. I’ve just turned 17 and my coat sports the huge lapels of the 1970s. It’s just one memory from a childhood that shaped me, that made me aware of the fragility of the land.

I grew up in rural Berkshire, a landscape of hamlets and villages, farmland and copses close to the county town of Reading. The word sound of CPRE was there in the background before I understood what it stood for. My father was active with the local branch and my grandfather made me a life member, the youngest in the country at the time.

At weekends we would walk the lanes and footpaths, splashing in puddles in winter, picking sloes in autumn. Further afield were the Berkshire Downs, exhilarating, windswept and on top of the world. But it was the little places that moved me, the forgotten places; the wooded corners of fields, primroses by the railway line, the tangled margins of streams. I still remember where I saw my first white admiral butterfly and where wild watercress grew. It’s these kinds of experiences, the small moments, that made me value the details in a landscape.

I moved to Northumberland in my 20s and have worked outside all my life as a gardener as well as writing about nature and wildlife. I’ve been able to return my grandfather’s gift by giving back to CPRE and wish that he and my father could know this. There were fundraising talks or visits to Chesters Walled Garden, the two-acre herb garden I ran next to Hadrian’s Wall.

Getting deeply immersed in a place, noticing and recording the wildlife around me, feels like a culmination of those early experiences. Moving to the North Pennines with my husband 15 years ago, we made a garden from an abandoned compacted site that now teems with wildlife. It and the wider valley often feature in the ‘Country Diary’ that I write for The Guardian, the oldest newspaper column in the world. When I wrote Second Nature, it was a drawing together of a life spent gardening and observing nature.

I love these northern hills. In spring, I garden to the jubilant bubbling of curlews, to the sharp piping of oystercatchers. Dippers bob on river stones and the smell of wild garlic is pungent in the woods. There’s a strong sense of community in the Allen Valleys, of self-reliance and mutual help. And as my grandchildren grow, I pass on to them my feeling for the land.

Win! SECOND NATURE

Susie White’s book, Second Nature (Saraband, £12.99), tells the story of how she and her husband created their naturalist’s garden, now bursting with wildlife, from an untended patch of ground. And lifelong CPRE member Susie has given us three signed copies to give away. To enter the prize draw, email your name and address to cpre@thinkpublishing.co.uk, with ‘Second Nature’ as the subject heading, by 30 June 2025. For more about Susie and her work, see susie-white.co.uk