Simon Armitage

The Poet Laureate makes a luminous tribute to the natural world, presenting his new collection inspired by the diversity of habitats found at Cornwall’s Lost Gardens of Heligan.

The Gardens are an ambitious restoration project where history and mystery combine. Armitage evokes the reawakened landscape with its woods, meadows and ‘jungle’, offering a bustling, fertile realm for all sorts of creatures to inhabit.

Using elements of riddle and folklore, he animates a series of dwellings: the ‘twig-and-leaf crow’s-nest squat’ of a squirrel’s drey, a beaver lodge’s ‘spillikin stave church’ and a hive’s ‘reactor core’. He blurs the distinctions between human and animal, natural and cultivated, emphasising commonality, while also warning of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers.