Town Tree Farm, Somerset
Town Tree Farm
The robots at Facebook tell me that it is exactly a year since I went to interview a wonderful elderly chap on the edge of the Somerset Levels. Chris Burnett’s private nature reserve is one of the most special places in the county of Somerset - I really mean that - and look forward to visiting again.
Here’s the article I penned 365 days ago…
There are too many people creating hell and havoc in this world and all too few making paradise.
That is what I thought as I strolled one sunlit day recently behind a 79-year-old Somerset farmer who was riding slowly along on a quad bike.
Our meandering journey was taking us through the 22-acres of earthly paradise which Chris Burnett has spent the best part of half a century creating in a southerly corner of the Somerset Levels.
Chris and Margaret Burnett
As the farmer’s passion gradually took a hold over the years, so he would nibble away at his pasture lands - armed sometimes with naught but a trowel, but more often with an old JCB digger - transforming blank grass fields into a kind of Garden of Eden all of his own design and making.
And so a lake would appear here, and a woodland there. Bridges, towers, waterfalls, meandering paths, grottos, homemade sculptures, islands, viewpoints all were built and made to work in this unique Arcadian vision over the decades…
All these features and a great many more besides came from the mind of the creative and altogether individualistic farmer who now opens his Town Tree Farm Nature Garden to the public everyday. Not that a great many folk turn up, because the oddly named farm is in a very obscure corner of the Levels, down a cul-de-sac lane somewhere near the River Parrett near the town of Martock, not too far off the main A30 West Country-to-London road.
But don’t think you could begin to imagine the Burnett-style of Eden from this bare geographical description. What you see in the nature garden is nothing like anything else you’ll find in the South West region. On the hot day we visited, for example, I was fully expecting crocodiles to glide smoothly out of the overgrown lakes amid the jungles that are the wild and luxuriant results of Chris’s creation.
However, before I wax too lyrically, there is trouble in paradise… At 79 Chris is not the indomitable man-of-action he used to be, mainly because he is suffering a few health problems which he shrugs off as “the wobbles”. So what he and his wife Margaret are looking for - and the reason why I’m writing this article - are volunteers to help with the nature garden.
“Without some help, the bullrushes are going to take over in the lakes and the whole lot will be finished,” sighs Chris, as we take tea in the lovely garden in front of the slightly tumbledown 17-century house that is Town Tree Farm.
I cannot think of a more pleasant volunteering opportunity for any person who may want to find some deep sense of peace and restfulness in their lives. The nature garden is beautiful and wild and unexpected. I was going to say unworldly, but it’s very much part of a the natural world.
Better, perhaps, to describe it as being a kind of oasis far from the modern world. Added to that, Chris is a gentle spoken natural philosopher and Margaret is one of those kindly cheerful country women.
When I visited the couple and explored the garden with photographer Richard Austin, we had difficulty in tearing ourselves away. There is something magnetic about Town Tree Farm that draws the human soul. The effect is like having your psyche wrapped in a beautiful green duvet full of birdsong and illuminated by a dappled filigree of light.
“I was born here in June 1940,” Chris told me. “I’m still ticking on, but only just. I can’t do it all now and I shall have to bring in people from outside - but you’ve either got to pay a good wage or you’ve got to have them on a voluntary basis. The National Trust has voluntary people so my daughter was keen on me trying that out. If I employ someone I’d have to make it more commercial - and that’s not doing anything for the wildlife, which is what I set out to do.
“I made the first pond here,” Chris went on as we sipped tea in the garden. “Then we made the next pond and the swans came in - and they wanted more room - so I moved out into another field. And so it went on.
“Dad came here when he was young - his father set him up here because it used to be a county council farm. Just after I left school the county said they were going to sell some of the farms - so dad bought it. He had a small dairy herd and he kept a lot of pigs.”
As for how the nature garden began, Margaret had a few choice words to say… “This was just a hobby to start with - now it’s a hobby gone mad,” she laughed.
I pointed out that it wasn’t the kind of beautifully manicured garden which people normally open to the public. Town Tree is wild and unkempt and overgrown in many places…
“I didn’t do it to open to the public, but for the wildlife and for a hobby,” chuckled Chris. “Then I was being called a bit of a lunatic, so the council came round and said did I want to open to the public? My reaction was: who the bloody hell would want to come here and walk around?
“But we went to Torquay on holiday one day and I was sat there watching them go up and down to the beach all day - and I thought: I dunno there’s nothing here, not really. I thought: I don’t know if people aren’t looking for somewhere to go and if I were to open and run it, it might help the nature garden to expand. I opened for 12 months and we’ve been open ever since. It’s not a commercial thing because that is not good for the wildlife.
“I have no idea how many people come a year. A few hundred? We just trust people to put the money in the honesty box. The experts leave us alone because I’m an odd-bod. They’ve all been to university and they are all highly educated - but where’s the common sense? They’ve got none.
“There was no trees here. No water. Only the old orchard out the back and there wasn’t many of those trees because dad kept pigs and they rooted them up. Some of the poplars here are now 110-feet high. I put them in, but someone said they wouldn’t be any good. They all grew. When I was young and I came out that door what I would see would have been a bloody great big pig. Now we’ve got 100-foot trees.
“We’ve always done a bit here and there to make things meet,” Chris mused as the birds san and the breeze rippled through the poplars and the oaks. “We had trouble with the otters at one time and they were having all the fish. Someone said they don’t like things that are moving. So I went off and got 12 televisions and put them around the islands and around the pond and switched on. They weren’t too happy over at Kingsbury because they could hear them at night.
“But lo-and-behold I went out there one night and one had killed a fish right by the television. Now there are no fish and the otters have moved on.
“The JCBs you see out the front - one of them was working until last year and then he had the wobbles, and that was that. We’ve got ‘un for sale if you want one.
“Now the main thing is that the rushes are spreading so fast and we can’t get in there by machine, so it has to be done by hand and I can’t do that anymore. We need a couple of chaps that can handle a boat and a hook.”
Suddenly the breeze picked up as a zephyr blew through in the midday heat, and Chris looked up at the trees and said: “When we have a gale force wind though here I say - they’ve come to prune the trees. Like that one there, look, leaning over - you give ‘un another 12 months he’s going to say bye-bye. Tiz nature. I got brambles out there 15-foot high - all the birds go there and feed - but if you get in your car and drive to Bridgwater, see how many brambles you’ll see. None.”
I put it to Chris that he had a special talent for landscaping - because a tour around the nature garden is like a never ending adventure and the path turns this way and that, opening new vistas and points of interest all the time…
“I can walk in anywhere and landscape it in no time at all,” he shrugged. “A builder who used to come and pick me up because when he bought property he’d take me there and say - what can I do with that? He got very rich in the end. I can walk in anywhere and landscape it, but I can’t put it on paper. Just common-sense isn’t it? When you come to a place like this, or anywhere else, you pick up the vibes. Peaceful. That is one of the reasons I did it.”
At this point Chris became philosophical…
“Someone said to me not long ago that he wasn’t feeling well and he wondered if we die, would we go to heaven? I said - hang on! You’re in heaven now, my son. You don’t know what is coming after this. But this is heaven. You’ve got absolutely everything you want. You’ve got all this - trees, plants, animals…”
The thought seemed to cause the old farmer to become a little political: “There’s too many people,” said Chris wafting a hand at the great noisy world beyond his natural oasis. “Give every girl a good pension if she only has one child and in three generations everything would be put right.
“No, I have never thought about going into politics,” he laughed before adding, as if in explanation: “I’ve only got one tooth left.”
Single tooth or no, I’d vote for him.
