A deeply personal reflection on childhood belief, memory, and the quiet rewilding of a lost garden space known as Pogle’s Wood.

When I was young, everything was black and white — except the Wellingtons were red.

Skipper was a fox terrier, and I belonged to him. If either of us got a biscuit, we ran to a secluded part of the garden and shared it. It was a quiet pact between species, unspoken but absolute.

I was small, and young, and I could read and write, though badly. But I could listen. And I did — every day — with ‘Listen With Mother’ on the wireless: “Now children, march around the room like little soldiers,” and we did, obedient to the voice from the box. Later came ‘Watch With Mother’—before 4pm, always on the old rental black and white television. And one programme in particular held me entirely: The Pogles. Later renamed Pogle’s Wood.

The Pogles were small beings who lived in a hollow tree in a wood. They were not magical, but magic came to them. The four principals were Mr. and Mrs. Pogle, their adopted son Pippin, and a squirrel-like creature named Tog, who was Pippin’s playmate.

I didn’t believe in fairies. Or Santa Claus. The economics of the time didn’t allow it. There were no sixpences for teeth, no tricycles on Christmas morning. Everything was hand-me-downs — including the Wellingtons.

But I believed in the Pogles. And not as a story or a character. I believed they lived — in that secluded part of the garden where nothing cultivated grew, only green plants and weeds and the occasional sparkle of a bulb that also dreamed, like me.

It was a space at the edge of things. A liminal zone.

And one day, my mother cut a slice out of an old washing-up liquid bottle. She wrote “Pogle’s Wood” on it in chinagraph pencil. My father hammered it to the old yew tree that marked the boundary of the world.

And that was it.

The Pogles must live here — because the sign said so.

I was Pippin. And Skipper was Tog. We didn’t dress the part, but we played it with conviction.

They were not magical, but magic came to them. And me? I didn’t need magic. I needed place, and story, and a belief that something older and smaller and kind still waited under the leaves if you stood quietly enough. I believed — truly — that if I looked long enough and in just the right way, I would see the little door to the Pogles’ house.

Now, decades later, I find myself finishing off the paths that circumnavigate this secluded place. It had grown over, and in its state of neglect it felt heavy — not enchanted. It was not to make it look nice. It was to make it true again. To return it to what it had once been — not as a garden ornament, but as a remembered world. I had to address this.

Now I am still Pippin, but grown up. And Agatha is Tog. We walk the same paths. We keep the watch. We have come home.

This is the rewilding. Not of a space. But of a legend.

The sign is gone. But the door is back. The yew still stands. And now, I plant again — not because I want to return to the past, but because I remember how to believe it into being.

This post was made possible with kind permission from the Dragons Friendly Society.