A new haiku by the poet laureate Simon Armitage has appeared on a garden wall in Cornwall, the first of a series of pieces celebrating the creatures that make their home among the woods, meadows and ferns there.
Armitage’s haiku, Web, celebrates the silky but deadly threads that spiders “darn” in the hedges at the Lost Gardens of Heligan and was unveiled together with an illuminated 2-metre recreation of a walnut orb-weaver spider as part of a midwinter night trail.
The poet has spent a year working with the gardens on a series of poems about the life that thrives there, including the badgers, squirrels, beavers, barn owls and foxes.
He writes about 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”.
There is also a poem about Heligan’s large “bug hotel” – said to be the biggest in the UK – written as if its inhabitants had left Tripadvisor-style reviews about it.
The idea is that visitors will come across poems tucked away in the gardens with the spider haiku the first to be showcased. They will also be collected in a volume called Dwell, to be published by in May.
Armitage said: “Working with Heligan has been a kind of dream, because its gardens and paths and its jungle are a sort of dreamscape as much as a landscape, a place that stays in the mind and where the imagination is invited to take over. I got lost in the Lost Gardens, made poems like little dens and treehouses, and didn’t want to be found.”
Laura Chesterfield, the managing director of Heligan, said: “We have so many stories to tell at Heligan but Simon picked up on us being a safe dwelling space for all sorts of species and gave a voice to some of these creatures in a very beautiful way.
“I think Simon fell in love with Heligan. He’s really immersed himself in the place. It has been an honour to welcome Simon here. We look forward to unveiling the full collection in 2025, and this haiku provides a perfect introduction of what’s to come.”
Chesterfield said other poems would be secreted away around the gardens in the new year. “We want people to come across them engraved on gates or rocks and feel like they were the only person to find that poem, as if it was written for them.”
Web can be seen at Heligan Night Garden, which is open on select dates, until 4 January and Dwell will be published by Faber.
