The Fairy Trail
This is the tale behind the Quinton Old Rectory Fairy Trail that will be opening in the garden in 2020. But it’s also a tale of two Davids.
Following completion of the landscaping work in Quinton Old Rectory Garden back in 2015, the first David spotted an opportunity to create a woodland walk through the trees that surround the perimeter of the garden. David is one of our gardeners; he’s been with us for many years, pre-dating our time at Old Rectory and very much part of our family. David loves wildlife and nature and looking at the garden with a different perspective. The woodland walk stems from those passions and its creation was a solitary, almost stealthy, project, as David cleared weeds mulched a path, lined it with branches rescued from our visits from the tree surgeon and created a woodland walk that skirts the top end of the garden and is several hundred metres in length.
The path that he’s created has a wonderful rusticity to it and walking it you get a real sense of being in a woodland rather than a garden. It feels a little bit other-worldly to me, and I think it’s that (along with a visit to the wonderful fairy trail at Archerfield Walled Garden…) which got my brain whirring….
What if the path really was a path to another world? A path along which tiny fairies might make their homes, where they’d live with woodland animals that could talk to them and where stories could play out and poems could come alive? I thought about how wonderful it would be to develop the woodland walk into such a trail, creating a small scale magic kingdom.
Enter David number two. David is a poet (he’s lots of other things too, but in my phone he’s “David Poet” and to me that’s what defines him). He joined us to perform at our inaugural Quinton poetry evening in 2019, wow-ing us all with the universality of his writing as well as his consummate delivery. I’d asked David to write a poem inspired by the garden for the poetry evening, and through that poem, David’s relationship with the garden took root (sorry).
When I told David about my plans to create a fairy trail (how quickly my musings about the magical beings that might live along the path had coalesced and become a plan with a clear output….!), his eyes lit up. Actually, that doesn’t do the situation justice; if you’ve ever seen a whole person light up, that’s closer to the mark. I think in that moment, David could see a vision of the trail, and the stories and poems that he might craft to bring the trail to life, laid out before him.
That was a few months ago now. And we’re quietly working on our magical little project, knowing that one day soon, it’ll be time to share its secrets.
Not yet though! We’re keen to get this 100% right; to make a trail that visitors won’t forget, that will enchant all generations and bring a little bit of magic to Quinton.
Roll on 2020!