SO WE STARTED AN NGO…

I don’t know how to conjure up this place for you. This morning, light leaked through mist, and rainwater coated every leaf, silken spider thread and fledgling bird feather. It smells of mud and ozone, earth and air. There are sounds, joyous ones like dueting olive sunbirds – or odd, wild ones like a bushbuck barking or a mysterious bundle of feathers called a flufftail calling: deep mournful hoos. It’s otherworldly, with its cannibal snails and velvet worms, its moss-covered trees and mushrooms. It’s astonishing as much as pretty. It has an edge – the trails are bone-cracking slippery when wet, there are stinging nettles and button spiders and puff adders.

Somehow, this small strip of wondrous nature has survived on the border of a city of 900 000 people, and I don’t knowif there is anywhere else that makes me feel quite so alive.

I first visited