Inspired by the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Poet Laureate Simon Armitage brings the landscape to life in Dwell.Through elements of riddle and folklore, Armitage imagines a series of vivid habitats: a squirrel’s drey as a ‘twig-and-leaf crow’s-nest squat,’ a beaver lodge as a ‘spillikin stave church,’ and a hive as a ‘reactor core.’ In this fertile world of woods, meadows, and jungle, boundaries blur between human and animal, the natural and the cultivated, revealing a shared existence pulsing with motion and vitality.Yet Dwell also serves as a quiet warning—these spaces and their inhabitants face growing environmental threats. Just as gardens shelter life, these poems offer lasting refuge to the creatures they portray, celebrating their presence while acknowledging their precarity.