Last month I made the long journey back to the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Hokkaido. My annual visit, which was curtailed by the pandemic, had run to three years of absence and the impact of Covid had made the distance feel more profound than usual. In this time, isolation during lockdown, two snowbound winters and the garden closed and running on a skeletal staff for two growing seasons, brought a particular kind of quiet to the foot of the mountain.

Nature continued to run its course, uninterrupted and growing thickly in the brief northern summer. The Sasa bamboo that the garden team keep carefully in check in an orbit around the more cultivated parts of the garden, returned like an incoming tide. Cut once a year in the autumn to encourage the indigenous flora of the forest, the clearances had a dual purpose. Firstly, to recalibrate the woodland flora after the initial clearances by the 19^th century settlers created an imbalance, allowing the Sasa to overwhelm the forest. Secondly to impose a managed domain. The bears that live on the mountain and use the bamboo as cover are not to be confronted, but they are also respectful of the open ground created by its removal. The garden team has been careful to only take as much ground as it could tend with available labour and a balance was struck that worked without having to erect fences. But during the pandemic the landscape took on another life and with energies pulled back to the essentials and the silence of a garden quietened by closure, the bears came back with the Sasa.