Here’s my third extract from the book ‘Noah’s Children’ by Sara Stein. Here she urges us to create ‘wild’ places for children to explore and enjoy in their own backyards…

‘Girls and boys come out to play! But they will not unless we summon them with the piper’s tune of mud and rushes, not sprinklers mechanically circling an uninhabited lawn.

I want a word and cannot find it. What is the opposite of tame?

If our children are to grow up at home in their environment, in appreciation that its sharing among other lives is essential to our own life and livelihood, and with the intelligence to wisely manage it, we must wild the land.’

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and the wider issues raised…