Mike Harridge: Meandering Through the Garden Source:Smritidaniel By the tender age of five, Mike Harridge was already an avid horticulturalist. He remembers his mother’s garden in their home in Havelock Town being crowded with fruit trees – jak, mango, guava and custard apple. For a little boy interested in the natural world, it was a paradise and he grew up on friendly terms with the lizards, frogs and tortoises that scurried, leapt and crawled across their land. He shared this love of animals with his brothers but unlike them he wasn’t very athletic – a case of childhood polio had affected his legs but not his happy temperament.By the time he was four, he was growing spring onions and spinach for their dining table, all the while dreaming of becoming a trapeze artist. What he would actually become was a welder, then an extractor of snake venom, then a keeper of tropical fish…all ...

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