His home, "Oakdene," had a large wild garden bordered by fields and woodland that stretched away to the Downs, including Watership Down. Oakdene has since been razed to make way for a housing project and is now the site of twenty-two small houses. Adams was a solitary child, separated by a nine-year age gap from his siblings, who were envious of their parents' preference for the baby brother, doubly precious because of the intervening child, Robert, who had died in 1919 at age two. He played alone with imaginary friends for company, taking refuge in the rhododendrons and the shrubbery, a favorite retreat. The connection between the natural world and refuge was made when he was young, as was the habit of creating imaginary worlds. His father was a powerful influence, a devotee of country lore who made sure that his son learned how to identify birdsongs and to know the Linnaean as well as the common names of wildflowers. Adams looks back to his childhood as a golden age, a lost rural paradise.
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