When you live in Australia, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that, one way or another, nature is going to get you. It’s why first-time tourists get so nervous, having heard stories of shark attacks, snakes in beds, and spiders the size of saucers. Living in this particular corner of New South Wales, I’ve never felt it quite so strongly.

It’s the middle of summer so everything is going ballistic. Weeds the size of bushes spring up where there had been none the week before. Tiny saplings seem suddenly to have become trees. I pick up a brush to sweep the veranda and a mud wasp has built its home on the handle. When it rains, tree frogs stick to the window panes and watch you with a wide grin. The grass grows almost before your eyes.

It’s a glorious time but hard to get through, sometimes. The air is thick with humidity and some days it’s like living in a Turkish bath. My clothes cling damply to my body and my glasses steam up when I leave an air-conditioned building. Mould blooms on undusted surfaces or on the collar of a shirt that was worn briefly and left to hang. The leaf litter alongside the lane is spread with white and gold fungi as pretty as flowers. You feel the whole place would simply devour itself if you didn’t keep an eye on it.

The abundance is jaw-dropping. There is life everywhere, in everything from the thrum of cicadas and crickets to the deafening frog chorus down by the creek. Gigantic webs are slung between trees at night and sparkle in the morning mist. When I drive along our little lanes, I have to be careful to avoid the water dragons sunbaking on the road, or an echidna or goanna crossing to the other side. We have hares in the garden, thankfully less destructive than rabbits as they seem to eat more grass and weeds than anything that troubles us, but which almost give you a heart attack when they leap away from under your feet.

It’s the full force of Australia, an Eden, thanks to its mix of rich soil, sunshine and plentiful rain. And so easy to remember that this area was once the dense rainforest known as the Big Scrub that covered a vast area and which was only cleared when the white man arrived. They tore down the trees, first the huge cedars for carpentry and then the rest, to create paddocks for cattle, the milk and cream taken by boat or train to Sydney. There was whaling at the coast. The abundance was tapped.

I thought of this many times when I was in Britain last year. It was June and everything was looking its best. The evenings were long, the dawn chorus full-throated, and gardens everywhere foamed with flowers. While it felt abundant, it also felt tame. Safe, too, because there’s little that will harm you, at least not seriously. In Britain nature feels almost incidental, at least in the busier parts, as though it’s surviving against the odds. You have to go to its outer edges to feel any sense that it’s the humans who are incidental. The nature you find is often curated, like the reintroduction of beavers to slow the flow of flooding rivers. Other species like red squirrels and kites have been carefully helped on their way to re-establishment. It’s a similar story across Europe. It’s the intervention of the humans that allows it.

Here, on the other hand, I sense nature is just waiting for us to get out of the way. Sure, there are plenty of species in danger, victims of human settlement, climate change, monoculture farming, and feral cats. Our latest scare is the impending arrival of fire ants which threatens to bring chaos to agricultural life. At Cloverdale, we have consciously adjusted our land to make it more bird attracting, and we’ve replaced plants like the tulip trees whose flowers are toxic to native bees. But we’ve also cleared areas to stop them becoming snake habitat, too, so it’s a biased kind of care we practice.

I wake to a dawn chorus that is rich and symphonic, each species heralding the day and somehow managing to hold themselves in some sort of balance. As I look from the veranda, my eye is caught by an endless display, from the birds criss-crossing the highway of the sky to the scrum of ants devouring a beetle near my feet. A stingless bee seems to catch its breath on my seat cushion. There is something wherever I look. It positively pulsates with life.

This area is a miracle. While the Big Scrub was cleared for cattle but is now green-leafed again with macadamia and fruit orchards, I like to think that this will pass, too. Many have already allowed areas to run wild again, where pioneer trees will encourage yet more trees and thereafter more birds, insects and animals. Despite the onslaught of new houses and spreading settlements, I imagine the rainforest quietly reclaiming its land, biding its time as it waits to ambush us in the most sumptuous way. In time it will smother and cover us, the temporary humans, mere passers-by on this planet.