Secret Garden review – David Attenborough offers us a gorgeous fantasy for his 100th birthday

For his centenary special, the naturalist stays close to home – who could blame him? – and reveals a magical world teeming with cuteness

He’s nearly 100 years old and has spent more than half that time showing us the entire Earth, so it feels fair enough that David Attenborough has scaled back and stayed at home for this centenary year’s bundle of natural history wonders. There he is, in the sunshine in the middle of England, ambling past a shed. “Across the British Isles, there are magical places,” he says, whispering through the purple alliums. “Our gardens!”

Secret Garden’s conceit is to bring the super-high-res cameras and patient filming techniques that are usually deployed in the Amazon rainforest or the plains of the Serengeti and see what they can capture in British back yards. “Many of us are completely unaware of the wild world right under our noses,” adds Attenborough. “Some British gardens are almost as diverse as a tropical rainforest.”