The 250 acres of Nonsuch Park may not quite be big enough to get lost in, but they are certainly big enough to lose yourself in.

Brian Jackman, one of our foremost writers on the natural world, understands that feeling well. In a new book, Wild About Britain, he discloses that he spent his boyhood in Stoneleigh during the Second World War.

"Nonsuch," he writes, "was the perfect adventure playground, where I swung like Tarzan through the trees, made Robin Hood bows from young ash staves and built Apache dens among the cow parsley."

Long before he set eyes on the African bush — which he has described vividly in his books with the film-maker Jonathan Scott, The Big Cat Diary and The Marsh Lions — he had imagined it in Nonsuch.

He and his friends knew nothing of the park's Tudor beginnings, he says. "Instead, enclosed by fleets of blowsy elms, its unshorn meadows were our prairies, its hawthorn hedgerows our African savannas.

“In one field a landmine had fallen, blowing a deep crater in the clay that quickly filled with rain; and nature, always swift to exploit a niche, soon transformed it into a wildlife haven."

Years later, Jackman would learn that the botanist and conservationist David Bellamy had caught newts as a boy in that same pond.

Jackman, now 82 and long resident in Bridport, Dorset, lived during the war in Briarwood Road, just across the London Road from one of the park's entrances.

He went to school at what was then Stoneleigh East Secondary, and used to do a Sunday morning paper round from a corner shop on Stoneleigh Broadway.

Having started in Fleet Street as a messenger boy, he worked his way up to become a travel writer for The Sunday Times and other national newspapers, and over four decades reckons he has spent the best part of four years under canvas in Africa.

In his new book, a collection of his writing about British landscapes and wildlife, he recalls that when he was eight and the Blitz was at its height he was evacuated to a farm near Bude in Cornwall.

He did not return home until two years later, when, he says, nature had begun healing the scars of war.

Weeds and garden flowers had transformed bomb-sites into jungles, and in Nonsuch — where trenches had been dug across open ground to prevent German warplanes landing — thousands of tortoiseshell butterflies sunned themselves on thistles.

"Whenever I return to my suburban roots," he writes, "my mind runs back to those butterfly years when the sun shone and the buddleia flowered and summer seemed as if it would never end."

Wild About Britain is published by Bradt (£9.99)