It was just an absolute pleasure to speak with Poppy – she loves permaculture thinking, designing and plants as much as me!
You can catch this episode on any of your preferred streaming platforms or watch the video recording on Youtube.
Read the full transcript here:
Morag:
Oh, thank you so much Poppy for joining me on the show today! It’s an absolute delight to have you here sharing about your love of plants, your love of gardening and how you’ve landed with ecological gardening as your way of showing up in the world & speaking up for what you feel really matters. Let’s start with a really big question of what is it that really motivates you to want to step up and speak up? What are the things that you find just dwell there are in your heart that you feel you can use this as a platform to speak about?
Poppy:
Oh, that’s a really lovely question. Thank you so much for having me here! It’s a pleasure to chat about this. Yeah, so what motivates me? Well, I grew up in South Africa. In my childhood years it was South Africa, freshly post-apartheid. So I saw a lot of things like the impact of a very unjust society. I suppose as a young adult, and as a kid that really, really drove me. I think that from that initial experience in childhood, it’s given me quite a keen sense of if there’s something wrong, you’ve got to do something about it, because people suffer in real terms. So I think that’s definitely a big driving factor for me.
There was also an element, as I was kind of coming towards what I do now, I was working in fashion and had like a very real personal experience of understanding the detrimental impacts of working in an industry that is so extractive and I suffered personally, emotionally and physically from that industry. So I suppose there’s also a personal element to it that I saw how incredibly healing engaging with food and food growing can be, in a really holistic sense. I was just like, ‘Whoa, this is incredible. I can’t keep this to myself!’ So I think those are the two things that really feed me and I’m just so inspired by the garden, the land, the living world – it feels infectious. It feels like ‘How dare I, if I don’t share this?’
Morag:
Just everyday there’s something so beautifully fascinating when you just walk out and connect in that way. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Poppy:
It’s such a powerful antidote to a lot of the issues that we face in our modern society and not only powerful, but beautiful & enjoyable. And I think that for me, it’s just so incredibly exciting.
Morag:
Yeah, like you are saying on a really deeply personal level, but also as a way to speak up. Whether it be social injustice, mental health, climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity – all of these things we can address by really grounding ourselves where we are and rewilding those spaces, feeding ourselves from those places and connecting with our communities. It’s incredibly powerful. I wonder how it came to you, though, that gardening is that thing? You were in modelling? And now you’re in the garden?
Poppy:
Yeah, it’s just like nodding along so ferociously to that, what you’re just saying about the power that it dwells in our gardens or in the land. And I suppose I witnessed that fairly early on. I went to Steiner School. At that school, they taught us about composting, and they took us to farms. And we just got a very basic understanding of how things grow and die in cycle.
That was a foundation that I could then return to when I was older. Also, when we returned from South Africa, my mum was suffering from mental health issues and one of the things that just really transformed her was starting gardens. There wasn’t any money and we were moving around a lot. But every time we would go into a new home, she’d start a garden and it was really special for our family and really important for her. So I think that that also taught me that it was there. I had early memories of the garden being a place that was really healing and enjoyable and positive and I guess I’d seen what had happened to my mom. So I suppose even I didn’t have words, for I had zero understanding of the positive impact of being outdoors even though I had a direct experience of it.
When we came back from South Africa, we were living in the countryside and my mom is very planty and she takes us for foraging and things. She wouldn’t call it foraging, that just wasn’t like a word that we used, it was just like, we’ll just go and find something. There was a lot of that and that meant that I had like a foundation, a kind of place to return to. When I was in my period of really searching, there was that to return to as well as the fact that I was trying to heal myself through food and curious about where the food came from. At the same time, I was understanding more about climate change and the impacts of that.
In a weird way, the thing of me being curious about healing myself and being curious about how I can help heal the global issues we’re facing, kind of lined up and the same thing could do both. That’s how I ended up here. There was already the foundation of it and then the dots started connecting, which took me back there, I suppose.
Morag:
It’s so powerful, when that moment of realisation happens, isn’t it? That I have agency to be part of this, the global movement of change by paying attention to healing, what’s right in front of me and what’s within me? I think that’s a huge thing. I’d love what you’re saying about your mom, and how it was infused in that experience, without the language. It makes me realise how important it is that we have opportunities for young people to cultivate a love for plants & for growing.
Actually, just on the mental health issue, I was having a chat with another woman today who’s doing a PhD in social work in mental health and she’s saying she’s starting a project to look at how to prescribe permaculture as a way of healing in mental health professions. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s so interesting!’ Just such a shift I think in how they are thinking about addressing the growing mental health issues here in Australia or anywhere around the world.
But coming back to the garden, though, how did you learn this? You had a sense of experiencing the garden growing up but not knowing the language of it, how it all works. So, where did you land to actually find out about how to do this? Or did you just find your own way?
Poppy:
I did a lot of self teaching because I was excited and passionate. There’s a lot of YouTube and books. I also did some short courses. There was a moment that my partner and I were in India, and god, when was that? It might have been like 2016. We were in Auroville and we met this amazing guy whose name I can’t remember right now, he was a British guy, I think he was northern.
He had moved to India many years ago and he spoke the local dialect and you couldn’t tell he was British from his accent – it sounded to me like he was a local even though he was a white guy. He was basically cultivating this incredible permaculture food forest and through that cultivation, he was feeding a lot of Auroville. There were a lot of really dignified, meaningful jobs being provided for the local community who weren’t part of the Auroville.
Auroville, by the way, is like an experimental kind of utopian community experiment situation happening in India. That was the first time I saw really amazing food for us. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is doing so much!’ He was like putting his hands in the soil and pulling out bits and smelling it. It was the first time I’d seen someone really involved with their landscape. He was probably the guy that inspired me to be like, ‘Oh, he was talking about soil life?’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t even know that you could talk about soil life!’
Morag:
Like ‘I didn’t even know the soil was alive!’
Poppy:
Yeah, he was probably the guy that sparked a thing like, ‘oh, I want to know what he knows!’ That got me really into permaculture. I was looking at a lot of different permaculture practitioners and what qualifications they had done in the past. One of the qualifications that kept coming up was with the Royal Horticultural Society in the UK and that was a year long training in the basics of plant science. It was less practical and more like the sort of stuff you learn in school about what actually is going on inside a plant and what is actually going on under the ground. That was a really good foundation for me personally, I enjoyed that.
Then I did various courses and some time also at a little kitchen garden in the south of Spain and some community gardens in London. Then eventually, I’m here, my garden here in Devon, and co-running a Community Market Garden just outside of town as well.
Morag:
Wow. So your garden, I’ve seen some pictures of your garden. It looks absolutely stunning. I’ve also seen pictures of you drawing it for your permaculture design – I’m not sure if it’s entirely permaculture or how you describe it, but maybe you could tell us a bit about that. It’s long and it’s thin, tell us about your garden! It sounds phenomenal and looks phenomenal.
Poppy:
Yeah, so it’s like six and a half metres wide max. It’s not super big, it’s a long, thin corridor about 30 metres long. I live in a really old town and I actually went to like the archives of the local area and the old ladies who look after them were explaining to me that the boundary wall on one side of the garden has probably been there since pre-1700s. They think a lot earlier than that.
This site used to be a plot that was used by the local tradesmen who each had a burgage plot behind their properties, where they’d basically subsist like they had a pig and a bread oven, grew veggies and had fruit bushes and trees – stuff like a cottage garden. So this garden is currently a third of that original baggage plot. It’s like that plot that was previously used for, like a genuine family to subsist on has been divided into three. I love it so much.
At the very end there’s apple trees, so I guess that’s the zone that’s farthest away. Then there’s an annual veg area and the greenhouse. And then there’s a more perennial herbal area. That’s the kind of layout with a long, narrow path that weaves through all of that. When I arrived here, there were already quite a lot of fairly established perennials, which were really lovely – like a really great big myrtle bush, the apple trees and one of them is really, really old. Various herbs as well, including annual and biannual herbs, which kind of like pop up here and there, which is really, really nice. It creates a lot of dynamism in the garden. Things like evening primrose and fennel, loads of poppies and wild marjoram.
So basically, when I came to the space, I really wanted to maintain the incredible wildness – it was full of insects and full of birds and it was really special. A lot of the design has been about, ‘okay, what’s already here?’ as all permaculture designers do, but there was a lot there already. So it was like, ‘Okay, how do I slot myself into this incredibly abundant space that already exists?’
For example, there was an area where the veggie beds are now which was covered in bin bags full of garden waste that had been left there for I don’t know how long. Lucky for me, because the garden weeds had been there for so long and decomposed and created amazing compost. Below the bin bags, it was like mulch, right? Because light had been excluded. So that’s the area that became the annual veg beds because they’d kind of been accidentally prepared for me! That compost in those bags became the first layer of no dig compost that went on top of them!
Initially, I really wanted to have the veg area near the house because it’s an area that I’m obviously using a lot. But then ultimately decided that because the garden is so long and thin, it’s probably a good idea to have the annual veg a little bit farther away to draw me through the space and the same with the compost as well. Because otherwise, it sort of bears the risk of the garden becoming only used in this very small area close to the house because there’s just one long path. There’s no winding around the place.
Morag:
That kind of flips what normally is said in permaculture – ‘bring it close to home.’ But that idea of actually wanting to draw yourself out into space. I love that. I really love that. With my garden here, when I come home, you actually have to walk through the garden to get to the house. Mine was just a blank site so I had the chance to actually design that. I wanted to do that because as I was coming home, I could talk to the chickens, get some veggies, go down to the house, bring the egg down and cook it up. As I’m heading out again, I can pick up some odd leaves and toss them to the chickens and say goodbye to them. So it’s like that embeddedness and designing ourselves into the space and I think it’s so beautiful.
Poppy:
I mean, I think that’s one of the things that drew me to permaculture. Traditionally a garden is separate in a way and I really loved the importance that you are part of that ecosystem and design yourself and your needs into it as well. That’s something that I found really exciting in permaculture.
Morag:
Yeah! You did a fair bit of study I heard with Martin Crawford and people like that on the food forest programs.
Poppy:
I did a course with him and that was another really inspiring experience because I’d seen the food forest out in India and that was like the most incredible thing ever. Then I saw a few smaller scale ones in the UK but they didn’t quite have the impact that the other one had. I mean, it’s hard to cultivate something like that in our climate. So then when I went in and saw what Martin’s doing, that was like mind blowing. I was like ‘okay, yeah, this is another person who knows something. And yeah, I think his book is probably one of my most bedraggled looking. I think it’s just called The Forest Garden?
Morag:
Okay, yeah, he’s got a few that are also about cooking and different types of plants and things.
Poppy:
Just like literally how to grow a forest garden. It’s got like a huge index of plants and what their uses are.
Morag:
I actually remember that site because I spent a lot of time in the round where the agroforestry research trust is, and I remember that as a paddock. Then I went back there 10 years later than 20 years later, and I’ve seen that transformation. It’s extraordinary. What it makes me think is how quickly, like 20 years is a long time, but it’s not really, right? You can transform from an empty paddock to a beautiful, multifaceted forest that is home to so many species. It’s this kind of concept of regeneration and telling the story of what’s possible is really important. And I wonder, what stories do you find yourself going out and telling? Because I know you’re a speaker and a writer. What kind of stories of inspiration do you find yourself going out and sharing to myceliate this kind of passion and interest?
Poppy:
Hmm, that’s a nice question. I think that the story that I find most exciting at the moment is what I was saying a second ago, that we are nature, that we are part of it. Because I think for me, that was like a really big thing to feel. I think that ultimately – when we go around with a genuine experience of that, and not just a heady understanding, but like a feeling of it – I think it really changes how we interact with one another and the world around us.
I’m a big believer that although the climate crisis, and so many of the various social justice issues that we face today require, require complex legislation and a lot of fine detail in various industries, that at the end of the day, if the uniting story that we as a community, as a culture, tell ourselves is rooted in that understanding of connectivity and relationality, then the detail can be filled in by the people who have access to that kind of information.
I was actually having an interesting conversation with my partner this morning and he was saying, ‘I don’t think there’s going to be any change unless there’s legislation.’ And then I was saying kind of the same, but like, legislation won’t come unless there’s a public mandate. And the public mandate won’t come unless we as a people decide that we have a different system of priorities or a different value system. So that’s the thing that for me, I find most powerful on an individual level, because of the level of awe and wonder which is so important for us to experience as humans. And the comfort and being part of something as an individual is powerful, but then for the collective, it has so much capacity to hugely, radically change the way that we structure our culture and do our business.
So that’s the thing that I find exciting. I think that’s probably the reason that I harp on about gardening at all, because I think that if there wasn’t that radical element to it, I wouldn’t be excited about it. Because for me, coming to gardening was like, ‘How do I do something good?’ And it gave that.
Morag:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh, I’m doing it, nodding and nodding. Yeah, absolutely. I have this way of explaining the radical nature of it and the power of it, that the power is not always in the government. Often, you might get a change and then the policy changes. The power is with us in our communities, myceliating this understanding of how soil works and soil life works!
All the projects, if you scratch any community, you’ll find this kind of stuff, and they’re all connected. Every now & then you’ll see these little mushrooms pop up, which is a project or community garden or someone speaking up about it. If we keep composting, there’ll be new mushrooms that come up and it’s all connected – we’re all talking to each other in different ways and co-creating this without a plan. It’s this distributive model of actually lifting up a different way forward. So that’s kind of how I think about power and change. It is about bringing together people as well. I understand that you share a love of community gardens and community food projects as well. Can you tell us a bit about the community food project you’re involved with?
Poppy:
During the pandemic, there was like a real surge in interest from the local community and wanting to get involved in it – that was before my time with them. Following that, they started a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) veg box scheme, where they were basically utilising this momentum of volunteer people and the idea was that they’d be able to produce a veg box with those volunteers. But as COVID and the restrictions lifted, producing a veg box for paying customers changes the dynamic of a market garden hugely. People kind of, you know, drifted away. And Sasha, the person that I co-run the place with, ended up being the last person standing.
The following year after that, rather than doing veg box, they started a project called gross share, the idea being that rather than people paying for their veg box, people come and grow their own veg box. So I signed up to that kind of thinking, ‘oh, I’ll just, it’ll be so nice to just like, do what I’m told and just like to meet people, and not be making decisions about acquiring space.’
I then very quickly realised that that’s not how the project runs. It’s very self organising and it’s not about a top down kind of instruction. At first I was like ‘oh damn it’s going to take energy!’ But then it was actually incredible, because Sasha was like, ‘oh, you know, would you come and co-run this with me.’ And that was last year. Now we’re in our second year. It is like such an incredible experience in seeing how a project can emerge that is less top down – we still get stuff done! It’s such an interesting experience. I thought that the main sort of draw point would be that people get food that’s organically produced. But turns out the main draw point is the community element, which is a really incredible kind of emergent property.
Morag:
Yeah. It’s amazing, isn’t it? And I wonder too, whether you have it set up as an educational space as well, or just as a meeting space?
Poppy:
Yeah, so Sasha and I meet weekly, we like to plan the space, order the seed and loosely plan what the learning element for the session is going to be dependent on what’s happening in the garden. A lot of the people who are on the scheme have zero growing experience. So a huge part of it is educational. But the idea is that it’s learning through doing so there’ll be a run through practically, verbally and then we do it.
Morag:
It seems to me like in the southwest of England and particularly around Devon, there seems to be an enormous amount of local food action happening. Are there a lot of conversations happening between the groups? Do you feel it there? In some places it can be quite dispersed and you can feel alone in your project. Other places it feels like ‘oh, there’s an aliveness in this’ and support beyond just your little bubble.
Poppy:
Yeah, well, that’s partly why we moved here, because we were in London before and it felt like a very good place to come and be new in this stuff and wanting to still be learning if that makes sense. And yes, there’s a real sense that there’s people here who know, like Martin Crawford. One of the ladies who’s on the scheme, she works for him and so she’s constantly coming back with the most incredible information and sometimes plants. There’s definitely wonderful connections between everyone. There’s actually a Whatsapp group chat, where a lot of information sharing happens with most of the local growers in the area.
Morag:
Yeah, fantastic. And so when you write or speak out into the world, if you go and travel and speak, or write into more mainstream magazines, what do you find is the message that lands in the most fertile soil?
Poppy:
That’s really interesting, yeah.
Morag:
It’s that kind of question that like, I’ve been doing permaculture for, gosh, 30 odd years. And it started as kind of a fringy thing, but it’s moving into something people go, ‘Oh, yeah, I get what this is about.’ I wonder, yeah, that was the question, what parts of it do you feel where you are land, and just resonate with people?
Poppy:
Well, I stopped calling what I do permaculture, because I was finding that it was not necessarily reaching all of the people it needed to reach. I think, as you say, that’s probably changing now, and I don’t know if it’s such a ‘thing’. But certainly, I found that kind of more, let’s say, conservative, maybe less curious about this sort of stuff, people and publications were far more keen for the diluted version of gardening, i.e. the more kind of traditional, retired person enjoying the flowers in their garden. So it was about how do I attach more radical elements that in a way that feels appealing for people who maybe are curious, or maybe not even curious and I kind of want to make them curious?
Morag:
What do you call it?
Poppy:
Ecological gardening. And it’s funny, because even that, people be like ‘but gardening is ecological? What are you talking about? You’re growing plants.’ Even that’s interesting, that there’s a kind of public misunderstanding of the fact that horticulture in the UK is the same as fast fashion. It’s an industry that’s not rooted in circularity or any of those things. So yeah, a lot of the pieces that I write for publications that are more mainstream, people are like ‘can you just like talk about what you do in your garden, and, you know, we just want our readers to have a really lovely, immersive, joyful experience.’ That’s usually the sort of tool I suppose I use, and I will sort of describe a, for example, beautiful day in the garden. And then sneak in stuff about circularity or soil life or growing organic – basic things like that.
Morag:
Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? If we can, in whatever way we can just be opening up some of those doors and gently showing ways and allowing that curiosity to dive a bit deeper. So in a lot of the work that you do, you are invited to speak on many different platforms and with some amazing people that are extraordinary spokespeople themselves. I wonder, apart from you know, about what goes on in the garden, what are those key radical messages that you talk about as a spokesperson in this space?
Poppy:
Hmm. Yeah, I suppose, apart from the ‘we are nature element’, I suppose, the thing that is normally coming up is, well, compost and food! Like the fact that because we all eat, this is something that we can all engage with and tap into. And because we all eat, we’re all producing a certain kind of waste and that’s another kind of access point into all of this.
So I suppose that’s the two conversations that come up a lot, engaging & encouraging a food justice system. It isn’t just about land restoration, there’s a really significant human justice element to it around access to good food that is good for our bodies, and access to green space that is good for our minds and good for our communities. So I think that’s probably the other main kind of message that comes through. It’s that land justice, and food justice isn’t just about biodiversity. Like we have to remember that we are part of that and that’s important too.
Then I suppose, the composting bit – that often comes up. Exploring the idea of food waste, and there’s a wild statistic that about a third of all food grown gets wasted in the end. I mean, that’s not entirely from food waste in our homes, a lot of that has also to do with things before even reaching the supermarkets etc. But there’s a huge food waste issue.
Often when it is coming out of our homes, it ends up in landfill, which creates huge pollutant issues. It’s a really beautiful example of how something can be a problem or a solution. You know, I’ve read about permaculture and how food waste, which can become really pollutant and toxic in landfill can become literally the stuff of life on a compost heap. That’s something that often comes up because it just demonstrates so beautifully the power of circularity and the incredible resources we have at our fingertips that we think of as waste and so become waste.
Morag:
I think the whole food waste concept is absolutely huge. When you think about it, the figure that you said is what we hear. I also kind of think as a home gardener, you realise how much extra gets wasted as well. For example, the broccoli plant. We only ever use the broccoli immature flower and all the rest of it is wasted. So if you actually think about the possibilities, the radical possibilities as home gardeners, of diminishing the waste of food entirely, I think we could probably cut it by about 90% if we started thinking about eating all different parts of plants and foraging wild foods as well. And I wanted to ask you, what’s your favourite forage plant in your part of the world?
Poppy:
I was about to say blackberries, because I was picking them this morning and there was just such a fond memory of childhood, we’d spend so much time picking blackberries. But I think maybe meadowsweet. I don’t know if you have that where you are?
Morag:
No, we don’t actually!
Poppy:
I think the Latin name is Filipendula ulmaria and it’s a beautiful flower. She grows in damp boggy meadows and I’ve never seen her growing in an urban space before, but maybe she could. She has these really incredible scented leaves and flowers, which smell kind of like almonds and vanilla and like almondy vanilla. Actually one of the compounds in the plant was used ultimately to synthesise the thing that became aspirin and aspirin was named after the previous Latin name of the plant, which is changed now I can’t remember what the previous name was. It’s a really powerful hub for soothing inflammation and pain and smells incredible. So I pick a lot of that over the solstice and into late summer. There’s still some out now, and the leaves also in spring. I think yeah, that’s definitely a foraging plant that’s one of my favourites.
Morag:
How do you use it?
Poppy:
I just dry the leaves and flowers and drink tea with nettles in the evening. It’s a really nice soothing tea and I drink it if I’ve got a tense stomach, tense headache even or stomach pain. I’ll drink that and it apparently makes the most delicious ice cream but I’ve never tried, I’ve only ever had the tea.
Morag:
How did you find out this information? Is it through speaking to people or just researching and books?
Poppy:
You know when you’re just obsessed with something you just like absorb it. You’ll overhear a conversation and you’re like ‘take note’.
Morag:
That’s what I love about community gardening, you can be out and about with a group of people in the garden. You could be doing something outside and then there are all these stories about someone’s grandmother used to do this or someone’s auntie did that – often the women folk of the family and the stories that get shared. I think that richness of the texture of the stories and the information that comes through that is just extraordinary.
Poppy:
Yeah, definitely through people. Then also the internet. And a lot of books, like there’s a book called Herbarium, which is really great. Another one is called Medicine of the Hedgerow. Those two are like two of my favourite herb books. But yeah, I buy a lot of books. In charity shops where you can find books that are really old and sometimes have pretty cool information that is not held in the same regard that it used to be. I think that was really valuable finding really old gardening or foraging books.
Morag:
You just mentioned hedgerows, too and that’s something we don’t have here in Australia. I’ve always been in awe as I walked through the English landscape, just seeing the diversity in the life that’s in them and how they were just kind of invisible for a while and just cleared. I understand this quite a resurgence of them in places, is that right?
Poppy:
Yeah, definitely. You know, there’s such a better understanding of, as you say, the diversity that they hold. I find hedgerows particularly fascinating because of the kind of mentality that can come with rewilding, the idea of like divorce humans from landscape because we’re bad for it. I love hedgerows as a tool for demonstrating just how incredible we can be for landscape because a hedgerow is human-maintained space and our interaction makes it incredible. You know, like, historically you’ve got food, fibre, forage, medicine & fuel from them, and probably so much more. By cultivating them ecologically, they also become home for birds and so much forage for wildlife protection – all of these things. I think hedgerows are a really exciting sort of example. I guess they’ve become kind of like compost. There’s certain things in growing that can kind of become symbols, which I really like.
Morag:
I’m searching for a word at the moment. I don’t know if you can help me out. Because as you were talking then it’s that it’s that sense of we are embedded in the natural world and surrounded by food – whether it be wild food, or the food that we’re tending to, and all of that. I’m looking for the word, that feeling of being held and feeling safe and secure and nurtured by being in this landscape that we’re deeply in relationship with. I know there’s a word biophilia but that’s sort of more about connecting with nature, but that sense of being surrounded by our medicines and our foods and the forage and all of those. There’s got to be a word in a language somewhere. I can imagine maybe or maybe not.
Poppy:
I think for me, I mean I bet there’s a word in non-English language, but for me, the word would be ‘belonging’. Because it’s like, we’re part of it and our needs are met and we can have these exchanges with the landscape. For me, that’s, that’s belonging really.
Morag:
I feel like you have a sense of relationship to your garden, like I do to mine, when you’re standing in the middle of it, and you just feel it around you like, how does that make you feel? Like what is it? What does your garden mean to you?
Poppy:
Yeah, I love that. Sometimes my god, sometimes I feel very small, even though my garden is tiny. Sometimes I’ll be looking at all of the relationships unfolding in front of my eyes and just feel so small in a really nice way. Because my garden is not massive and yet, it’s still full of all this complexity, I’m just like, Oh my God, my mind is blown all the time by the garden. Sometimes I feel hugely frustrated, because there’s always something that can be done and things are alive so they do whatever they want to do, not always what you want them to do. That’s like a constant learning experience. And sometimes I feel torn because I never seem to have enough time in the garden ever, doesn’t matter how much time I’m there. Peaceful, energised, so many feelings.
I guess that’s why I like gardens because they are alive. It’s like a dynamic relationship. I’m looking at a candle right now. It’s not just like, ‘oh, a smelly candle, which always smells nice.’ Like sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s ugly, sometimes it’s beautiful. And that’s like, the beauty of it, you know?
Morag:
Yeah and sometimes it’s squidgy underfoot, like it might be now with the rain you’re getting!
Poppy:
And sometimes it’s dry and parched and you’re like ahhh no!
Morag:
Yeah, that’s right. I often think about myself now because I’ve been here in this garden for gosh, about 20 years now. I kind of feel like I’m the garden gardening, not the gardener and that’s beautiful. It just feels so great. I have a sense that that’s kind of what you’re getting there as well.
Poppy:
Can I just say that I love that you are the garden gardening, that gave me chills. I think that’s so beautiful. You are the garden gardening. Yeah. One day to have been in a space for 20 years, I can’t wait for that experience.
Morag:
Yeah, it goes like that. I’ll tell you now! As you were speaking about, you know, the joy and the peace and the frustration and all those things, I feel too! All the time that I don’t get to spend, but I would love to spend. That’s why my little studio that I built here is wrapped around by the garden. So the chickens are just out there, the food forest is here and the compost is just within sight. I can kind of see everything I can look across the forest, past the lake, and yeah, so even if I do need to be in here, I still have everything just around, which is super nice.
Poppy:
Do you grow annual veggies and things like that as well?
Morag:
Oh, well, I mostly encourage ones that love to self-seed. So I have this section right down near my house that surrounds the house, which is full of annuals and perennials, the salads, the leafy greens, the beans & peas – all that kind of stuff just in their patch. Sometimes I create a forage garden and then when something sort of dies back, I’ll just have like little mosaic plantings, rather than having beds. And yeah, that’s sort of how I have it.
Poppy:
So you have a kind of area of annual vegetables, but it’s not like rows, you’re kind of growing in a more polyculture sort of style.
Morag:
Totally, yeah. And I respond, like if something comes up, then it’s like, ‘Oh, great.’ And then I’ll sort of adapt to that and then something might fall over and I’ll adapt to that – rather than making the plan of how it all works. Because I’ve been here for 20 years now, I hear a particular bird come in. It lands in the mulberry just as the mulberry tree is starting to grow its leaves and get its new fruit on it. And I know great, the rains are about to come, which means I could start to plant this or all the wild mustards come up. And I think, ‘great, it’s time to start doing the brassicas, if I want to put any other brassicas in’.
So reading the landscape rather than the chart, because the charts just kind of change all the time. Whereas reading landscape, reading the garden and reading the plants and the birds and being part of that system. Trying to be present and notice.
Poppy:
Yeah, I love that. I think one thing that I thought – like I said I wasn’t particularly interested in foraging before getting interested in permaculture – as I sort of understood what you just described, that relationship between the wild landscape and a cultivated space, that’s really interesting.
Morag:
Yeah and I think, gosh, you know, like I feel this after being in this place for 25 years. Imagine what it feels like to be in this place for 100,000 years. It really shifts my perspective on so many things, just having this deep relationship to country and really working a lot with a local indigenous group to try and explore relationships.
Poppy:
I can say this, which is that as someone who’s mixed heritage, like I’m half Nigerian and half English and grew up in South Africa and then in England, and was always moving around – even in South Africa and when we were in England. Then when I was an adult, a young adult, I was living on a canal boat and moving around on the boat as well. So as somebody who I feel like in my body and in my mind, I’ve been very transient and not necessarily connected to place. Like growing a garden has been like, when you say you’ve been in that space for 20 years and all the things that you know and understand, it’s like I just crave that so much.
I cannot wait to like one day have that experience. Then to me, it’s like the greatest gift that I could offer my kids one day is to be able to hand some of that down so they can layer on top of that. And it’s just such an exciting thought that is partly exciting and partly sad that knowledge has been lost, but I guess I’m starting to try and find some of it. Like a slither of it – probably won’t find much in one lifetime. But you know, I’ve got to start.
Morag:
I think yeah, exactly. We’ve got to start somewhere and inspire that curiosity and the love and the connection and the belonging. Whatever we gather and whatever stories and knowledge and ways of relating to plants and just keep on passing that and keep talking to each other and creating places that inspire. I think that’s it when people can come in and they walk through it, whether it be digital or if they get a chance to come and wander through a garden. That is incredibly powerful as well, I think. So where are you heading next? Have you got any new big projects coming up that you’re thinking of, or are you just grounding and re-earthing?
Poppy:
The main thing that I’m focusing on is the community growing project, because for me, that’s a really exciting, real life project. I think that digital sharing, etc, is incredible, but the stuff that really feeds me is real life, obviously. We’re just wanting to kind of keep developing that because we’re only in our second year and we’d really love to secure more funding and kind of turn it into some sort of example that can be replicated within the kind of local context of other communities and become a bit of an example, potentially. So that’s where a lot of my energy’s going, which is really, really nice.
Morag:
Fantastic. Yeah, that’s wonderful. And I wonder, what do you say, when you’re out talking with groups, what do you say to them to encourage them to dive deeper? What’s your call to action?
Poppy:
Like, don’t be afraid to experiment and get it wrong? Because you will and so many times people like, ‘oh, but you know, what if? What if, what if, what if?’ It’s like, things will go wrong, and things will break and they will die and that’s life and that’s part of the whole learning experience. Yeah, I think that’s – don’t be afraid to experiment. Just do.
Morag:
Yeah, that’s such great advice. I think that’s the thing, too, we get so caught up. It’s like, ‘oh, it’s gonna be we open those horticulture books and think it’s got to have this much NPK and these many spacings.’ Then just to stand back and to watch how nature’s gardening and to garden with nature, I think it kind of simplifies it somewhat, doesn’t it? She’ll tell you pretty quickly whether it’s working or not.
Poppy:
Yeah, totally. I think that sort of desire for an end goal of perfection is exactly what the garden dispels. There is no end goal. It just keeps going. I think it’s very common nowadays for us to feel very overwhelmed. I know I did and I often still do – kind of frozen in the gravity of some of the issues we’re facing today, particularly climate change. The main thing is action. Like if we don’t do things, nothing will change. There is so much radical change to be found in the growing space. So I think that the main thing is just like, don’t be scared of getting it wrong. The only way you can get it wrong is if you don’t do anything at all. Like anything is better than nothing.
Morag:
Yeah, great. Where can people find things about the work that you’re doing? The resources that you have? I know that you also have a course that you have. Do you want to just tell us a bit about that and where people can find you?
Poppy:
I’m on social media and Instagram, @poppy.okotcha. I’ve got a website as well, which is also my name and an online course with a platform called Creator Academy. So you can find Create Academy and me through any search engine and find my course through them. I sort of speak on various podcasts and write for various publications, which you can find on my website when they come out. Next summer and spring, we’ll be back doing talks and stuff around the place. So they will be listed up on my website as well when they happen, but that will be in England.
Morag:
People tune in from all over the world with this so that’d be great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been an absolute delight, having a chance to chat with you and to hear about your wonderful perspective, your beautiful garden and approach! I think that sense of we are nature – that message alone is enormous.
Poppy:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s also a pleasure hearing about your relationship with your space as well!
Morag:
Thank you Poppy.
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