On a busy street in a small town in south Devon, there’s a secret door. I tentatively open it, head into what feels like a tunnel and then up some steps… into a pocket of magic. It’s an urban garden and yet its soft lines and naturally blurred edges are instantly calming. The owner, gardener and author Poppy Okotcha, greets me and I ask her for a tour.
“At the very end, we’ve got four apple trees and a crab apple, and that’s where the chickens live, and the compost heap. Then there are the vegetable patches, where there are various perennial and annual vegetables. There’s a little greenhouse, and a haphazard patio-ish area with gaps between the pavers so that plants can grow. Right now, there are dandelions, but in the summer there’s marjoram and lemon balm and even some yarrow growing in the gaps.
“Then there is the final portion of the garden, which was full of edible medicinal perennials, but this year, I cleared it with the help of my mum and we’ve seeded it with a meadow mix. And that’s because I’ve got a little boy and I need somewhere for him to play.”
I’m enchanted by how the garden character evolves every few paces, as if I’m moving from room to room. I’m meeting Poppy to record a BBC Countryfile Magazine Plodcast episode and hear both her philosophy of gardening and how she turned her back on a prestigious career to spend her life with her fingers in the soil. For Poppy was, until recently, a top fashion model, jetting from Milan to New York and all the runways between.
“I came into gardening as I was looking for something that was both good for me, for the planet and for other people. I’ve come to understand more and more that a lot of our struggles at this time are related to our broken relationship with land and nature, or the living world, as I refer to it in the book [A Wilder Way]. So I look at how the garden can be a space of care and wellbeing – not only for the gardener, but all the other lives that interact with it.”
Hoverflies pause like miniature helicopters inspecting us and a queen bumblebee blunders by, ensuring her buzzing is recorded for posterity.
Regenerative gardening
Poppy continues, explaining her approach to ‘ecological’ or ‘regenerative’ gardening: “So I consider where seed comes from and the other resources that move through this garden. I get a lot of things secondhand. I focus a lot on biodiversity and try to create an environment that other lives can enjoy as well as humans. I try to grow food here and use water responsibly. And I also focus a lot on soil health because ultimately that’s what underpins an organic garden.”
There’s a gentle certainty in her voice that seems to affirm her career choice. Poppy’s disentangling from the world of fashion was a gradual process. “I was working progressively more and more with fast-fashion brands. The culture of extraction wasn’t just causing unwellness in my body and my mind, I could see it wasn’t good for the other people who were in the industry, from the photographers to the set designers through to the garment makers and the farmers. I thought if I’m struggling in my high up, fairly protected role, how the hell are people at the bottom of the chain faring?”
Leaving the runway
“One of the big moments of direction change came when I was at New York Fashion Week. A big-name casting director had requested for me to come to a casting, where they decide whether they want you in their show. It would have been huge for my career but she asked me to come at midnight. I got a call from my agent saying ‘go, go, go’. But I was in bed and I didn’t go. They kept calling me the next day saying ‘did you not go to that casting?’ And I just stopped replying to their messages. It was liberating.”
Alongside modelling work, Poppy started gardening courses with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) while living on a boat in London. Although she grew herbs on her boat, Poppy got involved with various community gardens around London. “I had my social media page and I started sharing more about the garden stuff and sustainability because a lot of it was tied into what I was learning.” Around this time, she had her first TV appearance on BBC’s Gardeners’ World, extolling the power of community growing and she started writing newspaper articles. The modelling retreated.
“Community gardens in a city are particularly exciting because you can have such a melting pot of different cultures and ways of growing. You share the space and you grow something beautiful together. It can be an orchard, a children’s garden or herb garden. Hackney Herbal is an amazing example. They’ve got a little patch but they run workshops, offer traineeships and more. And they run on organic and regenerative principles.”
Community gardening
Poppy has continued this involvement with community gardens since moving to Devon. I ask her why she made the break from London.
“We were looking for a change and my partner is from this area. It was also clear that there is just so much going on here – so many people with knowledge and with this drive to change things for the better. It chimed with what I was learning: permaculture and regenerative gardening with the emphasis on nature and community.”
For Poppy, community is part of the rebuilding of connection with nature and landscape. “We’ve got a very long, deep history of disconnect from the land and one another. The Industrial Revolution was born in Britain and we had enclosures prior to that. These were a severing of connection to land and nature and a sort of funnelling and streamlining of our lives. It’s meant that we’ve lost a lot of the rituals and traditions and valuable elements of spirituality and religion that used to be free and accessible in our communities, but now are monetised. You want to feel well these days? You’ve got to go on an expensive retreat.
“Rituals provide this. Ritual is actually a series of activities which don’t necessarily seem to be connected but give people purpose. And they provide connection. They’re really valuable. Through history we absolutely love ritual and it gives so much meaning to life.”
In her book, Poppy draws on the Wheel of the Year, the eight festivals of Celtic tradition, and the cosmology and belief system called Odinala from her own Nigerian heritage. “It’s about our relationship with the living world. In it, there’s a veneration not only of nature but of gods and goddesses tied with our world, as so many indigenous faiths are.”
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I ask whether she performs rituals within her own garden, but she laughs. “I really wanted to weave it into my growing practice, but on my own it felt forced and awkward. My real rituals are things that I naturally repeat year on year. Such as sowing the broad beans or clearing the woody perennial growth and chipping it to make paths. These are my rituals to mark the movement of time.”
The untidy garden
Rhythms and rituals are important in the life of a contented grower but I wanted to learn more of Poppy’s tips for a natural, healthy garden. “Don’t weed everything and just stop spraying chemicals,” she says. “Interacting with a garden in a way that’s good for it is almost always good for the person. Do a little bit of the garden at a time. For example, maybe do ‘No-mow May’ and see how you feel about it rather than just letting things go completely wild.
“If you’re growing food, grow a range of crops, then you’re getting a plant-rich diverse diet that is absolutely essential for our gut health. Soil health is vital – treat it carefully. Don’t over-dig it. Feed it with compost. Good soil makes for healthy plants and that reduces the challenges in a garden. But engaging with soil is good for us because it inoculates us with a whole range of microbes. Getting your fingers in the soil – you breathe it in, it gets on to your fingernails, you end up ingesting some of it because it’s on your hands. So that’s good for your immune system.”
With so much to gain for gardening positively with soil and nature, I ask Poppy why so many people have become disconnected, even when they own large gardens. I mention the culture of neat and tidy as well as the use of artificial grass. “I think that our gardens have in a way become like an extension of our houses, like our indoor environment. We’re spending more and more time indoors and I think that leads to discomfort with the unruliness and wildness of a living landscape. A garden has a will of its own; you’re interacting with many different life forms and I think that there’s a discomfort in that.”
That certainly chimes with many gardeners I’ve spoken to who fear untidiness and spend much effort, machinery and chemicals on keeping nature at bay and then, strangely, spending very little time in their well-ordered yards. I look at Poppy’s patch, with its primrose-studded meadowy corners and ‘unruly’ borders and it feels welcoming, at ease with the world and full of life.
People strive so hard for a mythical happiness, yet Poppy’s way to true contentment is a blend of community, nature, ritual and literally getting your hands dirty. This feels right.
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Top image: Poppy Okotcha. Credit: Justin Foulkes
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