It is not by design that I have come to meet the Devon-based ecological gardener Poppy Okotcha on the spring equinox, when day and night are equally balanced. It feels fitting. In her new book, A Wilder Way: How Gardens Grow Us, Okotcha describes how it is now that she rids her garden of last year’s old branches to make way for new growth. “Clearing the lot is a springtime ritual,” she writes, “it feels like shaking off a heavy winter coat.” Okotcha sees the garden as “a kind of guru”, and one of its lessons has been the importance of things breaking down. “A really valuable takeaway from engaging with living landscapes is the idea that decay – or an ending – is required for newness,” she tells me. “I like to think of endings as beginnings.” While the idea of a horticultural life cycle isn’t new, Okotcha’s equal appreciation for every stage of it, and the parallels she draws between gardens and the human condition, feels fresh.
Born to a Nigerian father and white British mother, Okotcha was brought up between the English countryside and South Africa, where her family relocated for six years when she was five. She describes the many gardens she grew up with, from her grandmother’s “magic-filled plot” in Wiltshire to the “sweet fruits and sunshine” of various gardens in Johannesburg, and several more, rather wilder spaces tended by her mum after her parents’ divorce and return to the UK. In South Africa, Okotcha and her siblings attended a Steiner school where she “learned about compost and played in the dust”, a far cry from the mainstream education she returned to in Britain. Through it all, the gardens, albeit changing, were a constant. And realising how the effort of transforming a garden healed her mother after divorce was, says Okotcha, a defining moment, “Seeing her love for the flowers and how they loved her in return.”
As the book’s title suggests, growing things – first in pots on a London houseboat, now in a small garden in Totnes that she shares with her husband, Toby, and their one-year-old boy, Sonny – has been transformative for her. Her book charts her garden’s progress over the course of a calendar year. Month by month, we learn not just what Okotcha is sewing or tending, harvesting or making, but how that process maps to her emotions and how illuminating it can be. She describes, for example, her grief when her mother-in-law, Meg, died in autumn 2020, during a week that she had been due to plant some broad beans. At first, she says, it was “confronting that the world carried on, that the garden continued to need my attention”, but she went ahead and planted the beans, which became “proof that dull sorrow sown can become something beautiful.” Now, sowing broad beans each year is her “own form of prayer” to Meg.
We wander around the garden drinking cleavers water, a refreshing infusion of cleavers, aka sticky willy (an annual weed for which I’d never known a name, let alone a delicious use), which gives the water a hint of hedgerow and cucumber. Okotcha espouses the “no dig” method of gardening, emulating a wild landscape in which organic matter falls, rots and becomes incorporated with the soil “by life, mostly earthworms, rather than digging”. She points out the fledgling foxgloves, budding yarrow, creeping buttercups at the beds’ edges; she shows me the tiny pond, dug to support wildlife and biodiversity in the garden, with its marsh marigold and water mint; she tells me about the small area of lawn which, only yesterday, she strewed with a mix of seeds that would transform it into a meadow play space for her crawling son; she shows me the veg patch.
Horticulturists and cooks refer to the first few months of the year as “the hungry gap”, when the earth is at its least productive, but the promise of food is everywhere in Okotcha’s small garden. Elephant garlic, caned raspberry plants, a gnarled apple tree, perennial kale and various salad leaves in their infancy, all covered with jam jars to protect them from the garden’s population of hungry slugs and snails. Next week she is sowing her tomatoes, spinach and herbs like, coriander and parsley.
It was the potential for growing nutrient-dense food of her own that re-engaged Okotcha with gardening as an adult. But to understand her journey to becoming the horticulturally trained woman wearing muddy-kneed dungarees and drinking nettle tea in front of me now (we have graduated from one foraged beverage to another) is to understand the fallout of a modelling career she chose over the offer of a place to read philosophy at the University of Manchester.
Okotcha had “an obsession” with going back to South Africa, she says, and with that in mind, hatched a plan to save money from modelling jobs to fly there once she’d finished school. At first, she explains that modelling gave her a boost. “I grew up in a really white area in the countryside,” she says, “and it was an environment that valued a Eurocentric beauty standard. There was something about being picked for modelling jobs that fed a part of me…” After a childhood in braids, she had grown a full afro and remembers being in New York and becoming aware of the politics of her hair. “I’d be walking down the street and hear, ‘Yes, sistah!’” she says, “and, maybe it was growing up with my white mum, but I realised my hair meant so much more than I had understood.”
As a model, Okotcha achieved a level of success which she credits with enabling the change of career that would follow. She steadily became disillusioned with, “hoodwinked by”, the whole business of fashion, from feeling used as a Black token by brands for visibility (“My face hid the truth that a Brown woman had been exploited to make those clothes I posed in”) to the myriad ways that people and the planet had been exploited for capital gain. “I couldn’t help but see the connections between the global fashion complex and industrial farming,” she writes. “Everything – all the resources required to make the aeroplanes, clothes, laptops, shoes, food – came from the earth.” Okotcha began to reject the fashion industry in mind, but also in body; she was exhausted, travelling across time zones regularly, and experiencing stomach problems, with terrible pain that lasted for days at a time. “What I was doing was not only self-harm, it was ecocide,” she says in her book.
“I’d grown up in South Africa during apartheid and the reason I wanted to study philosophy in the first place was to contribute to the world in a positive way,” she tells me. “And I felt I wasn’t doing that. That feeling grew and grew as I was starting to get sick.” She remembers telling her Nigerian grandmother, who lives in London, about how she was feeling. “‘Ginikanwa,’ she said to me, which is my Igbo name, it’s what all my Nigerian family calls me, ‘life’s about service.’” I ask Okotcha what she thinks her grandmother meant by this.
“I think she meant giving without expectation of return,” she says. “In Weird [Western educated industrialised rich democratic] countries, we think of self-care as bubble baths and nature walks, but if everyone’s giving to one another, then taking care of others becomes a good way of taking care of oneself.” It is this notion which Okotcha has channelled into growing – she nurtures her garden, and it nurtures her back. “The culture I grow my garden in may not value rest,” she writes, “but the culture the garden has grown in me worships it. Rest is radical because it allows life to regenerate.”
Having been told that she had IBS – a maddeningly unspecific diagnosis without a clear treatment pathway – Okotcha took matters into her own hands. “I went on a ‘healing journey,’” she laughs. She started to address her stomach issues with cooking and read increasingly about produce: how the nutrient density of food had dropped over the decades and how regeneratively farmed, organic ingredients augmented gut health while offering an alternative to the damage done by conventional, monocultural farming.
Aware of its anti-inflammatory properties, Okotcha first set out to grow ginger. She and Toby were living in London on a houseboat, so she planted a shop-bought piece of root in a pot, kept it warm inside, and it sprouted. “I loved that plant so much,” she says wistfully, before telling me that, one day on a whim, she gave it some supermarket-bought plant food, “I didn’t really read the instructions, I watered it on to the plant and it killed it. And I was like, wait, what?” Too much synthetic fertiliser can kill a plant – not that Okotcha would use any, ever, nowadays – “but it took me on a journey of wanting to understand how to grow it properly and doing that in tandem with understanding how to look after my body properly.”
Through growing, Okotcha has also learned about her heritage, and often embeds her ideas in folklore, from the Celtic worldview of endings as beginnings (her gardening year, and the book, begins in October, as autumn segues into winter) to Odinala, the Igbo cultural belief system that venerates nature – “the great teacher,” writes Okotcha. Was this not something she was aware of through her father? They’ve had a fractured relationship, she says, but also, he didn’t grow up with these spiritual ideas “because there was definitely an established sense of needing to be Christian to do well with the British. But as I started researching my book and asking my dad about things, I realised he knows more than I thought. He just doesn’t value it in the same way.” She describes her tears on reading about aspects of Igbo spiritualism, like Odinala for the first time as “the surprise of being reunited in my late 20s with something I didn’t know I had lost.”
Knowing a place deeply is a key tenet of A Wilder Way, inspired partly by the disconnect between Okotcha and her Nigerian heritage, and largely down to becoming a mother to Sonny in spring 2024. Her route to this kind of knowing is “gentle and organic observation” afforded by time, watching the seasons, plants, fruits and wildlife ebb and flow around the place she calls home. This was what she set out to do in Totnes, the famously alternative Devon town in which Toby grew up, where the air smells always of old-school health food shop and, around the spring equinox, wild garlic, which populates verges and fecund, hedgy thresholds between fields. She tells me that the proliferation of wild garlic was a reason for moving here, although it’s been a trade-off, she says, because Devon blackberries are just terrible. “I may never know the mango-tree-lined roads my grandma knew, but I bloody well will know this Devon hedgerow with its nettles that scratch and welt my legs and these berryless brambles that rip my clothes to shreds,” she writes.
Okotcha straps Sonny to her back and walks me to Totnes station via a hillside where we can pick wild garlic. She tells me she sometimes struggles to explain what she does for a living, especially to her Nigerian grandmother. “I make content about gardening and I write and talk about it,” she says humbly, but as I sit on a sunlight-filled train, a whiff of wild garlic emanating from my bag, I think about something else she said: “Remembering that we are nature is not a passive act.” A Wilder Way reminds us of everything we can do, year-round, in gardens big or small or just in pots, to be in and of nature, actively.
Rewilding your plot
How to get started: an extract from Poppy’s new book
In the UK, 87% of us have access to a garden and those gardens cover a vast area. They offer a patchwork quilt of opportunity for grassroots action, both in cultivating human connection with land and life and as a safe haven for wildlife, too.
There is no single recipe for cultivating biodiversity and health in the garden. There are too many variables to ever create a set of step-by-step guidelines.
However, I can suggest a number of practical things we can all do in our gardens, which enough trustworthy land lovers have recommended that I consider them in the category of “general wisdom”. Bear in mind, though, that this wisdom might not apply to your particular plot of land and the life that engages with it. Working with a growing space requires what it says on the tin: working with.
Working effectively to regenerate the land and complex living ecosystems requires a deep understanding of how local circumstances dance with “guidelines”. It’s a dance whose steps I am still learning. Guidance helps, but never let general advice override what your garden may be trying to tell you or you risk standardising biodiversity (a strange oxymoron).
Create and allow as many niches for diverse life as possible. Often the most opportunities for life are the margins, the points at which two different features overlap. For example, the shallows and edges of a pond, or the perimeter of a woodland area. The greater variety of boundaries the better.
Go organic in the garden and, if you can, in everyday life, too. Chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers have a detrimental impact on the health of the ecosystem, which includes us. Growing organically helps to create a safe space for the creatures who visit it.
Grow lots of different common native plants and wildflowers. All life needs water. Create a pond. It doesn’t have to be huge and it doesn’t even have to be dug into the ground. Even a shallow tray of water pebbles or gravel offers a welcome watering stop for bees. Take a lenient approach to native weeds, such as nettles, dandelions, brambles, docks and ragwort. These plants reliably support so much life, since they usually grow vigorously.
Create piles of logs, bricks or rocks. These provide homes and forage for all sorts of creatures, from toads and hedgehogs to slow worms and woodlice. Plant hedges and shrubs with berries for birds. Elder and rowan trees, and the guelder-rose shrub will feed us, the birds and pollinators. Make and use compost. Ensure wildlife can move between your garden and the next by creating access points in any barriers… or, if you get on with your neighbours, take down the fence altogether!
If you have a lawn, mow less often. Lawns can offer important habitat and nectar. The charity Plantlife recommends leaving some patches uncut and others mown monthly or quarterly to create a diverse habitat and opportunities for different grasses, flowers and the creatures that depend on them. Participating in “No-Mow May” alone can allow plants to provide up to 10 times more nectar to support pollinators.
Grow some of your own food and support local growers who support healthy ecosystems. Lastly, support groups pushing for biodiversity-friendly legislation.
A Wilder Way: How Gardens Grow Us by Poppy Okotcha (Bloomsbury, £18.99) will be published on 24 April. Buy a copy from guardianbookshop.com at £17.09
