The Apothecary

The apothecary garden

From broken ground to the edge of the sea

My work with apothecary gardening began fourteen years ago, when my son and I started to grow a garden on broken ground. A former industrial brownfield site, on the social housing estate where we lived, we created our first garden among rubble and compacted soil. With no money, we used what we could recycle from the rubbish lying around, and the plants others threw out or labelled weeds. As we discovered their stories, healing properties and plant-lore, the garden became more than a garden. It became a place of healing for us both through years marked by grief and caregiving. Our first apothecary garden was born; one that gave shelter and tended to both the humans and wildlife that made it their home. That early garden was a place of necessity as much as nurture, where tending plants became a way of holding stead to the beauty that could grow from broken ground.

Years later, that practice has taken root again in a very different landscape. In 2022, my husband, son and I left everything we knew and moved to Orkney in the Autumn of 2022, buying our first ever home on the island of South Ronaldsay. Uprooted and learning to navigate the changes in my life, it was to the garden and wild plants that grew around that I returned. To borrow from Virginia Woolf, this little 9 square metres of growing ground was the first ever 'garden one's own', not controlled by the remits of landlords or social housing rules.

Beginning with a small, muddy scrap of backyard and a handful of plug plants and seeds rescued from our former home before we left, this space has transformed into my apothecary garden by the sea, guided by tides, weather, and the wild plants that thrive here. In its third year, it now offers sanctuary and healing to all who live and visit.

But it doesn't stop there! In our first year in Orkney, my son and I were gifted another garden on loan, overgrown but offering promise. Sitting in the centre of our village, we are slowly nurturing this into another healing space — this time a woodland apothecary, giving shelter to the saplings my son grew as a child and brought with him in the move.

And this year sees the small seeds of a very big adventure! Recently selected as one of the Island Start-Ups on the Accelerator Programme with Robert Gordon University, I am working towards setting up The Orkney Apothecary — a woman-led sustainable project that aims to create positive change, one small wild seed at a time. Through regenerative growing, small-batch herbal products, and creative learning, it seeks to reconnect people with land, plants, and everyday practices of creative nurture and self care, supporting wellbeing while nurturing community, creativity and biodiversity. Rooted in my own personal experience, it is still at the seed stage but I am very excited to see where it will grow.