FULL OF WONDER

I originally sat down to write a single piece about WONDER GARDEN, but very quickly realised that the story behind it stretched far beyond a collection of teas, tinctures and botanical rituals and into something much deeper about Nature, wonder, place, and the purpose of the collection. So this is the first in a short series of reflections on how a garden in Cornwall slowly transformed the way we thought about beauty, health, business and our relationship with the living world itself.

Or perhaps more simply: how Nature became our teacher.

It all began in a nine-acre garden in Cornwall seven years ago, which, considering that only a year earlier, my husband Javvy and I had been attempting to grow herbs in what could generously be described as a postage-stamp-sized backyard in Hackney, still gives me goosebumps.

This chapter of our lives, where we would unexpectedly become custodians of the magical Trematon Castle estate, was never remotely imagined. But sometimes life seems to have far better plans for you than your wildest dreams.

I’ll leave the full strange and winding story of how we found our way there for In the Company of Nature my book published by Chelsea Green this June - but the short version is that there was an undeniable calling to the place - a sequence of events and uncanny synchronicities that slowly made me, as someone who has always considered myself relatively rational, to stop believing in coincidences altogether.

At first there were no grand plans for the garden whatsoever. 

Without a manual, we felt more like first-time parents unexpectedly handed a newborn baby and sent home without instructions, with the primary objective simply being to keep it alive. 

Although when I say “we”, I really mean myself. Javvy, had always been a plant whisperer, lugging them faithfully from flat-share to flat-share long before we’d ever met, his first real loves and dependants before anything else. But this was suddenly plant care on a seismic scale; not a few pots balanced on East London windowsills, but nine acres of gardens, woodland, wildflowers and ecosystems, all with rhythms and needs and relationships far beyond anything we remotely understood at the time.

And yet there was something instinctive about it too. Perhaps because we are creatures of Nature ourselves, and not nearly as separate from these living systems as modern life leads us to believe. My family was tending to the land just two generations ago. Much like how a new mother instinctively knows how to hold a newborn baby despite never having done it before, there was an innate intelligence on how to care, a visceral memory muscle waiting to be flexed again.

So, we decided to follow that instinct. Our first hunch was to let Nature be Nature and stop interfering so much. Out went the roundup, pesticides and chemical interventions, because it felt increasingly wrong to believe that systems which had been evolving, adapting and refining themselves for billions of years required us to aggressively dominate them into health. Instead, we focused on creating the conditions for flourishing and then allowing Nature to do what Nature has always done remarkably well when given the chance.

And slowly slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the garden began responding. Within a year the first signs of change were visible in the soil itself, which gradually became darker, visibly more alive and suddenly threaded with worms, fungi and the rich, almost primal scent of the earth beginning to regenerate itself again. Foxgloves, oxeye daisies and self-seeded wildflowers started appearing in places we had never planted them. I remember the reports of the dramatic decline of butterfly sightings in the news that summer, raising alarm bells for biodiversity. And yet, at Trematon, here we were witnessing a reverse trend. 

It seemed that all that was needed were the right conditions to thrive, and life would return in its abundance.

The second year was marked by lockdown. We found ourselves grounded in more ways than one. No longer splitting the working week between London and Cornwall a foot in each world, this was an opportunity to really immerse ourselves in the garden. We bedded in feeling so lucky (and a sense of lingering guilt), as many people were cut off from what suddenly felt less like a luxury and more like a basic human need and birthright altogether.

With less distractions we started to really pay attention and truly notice Nature's cycles and shifts. I started to track the seasons more attentively than ever before, clinging to sight of the first January snowdrops as symbols of hope that life was returning. Without alarm clocks or rigid schedules, our family could surrender to our circadian rhythms, waking with the light; our bodies remembering a more natural tempo that we had long been pushing against

One of the most moving and unexpected outcomes of being collectively grounded was that it sparked a deep awakening in how we saw the world, and our place within it. 

A kind of shared epiphany about the value we place on Nature. We had been so grossly overlooking the miracle of life until  there were limitations placed on our access and time with Nature. And yet, in that great collective exhale from life as we knew it, a remembering began to flicker;  a sense that we were not separate, but part of something vast, intelligent and whole that we are meant to live in tune with.

The strange thing about paying close attention to the natural world is that the seemingly ordinary starts to reveal itself as extraordinary. 

The more I observed the cycles and seasons, the more I found myself awestruck by the sheer improbability of it all: that for all we currently know, life, in all its splendour and complexity, may only have happened here on Earth, and that across the vast silence of the universe, this blue-green planet may be the single flicker of consciousness capable of contemplating itself at all.

Because if this really is the only place where life has emerged, where trees and birdsong and consciousness and love exist, then the weight of our responsibility toward the living world suddenly feels immense. It becomes impossible not to question the extraordinary arrogance with which humanity has so often behaved toward the very systems sustaining our existence. Sometimes it genuinely makes me want to shout about our privilege of being alive from rooftops and want  to shake people awake to the reality that we could destroy, in only a few short centuries, something the universe has spent billions of years creating.

And perhaps that is ultimately what began changing at Trematon too.

Once you truly allow yourself to feel the miracle of life properly, care stops feeling like obligation and starts feeling instinctive.

Now, for anyone who remotely knows House of Hackney, you’ll know that Mother Nature has always played a major role within our design world as our greatest muse, as we *try* to emulate her prints and palette and the exquisite knack she has for putting it all together with a level of wild harmony that no human designer could ever truly reach.

But during this time at Trematon, what began initially as aesthetic inspiration slowly evolved into something much deeper.Nature stopped feeling decorative and skin deep, something merely surrounding life, and started revealing itself as the very system life emerges from and depends upon. It became less a backdrop to our existence, and more a teacher showing us by example how to live in greater relationship, rhythm and reciprocity with the living world around us.

By the third year at Trematon, the garden - and us too - had entered an even deeper phase of relationship and understanding. Javvy immersed himself as a student of permaculture and biodynamic growing at the Apricot Centre in Totnes, while our regenerative farming neighbours Tim and Claire started to introduce us to radically different ways of thinking about land, food, soil and stewardship.

The more we learnt, the more aware we became of what we ourselves were consuming and putting on our skin. 

We began to trace the hidden journey of food and beauty backwards through chemicals, monocultures, animal-testing, depleted soil systems and industrial agriculture, and realised how disconnected so much of modern consumption had become from the gifts that Nature provides.

I had recently quit coffee, my nervous system and adrenals increasingly too sensitive for the highs and crashes. It started to feel important nutritionally and energetically to ingest something the land was already so generously offering us, as though these plants were not random at all, but seasonal companions quietly arriving exactly when the body needed their particular form of support.

And every morning I started chucking wild nettle, rosemary and lemon balm into boiling water, creating makeshift herbal infusions rich in minerals, antioxidants and nervous-system support, and dropping home-made rosemary and lavender infused organic oil into my evening bath, the scent of the garden itself filling the house. For me, although they undoubtedly did me good, these small rituals were less about “wellness” and much more about being in relationship with the land (and I trusted the intelligence of the garden far more than any trend, algorithm or influencer claiming to know what the body needed). 

There was something deeply reassuring in the idea that Nature had already spent billions of years evolving, and that perhaps the seasonal remedies appearing around us each year were not random at all, but part of a much older conversation between humans and the living world that modern life had simply interrupted.

We became fascinated by how accessible this kind of wellbeing actually was too, because so much of what genuinely nourished us seemed to be growing freely all around us; nettles rich in iron and minerals, rosemary stimulating circulation and cognition, cleavers supporting lymphatic drainage, plants dismissed by many as weeds quietly revealing themselves instead as medicine.

Wanting to freely share some of this wonder and benefits with the House of Hackney community, I discovered a Cornish herbalist called Harriet Coleman and invited her to Trematon to create some simple recipes and films with us exploring the medicinal intelligence of plants and seasonal living. We had never actually met Harriet before, but there was an instant bond between us. A deeply respected herbalist trained under the legendary Anne McIntyre (often described as the mother of modern herbal medicine in the UK), Harriet possessed a rare ability to make ancient plant wisdom feel accessible, generously sharing her knowledge as we spent days experimenting in the kitchen with herbal infusions, tinctures, oils and soups. She taught us how cleavers - those sticky weeds most of us absentmindedly pull from our clothes during walks - act as one of Nature’s great lymphatic cleansers and water purifiers, how hawthorn supports the heart emotionally as much as physically, and what would become the foundational principle of our apothecary collection WONDER GARDEN - how herbs emerge seasonally in rhythm with precisely what the body requires at different points in the year. Slowly the boundaries between garden, kitchen, pharmacy and ritual began to dissolve for us.

And so, when spring arrived in 2022, and the annual moment came to decide what to plant in the freshly cleared vegetable garden, there was suddenly no real question about it at all.

We would plant a garden full of wonder plants instead.

It would take 4 years of growing, tasting, testing and honing, but Trematon became the physical birthplace of WONDER GARDEN. The first seeds were planted long before we consciously named it, because what was really taking root during those early years at Trematon was not simply a herb garden or a future collection, but an entirely different way of seeing the world.

One rooted in wonder, reciprocity, relationship and the growing realisation that perhaps the remedies we are searching for have been surrounding us all along.