How Gardens Grow Us with Poppy Okotcha
- Jennifer Wat
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
23rd April 2025, Kiln Theatre
‘Engaging with a garden is entering a cycle of exchange, we support the land and the land supports us’1.
How do gardens guide and nurture us, as we tend to them? How do they show us, tangibly, the kindness and care that we are capable of giving and receiving? In April, we had the pleasure of hearing from Poppy Okotcha at Kiln Theatre on the radical act of growing towards a better world – one in which there is much magic and wildness to be found.
‘We are in need of stories that remind us of the magic of being humans who can be kind, responsible, and collaborative.’
Born and raised in North London, Poppy takes us through the many places she has called home. From living in South Africa, the English countryside in Wiltshire, a houseboat, and her family home now in Devon – every chapter is defined not by the interiors of a house, but the nature it is immersed in, opening up new opportunities to grow in pots to larger allotments and community gardens.
Several factors propelled Poppy into the world of horticulture and regenerative growing. Confronted with change, growing brought stillness. It was a way of putting down new roots. Beneath the idyllic sprawling fields of wheat in the countryside where she lived, were also borders of monoculture and large scale industrial farms with wildlife and biodiversity desperately in decline. In the face of industrial powers, growing in one’s garden and with the wider community became a grassroots solution to producing food in healthier, more sustainable ways.
After discovering she had IBS, it was a way of taking seriously the impact of food, how it is produced, on our gut health. It should come as no surprise that our health is dependent on the health of our soils. Modern industrial agriculture, as opposed to regenerative farming practices, rely on intensive methods such as monocropping and the use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides – depleting the soil of its health, and thus the food we eat of its nutrients2.
‘Gardens offer us a blueprint for how to live ecologically’.
Whilst gardening and growing can start from a point of wanting to be self-sufficient, the reality is that we have and will always rely on others; on networks of people with different skills and abilities, finding ways of achieving things together. Growing gives rise to all kinds of kindness that might include gift giving, mutual aid, or the opportunity to connect with one another. This natural abundance is found everywhere in the living world where crops are naturally abundant with seeds to be saved and shared; and in the wood-wide web, plants and trees signal to one another through an underground network of fungi, roots, and bacteria to call on support from the wider system.
Lastly, Poppy reminds us that gardening and growing is ‘fertile ground for stronger political movements’. Not only does it create the time for our minds to rest and attention spans to recover, but it is a way to pass on skills and a culture of care across different generations. It creates spaces to connect with people we wouldn’t otherwise meet or form close bonds with. Conversations that might otherwise be uncomfortable or entirely avoided become somewhat easier to have in a therapeutic space, over a shared activity.
‘As gardeners, we get to be observers again, where we can slow down and discover new things’.
There’s a noticeable shift in how people are beginning to see gardens and what they might expect from them. Slowly, we are moving from neat borders into something wilder and more biodiverse as concerns for the climate crisis grow. From creating B-lines for bees and butterflies through wildflower paths or supporting campaigns such as ‘No Mow May’3 and social enterprises such as Grow London4, there is a huge potential to have more natural spaces that meet all out needs around food, education, beauty, leisure, and a healthy ecosystem. If dominant narratives around the separateness of humans and nature have created a prison through which we understand the world and our place in it, then the act of growing becomes a tangible way of putting circularity and resistance into practice.
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