About me.

As a gardener, I focus on working in harmony with our natural world. My interest in ecology and concern over the degradation of our living world, food & social systems very much shape my practices and ideas. People are as much a part of a garden ecosystem as any of the other life found there and my aim is to help people develop and maintain gardens where all life can flourish and be joyful.

As my interest in gardening has developed and grown in recent years, I have been very fortunate to be able to grow and experiment in my parent’s back garden in Leytonstone. Whilst my skills and existing knowledge have been fed by experience of being and working in numerous different spaces, the opportunity to play in and observe a green space on my back doorstep (crucially, one that I have had some level of freedom to develop and grow in) has been invaluable. Building upon my parents garden that has largely been developed for its aesthetic value, I have managed to incorporate other plants and elements that are as useful as they are beautiful. From digging a frog-filled wildlife pond to cultivating a vegetable patch with a mixture of annual and perennial crops, I’ve had the opportunity to explore ways in which to attract and support wildlife in a garden that nourishes us with food, herbs, flowers and pleasure.

Despite growing up playing in the garden and numerous visits to Hollow Ponds as a child, my interest in the garden and the wider living world really developed whilst at university. I graduated in 2018 with a bachelors degree in Zoology and a year of experience at a research station in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Digging ponds as part of a project to study frog behaviour and seeing the resultant influx of life was a great influence on my decision to dig a pond in our back garden - whilst we here in the temperate UK don’t have anywhere near the diversity of amphibian life as tropical Ecuador, our frogs, toads and newts are important nodes within the web of (semi-)aquatic life and are also valuable allies in the garden. With memories of numerous frogs thriving in our garden as a child, it was somewhat alarming to find after digging the pond that only 3 adults found the pond.

Fortunately, with the new pond in place the frogs were able to breed once again and our garden became populated with froglets the size of a fingernail. Another successful breeding year followed. Many of the previous year’s frogs had survived: not quite froglet anymore but, not quite fully grown. The pond was working… The year after surprised me. Believing that I would have to wait three years for the young frogs to mature and start breeding, I was surprised one night in late winter to see the surface of the water writhing with frogs in their amplexus grip surrounded by numerous mounds of eggy jelly emerging from the surface of the water. At last I could feel confident that, at least for now, the frogs on our block would survive for now. The following years have seen repeated spawning each spring and now through the summer months our garden supports an intergenerational population of frogs. However small, my first conservation success!

After university I spent time volunteering and working in the conservation charity sector and furthering my studies with a Certificate in Countryside Management from Capel Manor College. My volunteering journey began at Walthamstow Wetlands and gradually led to a permanent paid position as the Green Gym Project Officer representing The Conservation Volunteers (TCV) in various Waltham Forest parks. Whilst learning a lot about local wildlife conservation and managing volunteer projects over this time, I also learned a lot about the shortcomings of the charity conservation sector - most prominently a lack of resources and ever increasing, often unsustainable workloads where the focus is often far more on quantity over quality. Due to what I felt to be a lack of meaningful care for staff wellbeing and a ‘that’s just the way it is’ attitude that seems to be rife in the sector, I regrettably chose to leave my role with TCV at the beginning of 2022 to pursue further learning and to broaden the scope of my work.

I took the opportunity of time and space to visit the locally famous Organiclea. Having been a part of the Welcome Garden community garden since its establishment in 2020, it was exciting to see a well established growing project with care as a central pillar of their operations. Since joining them as a volunteer I have been fortunate to learn a great deal. Aside from that which I have picked up organically, I’ve also had the opportunity to complete a Level 1 Organic Food Growing course and a Sustainable Maintenance Gardening volunteer placement, the latter of which has very much led me to the work I am doing today and the formation of the Living Gardeners Collective. 

In addition to client-based gardening, over the past year I also have been working as part of Waltham Forest based Community Apothecary. This is another local organisation with land and community care at the centre of the work that we do. My role in the organisation is as a gardener at our Mulberry Close garden in Chingford where we grow medicinal herbs with volunteers, learning about the herbs, how they grow and the benefits that they have to our health. Part of our site is cultivated as a medicinal forest garden. My work here led me to complete The Orchard Project’s Introduction to Community Orcharding course, where I was able to develop my knowledge and skills in fruit tree care and forest garden design.

Amongst my professional work I also support other community gardening projects around the borough. These include co-facilitating sessions at the Welcome Garden in Walthamstow and growing a small scale guerrilla gardening project in my hyperlocal area in Leytonstone.