Poppy Okotcha: ‘Plants taught me about myself’

In her verdant garden in Devon, the model turned gardener talks about decay, family roots and living a wilder lifeIt 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.” Continue reading...