As someone who moved from London to the country myself, this piece by Jeeva Beckett in today’s newsletter very much resonated, particularly when she talks about the space it creates in your life both internally and externally. The creativity and healing she speaks of I have felt profoundly since gardening became a part of my life, rediscovering my connection with the natural world and putting down roots in the countryside.
It is one reason why it’s even more troubling, and why it must surely compound health and wellbeing inequities, when we realise that not everyone has equal opportunity or access to gardening and gardens, or even to green space.
And the reality is that structural and systemic inequalities disproportionately affects people of colour:
Black people have among the lowest rates of home ownership in the UK. In every socio-economic group and age group, white British households are more likely to own their own homes than all ethnic minority households combined (Gov.uk, Home Ownership report, Feb 2020).
According to Natural England, in the UK, ‘BAME’ communities are 60% less likely to be able to access green space and natural environments than their white counterparts. A high proportion of Black people in the UK (98%) live in urban locations.
A Friends of the Earth report from 2020 on “England’s Green Space Gap” exposed how widespread green space deprivation is and how it’s an issue of racial injustice as well as a concern from a public health perspective. It found that if you are of “BAME” origin you are more than twice as likely as a white person to live in areas in England that are most deprived of green space. It brought together data on public green space, garden space and open access land including mountain, moor, heath, down and common land. Almost 40% of people of BAME backgrounds live in England’s most green space-deprived neighbourhoods, compared to 14% of white people.
As much as I, like Jeeva, am grateful for my garden, am able to nurture my connection to the natural world and appreciate the restorative and healing power it brings, it’s difficult to ignore that structural inequalities create barriers for many to accessing “nature”, gardens or green space.
Much work and major reform is needed if we are to meaningfully address and begin to break down some of the barriers that keep people from connecting with the earth. Shared Assets, Land Workers’ Alliance and LION are a few of the organisations working in the area of land justice in the UK.
The big move, by Jeeva Beckett
So yesterday we finished watching the Hobbit, a far more enjoyable experience than the first time round. Expectations were lower and I had thankfully forgotten most of the film apart from the opening scenes. I like the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Bearing in mind where I live, in a coastal village in Devon, miles away from where I grew up in London, I feel like I am living in Middle Earth. The lonely mountain could be a hill on Dartmoor that looks remote and forbidding. I could easily imagine dragons living beneath the undulating hills surrounding Totnes and Dartington. There are Elvish forests and hidden sea caves close by where groves and rushing streams make me think Peter Jackson made a big mistake. He should have located the films in the West Country. I’ve always gravitated towards the fantasy sections in bookshops and libraries. Ursula Le Guin and the Earthsea trilogy were some of my favourite books growing up in dull, grey London town. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that I live here now.
This is, after all, where the sacred mysteries of Merlin, King Arthur, the Lady of the Lake, Avalon and the Holy Grail originate. I wonder if the movie subconsciously influenced where my husband and I chose to honeymoon (in New Zealand) and where we moved to set up a new life, babe and cat in tow, away from the stresses of modern London life?
The stresses of modern life follow us here too, as we navigate our new and ever-changing roles as bed and breakfast owners, painters and decorators, project-managers, gardeners, parents and self-employed people. And I wonder how our choice of location has come to influence us? It has brought us closer to nature in a palpable way, with forests and rivers close by and with our garden just outside our front door. It’s big and beautiful, our garden. Full of ponds, large, complicated beds, a camellia walk, ha-ha, rose and wisteria arbour, magnolia and mulberry trees and orchards that need attention and nurturing. It is eye-opening, pleasurable and humbling to be part of a garden’s history, knowing that what we plant, grow and maintain today will, we hope, be enjoyed by others later down the line. I like to think that the garden gives pleasure not just to us but to our guests, family, friends and neighbours too.
Chopping back bushes, pruning hydrangea and rose bushes, weeding beds, redistributing compost and tidying up the greenhouse, I am pleased with the skills I am accumulating. With help from our gardener, who comes twice a month, knowledgeable friends, neighbours and books, I’ve learnt much that I can keep and build on. That’s the thing about gardens, you nurture them and they nurture you. They feed you, comfort you, smile at you – the trees, the birds, they sing. I am learning that gardening can be a profoundly healing and creative activity.
I manage a quintessential English cottage garden but the garden has no identity of its own other than what we’ve assigned to it. I especially love the persicaria, camellias and rhododendrons, that I am now learning do not originate from Britain but are from the Himalayas, closer to where my ancestors originate. I now feel that I am surrounded by an international garden with its bold Asian plants and bold, Indian colour, married with the English sensibilities of a country garden. I find myself mentally reassigning it according to my view and new found knowledge, which is global by default.
My parents met in the Far East, conceived me in the Middle East, my ancestry is Tamil (Indian and Sri-Lankan) and I was brought up in the West. I have uprooted myself from the largely cosmopolitan, international upbringing of both my childhood and early adulthood to a provincial village by the coast of South Devon. I am literally living in the-Shire with the Shire-folk, who are still largely oblivious to the goings-on in the rest of Middle-earth (London). It’s both brilliant that I live here and it’s frustrating that there are so few BAME (apologies – a mindless phrase but useful here) people around me. Believe me, I wish there were more. For my sake and for my mixed-race child’s sake. When I was growing up, my dad used to laugh at me for disliking the Indian areas of London, like Tooting, where we would get Indian stuff, eat Dosas and Hoppers and my parents would speak Tamil to the local shopkeepers, petrol station staff, restaurant staff and feel connected to their culture for a bit. Now I make the same pilgrimage too, whenever we are in London, to stock up on Indian stuff, buy Indian sweets and eat at local places that serve Dosas and Hoppers and teach Luke a bit about my side of the family tree.
As we strategically made the changes we needed to make in order to take the well-trodden path of moving out of the city for more space, I realise just how much more space we have created literally internally and externally in our lives. Space that allows for creativity and healing. Space that allows for us and our ideas to grow, like a garden.
I like how there’s always something that needs doing in a garden and how we’ll essentially never be finished with our jobs. I walk past a bed that needs weeding, pruning, clearing, nurturing and I have purpose again. For a bit anyway… until I get tired or realise that there’s washing to unload or a house to hoover. The doing of these profoundly everyday tasks with zeal transforms our lives into more meaningful places to occupy. Those worms and bees are working overtime, aerating the soil and pollinating the flowers and fruit. The plants are trying to get as much sunlight and water as they can to thrive. The rest of the living world has got shit to do as well people. It’s busy.
Thinking about what seeds to plant, preparing the bed, potting up seed, nurturing them and watching them grow into massive tomatoes, corn, squash and beans is a truly rewarding task. A gift that keeps on giving, year after year after year. Producing pickles, chutneys, free produce and flower bouquets for family, friends and neighbours. The stuff of life, the giving and the receiving, the energy exchange. Not to mention how much free food the nature of Britain gives us – wild garlic, nettles, sorrel, blackberries, sloes. I feel so much a part of nature here that I can’t imagine a time when I was so disconnected from her rhythms. A garden can give so much for so little effort and even the effort is no effort at all, once you get stuck into the task at hand.
Gardens allow you to be lazy in winter and harried in spring, perhaps that’s just how I thrive best – under pressure at times and slow and steady at others. What are we, if not a part of nature itself? In trying to separate ourselves from her, is it not we who have sown the seeds of our own discontent? Perhaps only we can free ourselves from our tyranny by falling back in love with nature and therefore, ourselves. Connecting with our more-than-human kin grounds us, gives us purpose, is consistent and as such allows us to navigate an uncertain world with greater ease. And I, for one, am grateful for it.
Jeeva Beckett is a bed and breakfast owner living with her husband, 5-year old son and cat in the South Hams. She is currently studying towards her RHS Level 2 certificate in Practical Horticulture. Her Instagram account is @hooppellstorr, where she often shares stories from the garden, her garden produce, posts about the B&B (Hooppells Torr) and living in Devon.
Jeeva has been paid for this article
Photo credits: Jeeva Beckett