Regenerative grower and horticulturist, Poppy Okotcha grows a better world as she gardens through the ever-changing seasons.
In this wild-hearted, deeply moving book, we see how our relationship with nature has been eroded, just like the soil, right down to the roots of our ancestral spiritual beliefs and traditions.
Reconnecting with the cosmologies of her Nigerian and English heritage, Okotcha shares nature-based stories from Odinala — the traditional belief system of the Igbo people — as well as folktales from the Wheel of the Year — a neo-pagan calendar of seasonal festivals drawn from the peoples of Northern Europe.
Showing us how to regrow our nature connection and find a sense of belonging in the natural world, Okotcha begins in autumn — a time when leaves return their nutrients to the soil — and moves through the garden’s year, from winter’s restorative powers, to late winter/early spring’s time of preparation, spring’s renewal, and summer’s actualisation and ripening, offering us helpful tips, guidelines, and recipes along the way, such as how to make an elderberry syrup, a pond, and a one-pot mini food forest.
Okotcha tells stories of the gardens that have grown her, and it is these personal tales of happiness, heartbreak, and hope that make this book blossom with vibrancy, as she intertwines the seasons of her life with the seasons of the year.
Traveling through the gardens of her childhood, we begin in the urban expanse of London, moving on to a plum-filled South African garden, returning to Wiltshire, England and her Mum’s vegetable patch which reinvigorated her after a challenging time. We visit, too, the gardens of Okotcha’s adulthood, from a floating canal boat ‘garden’ to her biodiverse garden at home in Devon.
To Okotcha, a garden is an ark, a playground, and a sacred, healing space — but it is also a political one. Gardening and fostering a personal relationship with the land not only brings wellbeing but can also be a form of activism.
Growing and having access to healthy food is a human right, and caring for people and planet is a vital and empowering act. Government-funded community gardens, garden shares, and growing groups, writes Okotcha, could transform our connection to nature and each other.
To live, garden, and grow not only sustainably but regeneratively, Okotcha teaches us that rest, care, and reciprocity must be built into our systems, so that we can go beyond maintenance and instead actively heal and regrow.
With the fast-paced freneticism of modern life that pushes productivity and profit, rest has become radical, but regeneration is impossible without it — and key to regeneration is the humble compost heap. Taking a deep-dive into the reef-like ecosystem of compost, we discover how it could be part of the solution to climate change, wastefulness, and pollution.
This eye-opening, vivid, and imaginative book is perfect for gardeners and growers, for lovers of nature and folktales, and anyone who wishes to grow a world with reciprocity, responsibility, and regeneration — or the principles of the compost heap, which Okotcha calls ‘heaplore’ — at its heart.
A Wilder Way: How Gardens Grow Us (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) by Poppy Okotcha. Review by R. B. L. Robinson.
