About My Little Farm

My love of land goes back a long way. In my twenties I established and ran a hundred-acre olive and lavender farm outside of Cape Town - big skies, fragrant rows, the particular satisfaction of tending land and watching it respond. It planted something in me that never quite left.

In the years that followed I became a nutritional therapist and owned a health shop, I spent many years helping people understand how to nourish themselves - how the food they chose to eat could heal them, how nature and wellbeing are inseparable. I felt a growing sense of disconnect between people and the planet, between our health and the health of the land we were forgetting to tend.

Then in my mid-50’s I found myself standing in a 3-acre field on the edge of Tregony, gateway to Cornwall’s Roseland Peninsula.

It was January. The ground was newly planted - dark soil threaded with the first pale green of new growth. Two of the hedges had been cut back hard, and the field felt exposed, bare.

And yet there were trees in every hedgerow, standing quietly. And the land had a raw wintery beauty but the field felt empty in a way that went beyond winter, it felt forgotten.

I stood there and had a quiet knowing, this field needed to come back to life. And it needed to be shared, with other people, and with the wildlife that had quietly disappeared from so much of our farmed landscape.

I have a great fondness for house sparrows, their communal chatter and cheeky confidence, a bird that belongs to farmland. But sparrows are in decline, a staggering 22 million lost in my lifetime. For a flock of sparrows to flourish they need thick hedges to provide them with protection, taking food from hedge and field. I hope that one day a flock of sparrows will make Earthsong their home again.