From the vital craft of hedge laying to the intuitive & scientific practice of water divination, the rural landscape is inscribed with knowledge ~ not just ecological, but cultural and ancestral. Gardens and fields, often perceived as ordinary, reveal extraordinary layers of meaning when viewed through the lenses of story, stewardship, and sensory connection.
These are not passive spaces; they are active participants in our lives ~ shaping identity, holding memory and offering resilience in a time of environmental change.
In this conversation, we’ll unearth the practices, symbols and visions embedded in gardens and rural landscapes, exploring how they can be spaces of both deep rootedness and radical imagination.
Our panel brings together four distinct voices, each cultivating a different form of knowledge from the land:
Marian Boswall, landscape architect and historian, draws upon landscape as legacy, weaving ecological restoration with ancestral memory and the ethics of care.
Tony Spencer, planting designer and visual storyteller, explores gardens as immersive ecosystems, blurring the boundary between naturalistic planting and emotional experience.
Poppy Okotcha, grower, educator and advocate for land justice, reimagines the garden as a site of healing, empowerment, and reconnection ~ a place where soil, self, and society meet.
Together, they invite us to see again — to walk familiar paths with new attention, and to consider how tending the land means tending our collective futures.
