living with nature

Botanist Fem Güçlütürk is making it her mission to tame the spirit of the wild with tender loving care

- Fem Gucluturk

In 2014, Fem Güçlütürk left the public relations company she’d founded to retrain as a botanist. In a quiet corner of Turkey, she discovered that caring for a busy greenhouse and garden was a conduit to caring for herself. ‘This is the part where people say, “And they lived happily ever after,”’ says Fem, speaking from the home she shares with her husband, Sezer Savaslii, in south-west Turkey.

Since trading city life for a plot of land remote enough to lack reliable phone service, Fem has found that her days now follow the circadian rhythms of her plants. The public relations executive-turned-botanist rises at 6am (‘even the dog doesn’t wake up then,’ she says) and studies permaculture and edible gardening. After breakfast, she heads into the garden and remains there, weeding and pruning, until sundown. ‘I live in a vegetative state,’ she jokes.