The caring garden

Poppy Okotcha turned her back on the jet-setting lifestyle of a top model for a more down-to-earth way of life. Fergus Collins meets the regenerative gardener and author to find out why

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On a busy street in a small town in south Devon, there’s a secret door. I tentatively open it, head into what feels like a tunnel and then up some steps... into a pocket of magic. It’s an urban garden and yet its soft lines and naturally blurred edges are instantly calming. The owner, gardener and author Poppy Okotcha, greets me and I ask her for a tour.

“At the very end, we've got four apple trees and a crab apple, and that’s where the chickens live, and the compost heap. Then there are the vegetable patches, where there are various perennial and annual vegetables. There’s a little greenhouse, and a haphazard patio-ish area with gaps between the pavers so that plants can grow. Right now, there are dandelions, but in the summer there’s marjoram and lemon balm and even some yarrow growing in the gaps.

“Then there is the final portion of the garden, which was full of edible medicinal perennials, but this year, I cleared it with the help of my mum and we’ve seeded it with a meadow mix. And that’s because I’ve got a little boy and I need somewhere for him to play.”

I’m enchanted by how the garden character evolves every few paces, as if I'm moving from room to room. I’m meeting Poppy to record a BBC Countryfile Magazine Plodcast episode and hear both her philosophy of gardening and how she turned her back on a prestigious career to spend her life with her fingers in the soil. For Poppy was, until recently, a top fashion model, jetting from Milan to New York and all the runways between.

“I came into gardening as I was looking for something that was both good for me, for the planet and for other people. I’ve come to understand more and more that a lot of our struggles at this time are related to our broken relationship with land and nature, or the living world, as I refer to it in the book [