Our Story
Hello - we’re Olivia and Joe and this is the story of how Bowden Springs Farm came to be.
Our story starts in 2017 when we unexpectedly had to leave our lives in London in search of a slower, healthier pace of life. I (Olivia) had just received a cancer diagnosis and I immediately felt the need to escape the city. My family were in Devon so my treatment was scheduled for Exeter Hospital and we made the move.
6 months of chemotherapy later I was declared in remission. But our lives felt tipped upside down - we had left our jobs and friends behind in London and neither of us had the foggiest what to do next. We took on temporary work and rented a flat in Totnes but honestly, we felt pretty aimless and low. On top of this I was still struggling with my health as well as having chronic health anxiety.
In 2019, out of the blue, Joe said he was going to view a piece of land that had come up for sale. It was an old reservoir site that had been disused for decades, it was littered with scrap metal but had beautiful views over Totnes. It looked like a handful to me and I tried my hardest to persuade him not to buy it - but he had a vision to set up a community garden and this was the first time he’d felt motivated and excited about something in a long time. Needless to say, he ignored me and bought the land!
Over the next couple of years we started establishing growing areas. We put up a polytunnel, planted fruit bushes, built a compost toilet and got to know the site. Joe used the gardening knowledge he’d picked up while working in a primary school garden and as a support worker on a care farm. Meanwhile, I had no experience whatsoever. I’d previously had little interest in gardening but since having cancer, I was more interested in where our food comes from, in organic growing and the connection between soil health and human health. I threw myself into learning everything I could. I did my level 1 and 2 in organic horticulture, I religiously watched Gardeners’ World and I set up a library of Charles Dowding’s books in the house.
Initially we were just growing veg but this led on to ornamental gardening which led to growing cut flowers and I completely fell in love. During these first couple of years we started selling produce outside our gate, we sold salad to cafes in town, we grew and arranged flowers for weddings and we started building a relationship with our community. We even hosted a couple of supper clubs showcasing the produce we had grown.
Over time, I saw my health start to improve and we both became big believers in the power of nature and gardening to improve a person’s health and wellbeing. We felt ready to share the space with more people and so in 2022 we registered as a community interest company (CIC) with a view to running therapeutic gardening sessions for our community. We are not amazing gardeners -far from it- but we have had a clear insight into the benefit connecting to the land can have. This lived experience is what we hope to share and lies at the heart of what we do.
We now run a volunteer day, a gardening club for adults with disabilities and a flower growing support group for women recovering from cancer. It is amazing to see how the garden helps people open up, connect with others and ultimately feel better - just as we experienced in ourselves.
The garden takes up a lot of our time. We have two young children and the garden often feels like a third. But it also gives us so much, not least a connection to nature which feels like an enormous solace when life gets tough. We often talk about what our lives would look like if I hadn’t gotten ill. We’d probably still be in London, ploughing away at our jobs, oblivious to the wonderful world of gardens and gardening - that’s got to be a silver lining!
