Two people sitting on a couch with flower bouquets, one holding a pot of purple and yellow flowers, the other with orange flowers, in a dimly lit room.

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 a shock cancer diagnosis for Olivia led to us leaving our lives in London to be closer to family in Devon. While she underwent treatment at Exeter Hospital, we began to imagine what a different kind of life here might look like post-treatment. We had left our careers and friends behind, and finding our feet would take time, but we knew we wanted a slower, healthier pace of life out of the city. 

In 2019, still feeling pretty uprooted, we came across a piece of land for sale — an old reservoir site that had been disused for decades, littered with scrap metal but with beautiful views over Totnes. We had the seed of an idea to set up a community garden, and for some crazy reason, despite our limited horticultural knowledge and resources, took the plunge!

Over the next couple of years we started establishing growing areas — a polytunnel, fruit bushes, a compost toilet — and got to know the site. Joe drew on gardening experience he'd picked up working in a primary school garden and on a care farm. Olivia came to it fresh, but threw herself into learning: organic horticulture qualifications, library books and lots of Gardeners' World were the key.

We started by growing vegetables, which led to ornamental gardening, which led to cut flowers — and we were hooked. In those early years we sold produce at the gate, supplied salad to cafes in town, grew and arranged flowers for weddings, and started building a real relationship with our community.

Through all of this, we became firm believers in the power of nature and gardening to improve health and wellbeing — we’d experienced it ourselves and we felt ready to share that with more people. In 2022 we registered as a Community Interest Company, with a view to running therapeutic gardening sessions for our community. We're not expert gardeners by any means, but we've had a clear, lived insight into what connecting with the land can do for a person, and that experience lies at the heart of everything we do.

We now run a volunteer day, a gardening club for adults with disabilities, a women’s flower growing group, school visits and open days. The garden takes up a lot of our time — we have two young children, and it often feels like a third — but it gives back so much, not least a connection to nature which we now can’t imagine our lives without.

Man in a garden tending to bean plants climbing bamboo poles, wearing a cap and a t-shirt.
Woman in a green top holds a bouquet of purple flowers while standing in a field surrounded by greenery.
People gathering in a garden with flowers and a blue structure, surrounded by fields and hills under a blue sky.
Rustic wooden deck with a vase of wildflowers on a pedestal, wooden furniture, and firewood under a wooden overhang.