It was during her first winter in Orkney that the nature writer Victoria Bennett experienced the joy of baying into the sea during a storm. “There’s something very physically releasing about howling,” she says. “It’s quite animalistic and powerful.” On a stormy beach, when waves are crashing on the rocks, “you can really let rip”, she says. “The sound just disappears.”
Until that moment, Bennett had been struggling with her decision to move to the remote archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. “I was beginning to feel like I was in a fight against the sea, and against the weather.”
As the storm began, she frantically weighed down the contents of her nascent garden – the first she had ever owned – and felt a little frightened. There is no way to get off Orkney in bad weather, she says: “We can’t even go to the main town, the barriers get shut, and if you’re walking, you can get blown down the street.”
But a few hours later, as she stood on the shore and howled into the wind, the feeling that she was in a battle with the elements evaporated.
In her forthcoming memoir about her first year on Orkney, The Apothecary by the Sea, Bennett describes how she first visited the archipelago of more than 70 islands and islets more than a decade ago.
On the anniversary of the day her sister drowned in a canoeing accident, she went down to the seashore and cried her heart out into the salty wind. When she got back to England, the islands “whispered” to her, she says, urging her to return and make her home there.
By the time she heeded their call, it was 2022 and she was 51 years old. “I was ready to find my own shape again, and Orkney was where I needed to be to do that.
“I needed to be there, by the sea, in that strange, flat place,” Bennett says.
But that first winter, after she upended her life in Cumbria and bought a Victorian terrace house in Orkney with her husband and 14-year-old son, she felt vulnerable and, at times, frustrated.
For Bennett – whose 2023 nature book, All My Wild Mothers, won the Nautilus award for memoirs – the solution was to turn her back yard into an apothecary garden: a reflective space full of traditional medicinal and culinary plants that would nourish her, body and soul.
But she soon discovered that this would not be easy on Orkney. “When a wind comes from a certain direction off the sea, in 24 hours, the garden gets wiped out. That happened twice last year. The salt-burn destroyed everything.”
Forced to accept the dominance of the sea over the land, she began to swap plants that could not survive such onslaughts, such as elderberries, for similar but hardier species, such as fuchsia berries. “That’s part of what living here involves: an acceptance that whatever I’m growing is in relationship with the sea, with the elements around me.”
The garden is fertilised with foraged seaweed and she has learned to look at the plants that flourish on the coastline when she goes swimming in the sea, which she does every day.
“Thrift, sea campion, roseroot – the coastline showed me what I could grow, because if it would grow wild there, it would grow in the garden.”
Bennett’s small walled garden, which measures 9 sq metres, has a central circular spiral bed of medicinal herbal plants, surrounded by a circular path. This is bordered by a micro-woodland of goat willow, elder, wild garlic and bluebells, as well as dwarf fruit trees, roses, wildflowers and larger apothecary plants such as mint, geranium and catmint in sunnier spots.
“There is a focus in the borders on colour, pollinators and scent,” she says.
She also grows Mediterranean and culinary herbs such as oregano, rosemary, tarragon and marjoram in pots on her patio and has a half-barrel pond of aquatic plants with marsh marigold and water mint, surrounded by flag iris and goldenrod.
“There’s not much room to stand in,” she laughs. “But I find it very peaceful and I love seeing the wildlife that live in it.”
Orkney is so far north there are up to 18 hours of light on summer days and an equivalent amount of darkness in winter. Bennett feels there is something magical about the islands – “something caught in the expanse of sea and sky, in the contrast of light and dark”.
Especially in winter, she says, living there has shown her “the most beautiful light is found in the darkest time”.
Now 54, Bennett is chronically ill: she has hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that causes joint pain and digestive issues, and genetic haemochromatosis, which means her body absorbs excessive iron.
Learning that she must stop fighting with the wind and the sea in her garden has taught her a bigger life lesson: that she must treat herself with more compassion and forgiveness, and love her body with all its flaws. “Coming here and growing this garden by the sea has helped me loosen and release into the ebb and flow of life,” she says.
Letting go can be necessary, she understands now, and what seems like a loss can, with acceptance, be reframed as an exchange – just as, when the tide goes out, the waves are exchanged for the shore.
“Relinquishing control and allowing my garden to be what it is – without wanting it to be something else – was a really important way of understanding that in myself.”
