Victoria Bennett, whose memoir about life in Orkney, The Apothecary by the Sea, showed her that 'the most beautiful light is found in the darkest time', found solace in a remote Scottish archipelago after her sister's death.
A Stormy Beginning
During her first winter in Orkney, Bennett discovered the joy of howling 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, with waves crashing on rocks, 'you can really let rip,' she adds. 'The sound just disappears.'
Until that moment, Bennett had struggled 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 explains: '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 of battling the elements evaporated.
Heeding the Whisper of the Islands
In her forthcoming memoir, Bennett describes first visiting the archipelago of more than 70 islands and islets over a decade ago. On the anniversary of her sister's drowning in a canoeing accident, she went to the seashore and cried into the salty wind. When she returned to England, the islands 'whispered' to her, urging her to return and make her home there. By the time she heeded their call in 2022, 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,' she says.
Creating an Apothecary Garden
After upending her life in Cumbria and buying a Victorian terrace house in Orkney with her husband and 14-year-old son, Bennett felt vulnerable and frustrated. The solution was to turn her back yard into an apothecary garden: a reflective space full of traditional medicinal and culinary plants to nourish her body and soul. But she soon discovered 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 sea's dominance, she swapped vulnerable plants like elderberries for hardier species like 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 looks to coastal plants like thrift, sea campion, and roseroot for inspiration. 'The coastline showed me what I could grow, because if it would grow wild there, it would grow in the garden.'
Her small walled garden, measuring 9 square metres, features a central circular spiral bed of medicinal herbs surrounded by a circular path, bordered by a micro-woodland of goat willow, elder, wild garlic, bluebells, dwarf fruit trees, roses, wildflowers, and larger apothecary plants like 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 herbs in pots and has a half-barrel pond with aquatic plants. 'There's not much room to stand in, but I find it very peaceful and I love seeing the wildlife that live in it.'
Finding Light in Darkness
Orkney's extreme light variations – up to 18 hours of daylight in summer and equivalent darkness in winter – have taught Bennett that 'the most beautiful light is found in the darkest time'. Now 54, she lives with hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome and genetic haemochromatosis. Learning to stop fighting the wind and sea in her garden has taught her a bigger life lesson: to treat herself with more compassion and forgiveness. '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, and what seems like a loss can 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.'
The Apothecary by the Sea: a year in an Orkney garden, by Victoria Bennett, is published on 30 April.
