The Apothecary by the Sea

Join award winning author Victoria Bennett for an evening of conversation and demonstration celebrating her new book, The Apothecary by the Sea - a lyrical, tender story of her journey creating a wild apothecary garden on Orkney.

With the years of early motherhood and elderly caregiving over, Victoria faces a time of change. She and her husband decide to take a leap, moving hundred miles north of everything they know to Orkney, where the winters are long and the summers filled with light.

In an unfamiliar landscape, Victoria instinctively returns to the work of growing, setting out to transform her scrappy backyard into an apothecary garden by the sea, inspired by Orkney’s folklore and ancient landscapes.

Shaped by tides and storms, wild plants and seaweeds, she creates a biodiverse backyard sanctuary filled with microhabitats, wildflowers and edible herbs.

Here she crafts teas, tinctures and balms shaped by the surrounding soil and seas. As the year closes, Victoria finds belonging not only in the garden she has nurtured, but in the landscape that has quietly embraced her and become home.

Includes apothecary gardening advice, as well as recipes to make your own balms, tonics and brews.

‘A beautifully written paean to the healing powers of nature, and an ode to the brutal climate of Orkney.’- Scottish Field

A profound invitation to enter into conversation with the land around you and in doing so, yourself. Also a gift for times of transition, it is a companion for those navigating thresholds in life, when old maps no longer serve and new ways of being are quietly forming. Victoria weaves inner and outer worlds together allowing memory, place and plant wisdom to dance at the same time. The featured herbs are reminders of ancestral knowledge that might have been lost, yet lives on through attentive listening and careful tending. This is a book you will want within arms reach on your bookshelf, one you will return to again and again, each time finding something new waiting for you. Lyrical and grounded, a gentle generous guide to placemaking.’ JC Niala, author of This New Eden

VICTORIA BENNETT is a disabled, award-winning writer, poet, and literary activist whose work centres on nature, identity, and creative resilience. Her debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers, won the Nautilus Award for Memoir, was shortlisted for multiple UK prizes, and was named an Aladin ‘Best Book of the 21st Century’. She is the founder of Wild Women Press and the international Wild Women Writers’ Salons, dedicating nearly three decades to initiatives that nurture creative community and amplify women’s voices locally and across the world. Victoria lives in Orkney with her husband, artist Adam Clarke, and their son, where she tends her apothecary garden by the sea.

Earlier Event: 3 September

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Later Event: 5 December

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