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Do you have it in you? The strength and desire to leave the place you call home, and travel five hundred miles north, to where the winters are long and the summers bring perpetual light?
With each traffic jam and each new industrial development, I feel a pull to a wilder, more rural life. I shrug the feeling aside, but Victoria Bennett chose change. With the years of early motherhood and elderly caregiving over, she uprooted to the northern Scottish islands of Orkney.
The Apothecary by the Sea charts her first year in Scotland, immersing the reader in this untamed and ancient landscape. It combines memoir, Nature writing and the herbal folklore known as wortcunning – “an old word for someone who is practised in the art of using plants to heal and protect”.
Bennett’s first book, the award-winning All My Wild Mothers, focused on the transformation of a Cumbrian housing estate’s rubbly ground into a wild garden, while Bennett experienced the deep grief of a close bereavement. When leaving the rented home to move to Orkney, Bennett was obliged to tear out this “thriving ecosystem that supported wildlife above and under ground” – or else face a fine.
It’s particularly poignant because “with over half of the UK native wildflower population in decline or lost, their threatened disappearance is more than just the loss of a particular species or habitat; it is a silencing of the stories they hold.”
And so to Orkney, where Bennett’s challenges now come from the raw elements of a landscape where wind, rain, sea and the seasonal light patterns all conspire to make horticulture tricky.
The islands are described with vital energy, allowing me to feel the spray of the sea and force of the wind. The task of growing begins: “Like Gretel in the fairy tale, I follow a trail of seeds and weeds laid down by the botanists of old – starwort, butterbur, twayblade, broom – names that roll off the tongue like incantations.”
The memoir provides the narrative thread of the book and it’s beautifully done, bringing me to tears a few times. The prose is understated and somehow able to reach the heart of emotion without diluting it with excess words.
Let me confess. I often skim the more detailed sections of Nature writing. Not so here. Bennett keeps the plant information succinct, engaging and meaningful. I crave the effects of each plant described, as they promise to combat tiredness, overwhelm, anxiety, insomnia and stress. It is oddly comforting to be reminded that these are perennial problems in humans, pre-dating mobile phones and 24/7 global news.
How much have we lost by turning away from such natural knowledge?
Yet it was not quite as simple as turning away. This was predominantly female knowledge, and it was taken. “When the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries was formed in 1617, healing passed from the hands of women and into the patriarchy of institutions.” It became dangerous to practise wortcunning, with accusations of witchcraft and mock trials that led invari-ably to death: “Remedies that had been passed down for generations were hidden or lost in the dead mouths of our medicine women.”
It’s therefore a pure delight to discover the recipes in the back of the book, which may be learnt by whole new generations of wortcunners. Many are accessible without a botanical garden at your disposal, with ingredients such as lavender, mint and rosemary. The recipe names alone bring a promise of alchemy: ‘tender loving brew’, ‘protection incense’, ‘comfort and joy brew’.
This is a book to connect you to a forgotten, stolen know-ledge. It brings the permission to grow a different way of living, where we “learn how to root deep and adapt to what the tides and weather bring.”
The Apothecary by the Sea:A Year in an Orkney Garden by Victoria Bennett. Elliott & Thompson, 2026. ISBN: 9781783969340
