Jo Rees goes off the beaten track for a garden-meets-gourmet experience in a horticultural haven
The first thing you notice at The Collective at Woolsery is that nature, when given the freedom to do her own thing, is more creative than anything we could dream up.
Since our last visit a few months ago, the plants at its Birch Farm had staged an uprising against both borders and the human ankle. We followed The Collective’s MD Emily Harmon in single file, brushing through a cornucopia of intertwined herbs, unusual berries and plants as she explained that diversity is the point. It seems that plants, like dinner parties, do better when not everyone is the same.
This apparent disorder is part of an agroforestry system created by the project’s head gardener, Josh Sparkes. His mixed planting system sees nut and fruit trees grown alongside berries, herbs, vegetables and other edible plants.
One of the cool kids of the UK’s neo-gardening scene, Josh also mixes Japanese bokashi composting into his natural farming set-up and, most unusually, is now experimenting with syntropic agriculture.
The approach, which couldn’t yet be called a trend – this is bleeding-edge green-fingery – harnesses the way plants abhor a vacuum.
The regenerative farming method mimics a natural forest ecosystem. Dense, multi-layered planting, alongside active pruning creates a self-sustaining, highly productive food system, without external chemical inputs.
Planting trees close together in this way and using aggressive pruning sends chemical signals to nearby trees to put on growth and fill the space. So, nothing at Birch Farm looks neatly obedient, yet its productivity makes neatness seem like a rather limited ambition.
Dinner in the garden
By the time we’d finished our farm foray and wandered over to The Farmers Arms, we were up for road-testing the system in the form of supper. Sitting in the pub’s garden, surrounded by rampant greenery, we were eager to feast on a menu drawn from the land we’d just journeyed through.
A tasting menu can sometimes feel like a restaurant explaining itself at tedious length, but here it made complete sense. The ingredients on the Birch Farm Menu hadn’t travelled far enough to acquire a complicated backstory. The meal’s coherence came from geography.
Over supper with Emily and photographer Kate Whitaker, we wended our way through the menu and its paired drinks, only pausing in conversation long enough for the front-of-house team to introduce each course.
It soon became clear that Josh’s veggies and the produce reared by head farmer Chris Jenn are in safe hands with the pub’s head chef Toby Neal. From the opening nibbles of sugar-kelp sourdough with Marmite butter, homemade charcuterie and rich bone broth to the closing lemon verbena tart with its fragrant strawberries and elderflower, it was considered and joyful. The menu changes all the time to reflect what’s being harvested, but July’s curation featured ingredients like john dory, smoked eel, sorrel, sweet cicely, summer truffle, braised lettuce and broad beans.
Cottage loafing
The Collective comprises more than just a farm and a pub. Sibling enterprises include a gourmet fish-and-chip shop, a nostalgic village store, the Potting Shed events space and a curation of pastoral-luxe accommodation. We spent the night in the largest house, Hillside Cottage, which has a substantial garden.
As with everything at The Collective, the cottage was both bewitchingly lovely and woven through with an air of quiet rebellion. In the morning, its garden lured us out of bed to stumble, still in our pyjamas, through its wild-seeming foliage – planted according to the same ethos as the farm gardens. It inspired a rethink about “weeds”. How much nicer to reclassify them as beautiful and leave them to thrive alongside more conventional specimens.
Breakfast arrived, ready to be scoffed at a terrace table beneath a buddleia quivering with butterflies. The feast – homemade sourdough toast with whipped butter and jam; eggy crumpets with spinach; and porridge pimped with berry compote, seeds and nuts – was both rustic and extremely well organised. That’s The Collective’s magical appeal: it offers wildness with comfort, abundance in tasteful quantities, and untamed nature with breakfast delivered.
Enjoyed our review of The Collective at Woolsery? Dive into more hotel and restaurant reviews across the South West.
