Findhorn and the Hippies

  

Article at Celebrating One Incredible Family

This is the story of Matthew Ingram’s visit to the Ecovillage Findhorn in 2023. He came to do research for his latest book The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture which chronicles how a generation influenced by psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and reactions to Vietnam, the Oil Shocks, and DDT became interested in sustainable growing and farming. The book contains a chapter about what happened when the hippies came to Findhorn.

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In August 2023, by train, plane, then taxi, I fulfilled a long-cherished ambition in taking the pilgrimage to Findhorn. Arriving in the middle of a rainstorm in the darkness, I gingerly let myself into “Genesis” the chalet that had once been the home of Eileen and Peter Caddy and their family. What had brought me to this enchanted site nestled on the dunes at Findhorn Bay in the North of Scotland?

I first heard about the intentional community at Findhorn when researching my previous book “Retreat: How the Counterculture invented Wellness”. It had been mentioned by one of my interviewees, pioneer of Holotropic Breathwork, Stanislav Grof. Grof had run a number of workshops at Findhorn and had a similar relationship with it to that he had forged with the Esalen Institute in California; the establishment of both, perhaps not coincidentally, was in 1962.

That previous book had looked at different techniques of healing against the backdrop of the hippie movement. There were a surprising number of candidates: Macrobiotic food, Transcendental meditation, LSD Psychiatry, Transactional analysis, and Esalen’s Gestalt Practice. But what I was unprepared for was the manner in which these were all tied into spirituality, and especially Eastern philosophy. That wasn’t the book I had set out to write! However, I ended up being fascinated by the holistic ideas of the Vedas, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Certainly, healing and its relationship to spirituality is a central motif of the community’s mission. It’s arguable that this need for revival was brought about by the trauma of the two world wars. Peter Caddy and Findhorn associate Richard St. Barbe Baker had both been in active service. With regards to the connection to Eastern philosophy, through the influence of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Peter Caddy had been transfixed by the spiritual culture of Tibet. Caddy was fortunate to travel there in 1945 just before the Chinese occupation. However, tellingly, he concluded of the experience that, “many of the people had become crystallised in their thinking and customs.”

It was, however, none of this that had brought me to Findhorn. In spite of Eileen Caddy’s view that the primary mission of the community was connected to her experience of the voice of god, “the still, small voice” and insistence that “the garden came second”, it will be eternally associated in the popular imagination with Peter Caddy’s giant vegetables. My latest book “The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture” looks at the connections between the hippies and growing. It takes in forebears like Rudolf Steiner and the UK’s organic movement (Lady Eve Balfour herself no stranger to the community), Self-sufficiency, the back-to-the-land movement, Masanobu Fukuoka’s Natural farming, Permaculture, and much else besides.

 Given that the “hippie farmer” is one of the best-loved and durable figures in society, a trope even, it is a wonder that such a book hadn’t been written before. Oh certainly, Tompkins and Bird’s “The Secret Life of Plants” (1973) was the foundational book of the plant-consciousness counterculture, but it didn’t discuss the hippies themselves – only their putative influences. Peter Tompkins can be seen talking to journalist and television presenter Magnus Magnusson in a wonderful BBC TV special on Findhorn from 1973.

The book’s final chapter concerned the community at Findhorn. Reading extracts from it published in Harper’s Magazine, as he sat in his cluttered and shabby warehouse in the old industrial section of Boston, Paul Hawken, author of the subsequent “The Magic of Findhorn” (1975) was rendered “psychologically flatfooted and analytically agape” – and set off on his own pilgrimage to visit.

The world of the founders of the spiritual community at Findhorn is referred to by Celebrating One Incredible Family chronicler Cornelia Featherstone as one of “tweed” but my book concerns the counterculture, that intense revolt of the youth against straight society that peaked in 1968-69 with The Beatles “White Album”, the Parisian student riots, Woodstock, and the back-to-the-land movement.

As Cornelia puts it, the original founders were at work in a field that was, “very specific and quite esoteric in the true sense of the word, ‘Not seen’.” Arguably, it wasn’t until the small community’s discovery by the hippie movement that it became what it remains to this day. Right at the heart of its visionary offering, setting it a decade ahead of other early intentional communities, was Peter Caddy’s vegetables. I had the good fortune to be able to talk to some of those original hippie visitors, briefly with Paul Hawken (now the world’s leading sustainability guru), with another key American émigré from that era, the sparkling Roger Doudna, who still lives in the dunes, and with Leonard, one of the original gardening “gnomes” who arrived as a gang from Blackpool in 1971.

Living Machine

Being guided around the site by the delightfully bossy Caroline Shaw, I was able to see firsthand the ways in which growing food and working with plants is still central to the Ecovillage Findhorn community. Caroline let us into the magnificent water purification plant, set up in collaboration with expertise from Cape Cod’s New Alchemy Institute (featured in another chapter of my book), where reeds are used to convert grey water till it’s clean enough for goldfish to happily live in it.

Cornelia’s greenhouse

Cornelia Featherstone showed me around her magnificent vegetable garden which has already, thanks to a lovely film by internet gardening sensation Huw Richards, attracted worldwide attention with half a million views. Cornelia’s garden was, in the true ‘spirit of Findhorn’ like Peter Caddy’s before her, growing biologically without chemicals; that’s to say in accordance with nature. This choice of growing methods, and indeed the whole organic movement, were closely followed by the countercultural generation.

 

Michael and the Soillse Garden

Michael Shaw led me around the Community Supported Agriculture garden on the site, which was being tended by WWOOFer Veronica Caldwell, returning from Australia to Findhorn where she grew up, and now a highly-skilled grower.

 

 

Raised Beds

Composting Hot Bins

Park Garden cold frames

But even this abundance of gardening was not all at the ecovillage! There are raised beds, composting hot bins, and cold frames in the community “streets”.

Massive rosehips

On a walk into Findhorn itself I was delighted to encounter some actual massive fruit. In this case rose hips reaping the benefit of a whole summer of long days. There has been much speculation over the years as to the causes of Peter Caddy’s forty-pound cabbages. Was it the devas? Without wanting to spoil anything, this matter is explored in the book with some interesting new material which came to light in my research. In strictly literal and ecological terms though, the real miracle is how a vibrant topsoil has been created upon such unpromising land. Ecovillage Findhorn, long may she grow!

“The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture” by Matthew Ingram will be published on April 8th 2025 – but is available as a pre-order.

RHS Level 2 Principles

My stack of course notes.

Between August 2021 and December 2024 I was researching and writing this forthcoming book about gardening, growing, and farming. Yes, I did learn a lot about those topics in my reading, watching, and interviewing (and can confirm, looking back with what I know now, that I didn’t make any mistakes!) – but I wanted to double down on that research for three reasons. Firstly, I wanted to make sure I really knew from a scientific and practical point of view what I was talking about. Secondly, I wished to learn more about plants purely out of personal interest. And thirdly, I had a view that this might be a qualification useful to me to get work. What shape that work would take, still not being totally clear to me yet.

Something that came up whenever I was looking into this area, as I was as early as October 2020, was the Royal Horticultural Society’s Level 2 qualifications. I’m glad I waited, because in September 2022 the course was updated, and it’s more appropriate to my interests now. There’s now a strong emphasis on biodiversity and sustainability. And with the introduction of conceptual tools like the Garden Health Plan (which combines abiotic and other factors with previous techniques like Integrated Pest Management to create a panoptic view of health), the whole course is by definition holistic in its perspective.

The RHS: Not just about ornamental horticulture.

Before making the leap, I reached out to legendary gardener Jack Wallington, author of the classic “Wild about Weeds” and he kindly reassured me that the course was also very applicable to vegetable growing. Indeed, the RHS isn’t just about ornamental horticulture. Many of the figures in its hall of fame have an interest in what’s termed “productive growing” and “edible landscapes” – like, for instance, Rosemary Verey and William Robinson. Any residual snootiness towards growing food seems to be, if not entirely absent, then gradually eroding away. Certainly the high rigour and impeccable standards of the RHS are exceptionally useful in that sphere.

 

At the end of July last year I made a start revising for the RHS Level 2 Principles exam (on the right in the image above). The Practical half of the course is more weighted towards ornamental horticulture which, at the moment at least, I am less interested in. For instance, I’ll wager that 95% of the plants one is expected to identify in the Practical course are jazzy shrubs, roses, and ornamental grasses. However, to the contrary, I’m happiest identifying: flowers that pollinators like, herbs, fruit, wild flowers, weeds, crops, and trees. And I was able to bend the Principles’ syllabus to accommodate that preference. Indeed, I leave the course with a huge “My Plants” spreadsheet which I compiled of plants that I love which illustrate various horticultural points. For giggles check out this large entry, only one of 238, which I compiled:

Like other of the Rosaceae family can be affected by fireblight. A lack of calcium causes malformed dead cells scattered through the fruit called “bitter pit”. Apples suffer from apple scab, powdery mildew, orchard fireblight etc. Seed designed to be eaten and then pass through the digestive system of birds or mammals far from the parent plant. Fleshy portion removed if planting horticulturally. An important early-flowering resource for bumblebees and mining bees and a key nectar resource for early hoverflies and bee-flies. Orchard trees decay more quickly than say Oak and cavities which open out in them can be homes for Great tits and Spotted woodpeckers. Orchards also home for Bracket fungi. Different cultivars of apples require different cumulative hours of cold in the winter to produce flower buds. Chemical inhibitors prevent germination. Self-incompatible – has to be pollinated by a different plant.

My Malus domestica (apples innit) spreadsheet entry

Another advantage of the Principles course is that it can be done remotely – but that’s changing with the advent of at least one provider offering blended learning for the Practical course.

 

One of the most highly recommended texts. My edition already out of date.

The RHS Level 2 material is typically described as being equivalent in difficulty to a GCSE. It’s been 37 years since I sat one of those! However, and here’s the clincher, the volume of information is enormous. One of my fellow course mates had this to say, “I came into Horticulture after 27 years of teaching GCSE at secondary level. Compared to what I have taught, the level of detail and volume of work in the syllabus seems massive.”

Add to this the ornate and convoluted way that the RHS asks questions, (from the same observer), “It felt as though the questions were deliberately trying to trip you up or focusing in on one minute detail rather than being a test of your breadth of knowledge.” That tricky way of asking questions (where it’s also not entirely clear what you’re supposed to be replying with in your answer), tripped me up on multiple occasions in my revision. It led, depressingly, to numerous failed pilot tests and dismal marks, even when I was reasonably confident of the material.

 

Peter Dawson’s swan-song. A handy resource for both Principles and Practical courses.

I do hope that none of this discourages people from doing the RHS Level 2 Principles course. If you get a decent provider with solid learning material, then it’s totally great. Bloody marvellous. I LOVED IT. I learned so much, and was genuinely fascinated by 99% of the material. Only garden design, of which there is only a little, left me cold – and to be fair, I am coming at all this from what is to most people today a very weird angle.

I sat the two unit exams this Monday and Tuesday after cramming the material very hard through December and January. I won’t get the results for a few months – and I’m really hoping I pass. However, if I fail I will pick myself up again and have another crack at it. It will be another opportunity to learn some more wonderful information

Fosco Mariani on Life

 

An edition of Fosco Mariani “Secret Tibet” with debossed Mani mantras.

I stumbled across this passage a few years ago in Fosco Mariani’s “Secret Tibet” (1951) – one of the great accounts of travel in Tibet before the Chinese occupation. Very beautifully and without recall to superstition, it encapsulates the vedic idea of the individual human’s spirit as a fragment of the larger universal consciousness; I think it would make an excellent reading for a funeral.

Running water reminds one strangely of human life. It first emerges so thin and small and devoid of strength. In its infancy it runs sparkling through meadows, among flowers and shining stones. Then the waters gain in weight and vigour and rush downhill; their youth is bold and happy, a time of singing and dancing in the sun, celebrating noisy marriages with tributaries, forming crazy little waterfalls and exultant little lakes. All is joy and high spirits. But gradually the slope diminishes, and the stream grows and becomes a river; youth turns into manhood. Its course is now more regular; it no longer runs crazily, but has become sensible and strong. It is less beautiful, but has become useful to agriculture and industry. What makes it attractive now is its calm, serene maturity. Enthusiasm, love, passion, beauty, have given way to quiet, useful purposefulness. At last it imperceptibly approaches the estuary; the lagoon-like expanses, the sadness and sweetness of old age. Then it once more mixes with the original waters.

Fosco Mariani: “Secret Tibet” p287-288

Gardens of my childhood

Growing up in the countryside, I didn’t live in a town permanently till I was 19. I miss it but am reconciled to being stuck in the city now. That connection to nature, that is so easy to maintain in the country, is possible to establish here but one has to work harder.

Recently going through my own personal photos from the years 1987 to 1994 – just a handful of precious photographs in the way it used to be before one could take thousands – and I came across these lovely ones I had taken of the gardens of our houses. Evidently moved, even then as a young person, by their beauty.

We moved house a lot when I was a child, living in a total of six houses between my age of 0 and 17. Houses #2 (outside Stroud, Glos.), #4 (outside Haddington, East Lothian), and #5 (outside Cirencester, Glos.) had stunning gardens.

This is the walled garden of house #4, which was truly spectacular. In the summer it was divine. I have a real fondness for walled gardens.

The photo at the top has faded, so I graded it a little – just because…

This was the magnificent formal garden of our house #5. Click on the picture to enlarge it. It really looks very lovely.

My parents had some noted horticulturalists among their friends. For instance, I remember visiting her friend Rosemary Verey with my mother and Rosemary showing us around her amazing vegetable garden. So I guess marvellous gardens was just what you did!

I’m by no means complaining when I point out that what remains of this inflorescent opulence is my 20m2 of roof terrace. Even that is a luxury, of course.

Vincent van Gogh

 

Saint Paul’s Hospital at Saint-Remy, 1890.

Iris, 1890.

The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Remy, 1889.

Tree and Bushes in the Garden of the Asylum, 1989.

Hospital at Arles, 1889.

Undergrowth, 1889.

The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Remy, 1889.

I was entranced by the Vincent van Gogh exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery. Mrs Ingram, who is a member, has been escorting various people along to it – her aunt, her mother, and now me. She’s taking a friend along next week, which will be her fourth visit. It’s that good that she doesn’t mind.

Last year we went to see the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam together. Truthfully, we were disappointed. We didn’t think much of the selection. I came to the conclusion that, yes, he could paint some wonderful portraits, especially of himself, but people weren’t really his forte. In 2019, we’d seen the Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. That too was an interesting, but faintly disappointing selection dominated by interiors, portraits, and urban scenery.

Garden with weeping Tree, 1888.

This exhibition, however, really seemed to nail it with a focus on pictures of trees and plants. People who follow this blog will be familiar with my interest in this axis of ecology and therapy. More than any of his other preoccupations, it’s in van Gogh’s drawings and paintings of the rural landscape and its vegetation that his work really comes together in spectacular fashion.

Van Gogh, at the time these paintings were made in 1888, had been diagnosed with “acute mania with generalized delirium” and “mental epilepsy”. He made many drawings in the grounds of hospitals and asylums. It seems like the therapeutic power of nature in helping the physically injured, as well as the mentally dislocated, was better appreciated in his era than ours, when it is only just creeping back into serious acceptance.

Drawings of Montmajour, 1888.

Van Gogh’s drawings of the countryside have a tremendous intensity. He was a big fan of the Illustrated London News, and in fact tried and failed to get work with my ancestors, who ran the paper. Visually, these drawings of his were inspired by the technical necessity of mark-making in newspaper illustration.

In print production, pictures would have been built up from the mark in the same way that halftone would later become the underpinning of printed pictures. It was not possible to render gradients of shade in any other way. But Van Gogh was fascinated by the technique of this mark making itself. He pulls it to the fore in a way that newspaper illustrators would have tried to make less obtrusive, as though it were an encumbrance forced upon them by the medium to overcome.

Van Gogh tailors his every mark in such a way to respond to what he is drawing: pebbles, grass, leaves, branches, the texture on rocks, everything has its own corresponding style of mark. Van Gogh’s responsiveness makes me think of Bob Dylan’s religious anthem, “Every Grain of Sand.”

In the fury of the moment, I can see the master’s hand,
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.

Bob Dylan

View of Arles, 1889.

Field with poppies, 1889.

The Large Plane Trees, 1889.

Landscape with ploughman, 1889.

Enclosed field with Peasant, 1889.

Wheatfield behind St-Paul Hospital, 1889.

A Wheatfield with Cypresses, 1889.

The Sower, 1888.

The landscapes, which are of special interest to me, often show fields of wheat, vegetable crops, allotment gardens and orchards at the edge of towns, (after Millet) sowing seed, or ploughing. Van Gogh romanticises this agricultural work. It represents to Vincent some part of his personality that has been broken from him. His paintings of it are an, arguably successful, attempt at spiritual reunification.

Sunflowers, 1889.

Sunflowers, 1888.

There are two of the exquisite sunflower paintings in the exhibition. As one literate in these matters, he must have reflected that the sunflower (Helianthus annus) was not just an ornamental flower but also a crop – and to that extent transcendent.

Oleanders, 1888.

But there are other highly distinct plants in these pictures: Plane Trees (Platanus x acerifolia), Cypress Trees (Cupressus sempervirens), Roses (Rosa spp), Ivy (Hedera helix) in the undergrowth, the Iris germanica flower at the top, a favourite of the Arts and Crafts movement and gardeners like Gertrude Jekyll, and the Nerium oleanders directly above. This faithful depiction of botany was at once more normal in those times when the urban/rural divide was markedly less pronounced, but also unusual in van Gogh given his largely urban upbringing.

Olive trees, 1889.

One sequence of paintings of an olive grove is presented as though a study in light, like Monet’s series of water-lilies. Van Gogh, god’s lonely man, works there in the heat of the summer sun – and only in the last picture do we see other people, and the olives being harvested in the cool of the evening.

Tree Trunks in the Grass, 1890.

Long Grass with Butterflies, 1890.

“Long Grass with Butterflies” is the last picture hanging by the exit. It might have been my favourite painting in the whole exhibition. Every blade of grass here is sacred. The butterflies, Marbled whites perhaps, pollinators, flitter in the still Provencal air.