iv: Our Editor in the Field
Kyra Pollitt meets Amanda Saurin This day has come, and I’m nervous. As I emerge, early, from my wee Hebridean hobbit hole, I find myself at the end of a rainbow. I mean, actually at the end of a rainbow— my house is the pot of gold. I don’t have time to get out my shovel and dig, but I take it as a good omen, and I start my journey with a skip. I’m travelling from the East of North Harris to the West of South Harris and, all along the way, that rainbow seems to have coloured the scenery. There is the brave red of the post box at Reinigeadal, yellow in winter grasses, pink morning clouds, the green of the mosses, the purple hue of wet rock, orange bracken, and the impossible azure of the crashing surf at Horgabost. When I first moved to Harris, I was still an Herbology student at RBGE and dreamt I might one day brew potions and tinctures for the island Distillery. That was before I discovered an existing apothecary range, prepared specifically to complement Harris Gin by the Distillery’s consultant, from Lewes in East Sussex, Amanda Saurin. No matter, I reasoned, I would set up an island apothecary instead. A while later, the beautiful Temple café, situated on the island’s best stretch of wildflower machair, was put up for sale, along with a house and croft. Whilst I pondered how to make a dream a reality, it was sold— to one Amanda Saurin, rumoured to be thinking of turning it into… do I need to finish this sentence? Now, I’m about to meet this woman who seems always three steps ahead of me. I’m unsure if I’ll be able to like her, and my inner envy gremlin isn’t even sure I should try. Of course, when I do meet her, she’s lovely— warm, charming, generous, intelligent, and oh so herbally erudite. It’s quite a relief, in a way. We sit together outside the café, on a glorious day, in the Covid-friendly fresh winter breeze, while Amanda tells me her story, and I feel as if I’ve been allowed to listen to big girls’ talk. Before us stretch sea, mountain and machair— an SSSI area, and what Amanda sees as ‘the terroir of the Hebrides’. But I’m getting ahead
of myself, and one shouldn’t try to jump too far, too fast. Slow is important to Amanda: You have to work your way, plant by plant, until you understand what they need and how to get the best out of them. Amanda grew up in Edinburgh, spending childhood holidays in the Highlands. She studied Law at Southampton University— where she found the physical environment a ‘terrible mistake,’ but met her husband. At the age of 25, she moved to rural Wales. By now a mother of two, Amanda wanted an alternative to conventional medicine for her children, and so began her engagement with plants, herbs and homeopathy. A mother and ceramist by day, she was also busy with herbal ‘books, books, books, planting, testing, and trying’. Time, she notes, is ‘the best way to understand each and every plant’ and I am beginning to understand time as something Amanda commands firmly. Yet it’s at this point that her idyll is interrupted, when her husband’s career dictates a move to beautiful, but ‘unwild’, Sussex: There is nowhere you can walk where you won’t meet someone, nowhere you can be where you won’t hear a car, or a plane, or a train. So, Amanda creates a wild garden— developing an orchard, a herb area and even a poison garden, which her, now four, children learn to treat with due respect. She completes her four-year Homeopathy qualification and does a lot of work with mother tinctures and flower remedies. Then the family moves to Cyprus, where Amanda meets the herbalist and Sufi, Miriam Khan. Over the next seven years, Miriam teaches her to distil waters and oils. As we brace the fresh Hebridean breeze, Amanda conjures warm air and sea, Orange Blossom (Citrus aurantium), Mountain Sage (Salvia officinalis), Wild Thyme (Thymus serpyllum), Kekik (Origanum majorana) and fresh honey. Mid-reverie, Amanda suggests I raise my eyes from my notebook, and there— beyond the place of summer ‘orchids, orchids, orchids’ —is
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