My Garden Story
A text by Jamilyn TaylorSeptember 16, 2025
It’s hard to imagine my life without Braziers now. Even though I’m not a resident, and I don’t go as often as I used to, it’s changed me for the better.
I have a very international background: my parents are from Sierra Leone, I was born in the UK, raised in the US, came back to the UK for university, and have stayed ever since. I really enjoy spending time in nature and with animals and have worked in a network of community gardens before. I also have a range of hobbies and enjoy reading, drawing, writing poetry and stories, and travelling to new places. In all of my travels and life experiences, I haven’t come across a place like Braziers before.
This past spring, one of my good friends told me about the Diggers and Dreamers website. I looked it up and was very curious because I hadn’t heard of it, or the phrase “intentional communities,” before. An intentional community sounded like what I needed. My friend encouraged me to look more into the concept, so I researched them and then looked at the map of intentional communities throughout the UK.
Braziers Park was the closest one to where I lived that was open to the public. Since it was only a bus ride away, I resolved to see what one of these intentional communities was all about. The next public event was the SOIL Wider Community Gathering & Exhibition, a weekend event of workshops and art exhibits around the topic of nature, and especially soil. I went for just a morning to view the exhibits and had an incredible experience.
There were art exhibits with more conventional mediums, like paintings, which were beautiful, but I connected on another level with the tactile and experiential art exhibitions – for example, poems on biodegradable slips of paper half-hidden in a dirt bed in the greenhouse, and headphones in the polytunnel playing recordings of moss and fungi microbial soundscapes.
What was just as wonderful as the art was how welcomed I was during my first time at Braziers by the staff and community members. I definitely wanted to come back to this community, and at the beginning of this past summer, decided to become a Braziers garden volunteer. I spent summer Tuesdays weeding, planting, watering, and harvesting berries alongside lovely fellow volunteers and a couple of Braziers residents. We laughed and had thought-provoking conversations in the garden, and in the house during tea breaks and lunches. During these meals, Braziers residents introduced themselves to us, joined our conversations, and got to know us. This was when I first started to really grasp the idea of intentional community.
What I really like about Braziers and the community there is how genuine, warm, and accepting people are. The people there – whether residents, staff, or volunteers – have a consistent willingness and passion for building relationships and creating community with anyone who shows up there. I have found it very difficult to find people with these traits throughout my life. It is hard to know exactly what it is about Braziers that both attracts these kinds of people and fosters a nurturing environment in which we can build and maintain these connections. What I do know is that Braziers has an undeniable type of magic that empowers people to do this.
I picked up on this magic right away and wanted to spend more time at Braziers during my summer. I arranged to come on Mondays in addition to my usual volunteer day on Tuesdays. On Mondays, I volunteered to clean and tidy the house alongside a team of residential volunteers and permanent residents, shared meals with them, and loved getting to know the community in a deeper way.
I’ve learned so many new gardening skills from volunteering on Tuesdays, like how to mow a lawn, turn compost, and make supports for climbing beans. However, I’ve learned so many other new things from people at Braziers that go beyond gardening – from experiences of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to non-violent communication skills. My weekly engagement in the community during the summer was so restorative and really helped me through a difficult year in my personal life.
As we’ve moved into autumn, our garden volunteering now revolves around apples. I learned about the entire process of how to make homemade apple juice: picking, sorting, and cutting apples before using an apple press to make juice. I’m excited to learn new gardening skills in the future, such as making fruit preserves.
With the changing of the seasons, changes in my schedule happened too. More responsibilities at work mean that I come to Braziers less often now. I can attend just gardening volunteer Tuesdays about once a fortnight. However, I definitely want to keep coming to Braziers Park. This is a place and community that is very special to me.
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More information on our garden volunteering programme can be found here.