I'm a non-fiction writer, naturalist and, somewhat accidentally, a community archivist and local historian. My work moves between landscape, memory and the lives that shape the places I find myself in.
I'm also an ecological horticulturist. Together with my husband I have designed, planted and restored nature-led gardens for many years — tiny gardens, terraced gardens, walled gardens, woodland gardens. There has even been an award-winning public garden, a set for a television series and a set for theatre. These days I rarely take on new garden design commissions, but if you run a nursery, a garden business, or tend a landscape with a history worth keeping, I understand that world from the inside and I'd be glad to help you build a digital archive of it.
I'm in the thick of writing a book, also called Before We Leave. It's a braided narrative about making an archive, belonging, and moving home. From time to time I publish work-in-progress sections on my Substack, Before We Leave with Bee Lilyjones and Friends, where the archive work also comes alive on the page. I publish intimate pieces that move back and forth between past and present. I write about early love, encaustic tiles under leaf mould, a village boy who managed a harbour in Madras. The research and the writing are inseparable here. Behind the scenes posts and shorter pieces are free to read. If you subscribe, you join a lovely community of folk who care about the stories places carry, and about the act of finding them.
I'm also part of an international writing collective, Lay It On The Line, and I founded and edit In Place: Literary Cartography, a literary travelogue published on this site.