This beautiful space is based in Court Hey Park, once home to the National Wildflower Centre. It was originally the walled garden of the Gladstone Estate, making it a place rich in history. Our stone circle is built using the stones that once anchored the world's first steam locomotive, The Rocket.
This place is special. When you walk through the gates, you feel your problems fade away. It brings peace and comfort to many people. I believe it is magical, deeply spiritual, and that the land spirits are very much alive here.
Incredible Edible Knowsley arrived here in 2019. When we first began working on the land, it had been left neglected for several years. The gardens were overgrown and filled with rubbish following years of vandalism and break-ins.
We began clearing the site with just a handful of volunteers. Before long, more and more people joined us. Thanks to the incredible support of local residents, Knowsley Council, councillors, businesses, and countless volunteers, we have transformed this once-forgotten space into the beautiful, tranquil place now known as The Land of Enchantment.
Incredible Edible Knowsley is a community project that grows food with the community, for the community — and we then donate this food back into the community. Our aims are to:
🌱 Reduce food poverty 🤝 Reduce isolation and loneliness 💛 Improve health and wellbeing 🌍 Improve the environment 📚 Educate
From this initial aim of growing food, together with the community we have added more, as over the past 7 years we have learnt what support is needed and how to create the sustainable incomes to continue providing it.
Since Covid, we have provided seedlings across the Liverpool City Region so that people could grow at home — reaching schools, mental health units, supported accommodation and many other groups. This was well sought after, and we have continued to do this each year throughout Spring and Summer. We also offer workshops to teach people and share tips on how to grow, from soil to fork.
We then learnt, from donating the food we had grown, that people were struggling to provide food for themselves and their families — so we decided to open a community food club. It has grown so much that we now have on average 120 people using the food club within five hours of opening each Friday. On site on a Friday, we can have over 200 people coming to our beautiful space.
We offer therapeutic horticulture to adults with additional needs, sessions to schools for children and young people, and sessions throughout the year to the public.
We also learnt that many people were unsure what to do with fresh food once it had been grown, so we created workshops on how to ferment, pickle, and make chutneys and jams, as well as how to prolong the life of fresh food — there are simple tricks that can extend shelf life for months, even years. We teach people the health benefits of healthy food: what each food is good for, and which parts of the body they support.
Workshops that we offer include:
🌿 Herbal workshops — health benefits and how to use them 🥗 Nutritional workshops — the health benefits of food 🌾 Growing from soil to fork — sowing, transplanting, harvesting and ground preparation 🧘 Meditation sessions 🥁 Drumming sessions 🌬️ Breathwork sessions
We are volunteer-based, which means that whilst we have a few staff members, the majority of our support comes from people volunteering their time. Without this, we simply would not be able to do what we do — we have amazing volunteers who work so hard to support us and their community.
Volunteers are individuals from the community, but also come from companies whose teams give up a day to work hard on our space. The hours a team gives in a day does so much for our project and our communities — not only their time, but also resources. It is thanks to these companies that we now have electricity around site, watering systems, pathways, ramps, repaired buildings, and so much more.
We have grown so much, not just in producing food, but in becoming a community. This is why we are on the next step of our journey — we now need to produce sustainable incomes to help us continue supporting our growing community.
We have learnt, together with the community, that to heal we need to work on mind, body and spirit at a soul level. This is where we have created and started to grow the spiritual side of our project.
We have created a beautiful apothecary and holistic shop. Every penny made here goes straight back into Incredible Edible Knowsley to support our communities. In here, we have met wonderful people and learnt that people are looking to find their inner selves.
We then started our workshops on herbs, and from there opened up our Spiritual Garden. Each Tuesday and Friday we light the spiritual fires and set the altar — open to everyone, whatever your beliefs — and offer breathwork sessions, drumming meditations, mindful exercises, and visual meditations. We leave the Spiritual Garden open throughout Friday, as some like to sit in silence and enjoy the space. Some write things they wish to release on paper and throw them into the fire; others make wishes.
Who are we? We are a community project that works with the community, that includes the community, and as a community we are coming together to support each other — and this is growing into something magical.
I feel so privileged to be a part of this — to see people come together, to see people smiling, supporting each other, just as it should be. Well… you just can't put a price on that.
— Karen Mower, Founder of Incredible Edible Knowsley and The Land of Enchantment