One Garden for the Sake of the World
How a Church in East London Transformed its Land — and a Community’s Soul
“You can begin by mowing a path,” said Vanessa Conant, the first female Rector of St. Mary’s and the Parish of Walthamstow, East London.
Call it an axiom, motto or sermon illustration, but for Conant, mowing a path was the start of a journey that has transformed her parish church and her community.
When Vanessa Conant and her husband, Cameron Conant, arrived at St. Mary’s from Edinburgh in 2015, the churchyard was neglected and heavily overgrown. Gravestones were lost in the weeds, drug deals were going down in darkened corners of the church’s uncultivated property and neighbors were upset about the eyesore at the heart of their quaint, East London village.
“If I’m honest,” Vanessa Conant said, “I did not have an environmental ambition at first. I just didn’t want people to shout at me when I opened the front door of the parsonage.”
But gradually, as she and the church connected with community members and called on a parish member who is a professional gardener to help, Vanessa Conant said she developed broader commitments to using church property for the sake of biodiversity, wildlife and as a safe haven in the midst of a rapidly disintegrating climate.
“Graciously and generously, my understanding has been shaped by other people’s commitments and convictions,” she said. Adopting former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ notion of the church as a “learning community,” she said she not only came to see the garden from a new perspective, but her sense of the Sacred shifted as well.
A Place to Be
St. Mary’s churchyard is the largest green space in Walthamstow Village. Covering nearly three acres, it was named “Churchyard of the Year” in the 2023 London in Bloom competition. St. Mary’s has also achieved silver accreditation in A Rocha International’s eco-church scheme, with laity also leading a “Climate Sunday” service each year.
In addition to being an actively used graveyard, the church grounds are divided into several sections, including a large woodland area along a popular walkway. They also have a range of biodiversity projects, including havens for bees, insects, birds, bats and animals. Every morning and evening, hundreds walk through the yard on their way to work or school. Some stop to rest and reflect, others buzz past like the bumblebees that flit between the blooms underneath the watchful monolith of the church tower.
Working alongside church member and head gardener Tim Hewitt, dozens of local volunteers have helped make St. Mary’s Churchyard a place where Walthamstow gathers to learn about horticulture and wildlife. They plant trees and flowers and spend time admiring and engaging with the diverse range of plants and natural features that make the churchyard a peaceful place to be.
St. Mary’s, of course, is just one garden. But its impact is much broader than what happens within the garden walls.
In a world plagued by climate change and biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and science skepticism, this garden has become a Sacred invitation to look for ways to persevere in a changing world. It’s also a call for gardeners, communities and individuals to do more for wildlife in their own backyards. To care for all life, human and otherwise. The message — found somewhere between the winding paths and wildflowers, the house sparrows and hedgehogs, the climbing vines and foxes slinking through the grasses at twilight — is that one garden might just transform the world.
A Bee and Butterfly Emergency
In the UK, the effects of climate change are already stinging. Increasing temperatures, more frequent heatwaves, rising sea levels and changes in rainfall patterns have led to increased risks of flooding and drought, damage to marine ecosystems, risk to local water supplies and loss of biodiversity.
Speaking at St. Mary’s “Ground Level” event in May 2025 — where gardeners talked about how to transform properties into biodiverse sanctuaries — wildlife author and journalist Kate Bradbury detailed what she called “a bee and butterfly emergency.”
Bee and butterfly populations in the UK have experienced significant declines since the 1970s. Over 80 percent of the country’s butterfly species and more than half of UK butterfly species (31 out of 59) are now in long-term decline. Meanwhile, since 2019, the bee population has decreased by a third in the UK alone, with 35 bee species currently under threat of extinction and all bee species facing serious threats to their survival.
Habitat loss, land use changes, urbanization, pesticide-reliant farming and milder winters are having an immediate and devastating impact on species not yet evolved to deal with the changes, said Bradbury.
It’s enough to make many anxious. So, from her garden in Brighton, Bradbury writes about how her own climate-change fears have pushed her to look for positive ways to keep going in a rapidly evolving world. Calling on gardeners and communities to do more for wildlife and the climate, she is convinced there is still hope. “If you grow plants, there’s always a future,” Bradbury said.
Some scientific studies suggest she might be right — about butterflies, at least. According to a citizen science study using data from 2007 to 2020, they found that the 7,971 gardens surveyed across the UK are potentially important refuges for butterflies. They “appear to be faring better” compared to the wider landscape, the report states.
“We Need an Ethical Journey to Heal the World.”
Cameron Conant said such science-based solutions are essential to tackle climate change. But a solely scientific approach, he said, is not enough.
As communications officer and trustee for Operation Noah, a Christian charity working with the Church to inspire action on climate change, Cameron Conant said it’s vital to remember and center the Sacred in any approach to the problem at hand. “I take more of a Wendell Berry perspective,” he said, referencing the American environmentalist and author. When he looks at the world, he does not see sacred or un-sacred places. Rather, he sees sacred and desecrated ones.
The solutions for such desecration, he said, cannot be solely scientific. They must also be fundamentally spiritual. Recalling the Ground Level event at St. Mary’s, both he and Vanessa said it was wonderful to have experts in the fields of biodiversity and gardening come to the parish and share their experience and expertise. “We’ve got all the science, but that’s not bringing the change,” he said.
Looking to churchyards in particular, Cameron Conant said, “what is possible in these places is the bringing together of science and horticulture and human endeavor and faith.” The bifurcation of science, technology and spiritual life is a false and unhelpful distinction, he continued. “I don’t understand the silo-ing of those things as an effective strategy,” he said.
When it comes to climate change, both Vanessa and Cameron Conant hear from people who want scientific or technical solutions that involve no change — as if we can continue living our lives of consumption without any amendment, any sacrifice.
As Vanessa Conant said, “we need the capacity to sacrifice and sanctify ourselves. We need character and value and virtue and a spiritual summons to live more simply. Those cannot be shaped by purely secular, market forces. We need an ethical journey to heal the world.”
Of Pocket Gardens and Pathways
When it comes to their churchyard, the Conants have discovered how tending to nature becomes a way of tending to humans and their souls, too. “The religious life is the constant opening up to process of change,” said Vanessa Conant. “So is the process of gardening.”
The Conants are not alone in this process of broader growth and discovery that centers the sacred nature of caring for the environment — and the sacred nature of hope.
From grassroots movements to sustainable agriculture, environmental ethics to the theological grounds for divestment from the fossil industry, there is a growing awareness around how we must address contemporary environmental issues: that it is necessary to understand the complex, reciprocal relationship between human cultures, spiritual traditions and the earth’s living systems.
Cameron Conant’s work with Operation Noah has positioned him at the forefront of major milestones in the fight against climate change, including the end of the Anglican Church’s investments in fossil fuels in 2023.
Now, although skepticism persists, groups within and beyond the Church of England are calling for more transparent, and sustainable, use of church property. The focus is on better serving the environment, reducing emissions and rescuing wildlife numbers in steep decline.
Churches own approximately one percent of all land in the UK. So, in its new “Land Use Vision,” Operation Noah calls on churches across the country to develop sustainable farm practices on their land – such as protecting 30 percent of land for nature and restoring 100 percent of degraded peatland. This will help develop more biodiversity and achieve net zero land emissions by 2030. Encouraging Christians to sign a campaign letter to UK Church leaders, they have already collected over 500 signatures.
Jo Chamberlain, National Environment Officer at The Church of England, said Operation Noah is offering sound principles. But they are calling on people to use land that many may not realize the church owns. The process, therefore, starts with people like Chamberlain working with dioceses to help them understand what land they already have, what is happening on it and what opportunities may exist.
“It’s more of a slow burn, soft approach,” she said, “encouraging people to think, observe, then plan and take action.” Chamberlain encourages parishioners and community members to begin by spending time in their local churchyards to see what they can see, open their eyes and dream of what might be done differently.
For Chamberlain, being in nature is a way of engaging with the Creator that is different than when one is in an indoor place of worship. “Appreciating and noticing what’s in the churchyard is a profound thing,” she said. “If you’re in a church, you have icons, banners, stained glass — all these symbols,” she said. “Outside, you have a different set of symbols and icons, a different way of relating with God.” The natural world is its own divine sanctuary, deserving of all the reverence and care and protections offered to places of worship constructed by human hands.
To that end, Chamberlain has seen a range of faith communities take nature and climate change more seriously — particularly through A Rocha UK’s “eco church” scheme. Part of an international network of environmental organizations with a Christian ethos, A Rocha UK equips churches in England and Wales with a program to better care for creation. In the first six years since it was launched, over 4,500 churches joined the learning community.
As part of the process, many of them, like St. Mary’s, have rethought the ways they use, manage and even perceive their land. London’s St. John’s, near Waterloo Station, has chosen plants for its extensive gardens that are drought-tolerant and nectar-rich for pollinators. They are tucked amongst borders of exotic shrubs, alongside a wildlife garden which is alive with bees from their apiary. Meanwhile, St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, also in London, invested 1.1 million British pounds in air source heat pumps and underfloor heating, combined with responsive electric heating, insulation, LED lighting and other major upgrades to achieve net zero carbon emissions.
Even the prominent church Holy Trinity Brompton has been making significant strides. An Anglican congregation spread across six sites in London with around 3,500-4,500 worshippers every Sunday, the church is perhaps best known for being the place where the world-famous Alpha evangelistic course originated in the 1970s and 80s. More recently, working with SUGi, an American conservation organization that supports afforestation following the Miyawaki method, the church planted pocket gardens on its property near Hyde Park. Scattered throughout their “wild pathway” are signs reminding visitors and worshippers “the Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. (Psalm 24:1),” and underscoring their commitment to “improving our environmental practices and promoting a sustainable future for generations to come.”
“Church yards have to be maintained anyway, eco church or not,” Chamberlain said. “It’s the responsibility of particular church communities to take care of their yard. We are not telling them to do more, but to do different.” To broaden sacred-centered action and take a more holistic view of spiritual action — one that necessarily includes us and our surrounding environment.
Vanessa Conant wholeheartedly agrees. She has found through the process of “doing differently” at St. Mary’s that the effort to tackle climate change is not only about divesting pensions and diverting funds but, in a world of desecrated spaces, viewing everything – every place, every person, every garden – as sacred.
The key to transformation, she said, is to start. As a learning community, the church is full of students determining, together, how to be better stewards of the planet and sustain its biodiversity for decades to come.
To that end, she challenges us all to consider the question: What paths might we mow in our own lives, literal or spiritual, to begin healing what’s been desecrated?
“If you’re open, you’ll change,” she said. “Not always quickly or easily, but the process will change you.”
By Ken Chitwood