L'Abri Subtilia was a six-hectare agroecological holding in Normandy — a working landscape of fields, forest edge, and diverse habitat, home to sheep, horses, chickens, and donkeys, and run by a family with a vision of farming, floristry, hospitality, and education woven together as a single way of life.
Over three years I worked in close collaboration with them — helping to form and expand that vision as much as to implement it, pushing the possibilities of what the holding could become and establishing the systems to realise them.
The work spanned the full landscape. A one-acre market garden, a forest garden, polytunnels and propagation infrastructure, and intensive composting and biological fertility systems formed the productive core. Beyond that, the whole landscape was connected through slow, steady ecosystem management — replanting trees and saplings, light-touch margin management to increase habitat diversity, and holistic grazing to move animals through the land in ways that supported soil health and ecological function.
The holding produced food for the household and guests, flowers for weddings and installations, and hosted residential courses that brought people into direct contact with integrated land practice.
Of all the projects I have worked on, this one had a quality the others rarely match — the quality that comes when land is genuinely lived in rather than managed from a distance. The connections between the family, the animals, the soil, and the seasons were real. That realness showed in everything. It is a reminder of what land stewardship looks
