Self-taught gardener, digital creator and author Anya Lautenbach talks to Jessica Jonzen about how she created her spectacular garden at a fraction of the cost, and recovered from crisis at the same time
THE LAVENDER HEDGE ANYA CREATED THROUGH PROPAGATION. IMAGE: BRITT WILLOUGHBY-DYER
It’s a funny thing to interview a friend, yet this is what I found myself doing with Anya Lautenbach, known to her 1.2 million followers across social media as @anya_thegarden_fairy.
Anya and I met in 2015 at the school gates; our eldest children were starting in the same Reception class and our youngest were just babies and only a day apart in age. Her abundant creativity and positive energy have always been a source of inspiration, both to myself and to my children. A playdate at Anya’s house is never predictable; they might watch some chicks hatch in the incubator, hold a Praying Mantis, investigate the moth trap, or see the beehives being checked, all in the surroundings of the magnificent garden she has created almost entirely through propagation.
So, it gladdens my heart – and does not surprise me one iota – to see that the magic Anya creates for her family and friends has translated with such success to her legions of devoted followers. As well as sharing her easy-to-follow video tutorials for how to propagate flowers and how to make use of free and natural resources, Anya generously shares her experiences of ADHD, which she was diagnosed with in adulthood. Indeed, her Instagram profile declares that she is ‘powered by ADHD’ and she uses her platform to encourage conversation and awareness of the condition.
Anya’s enormous popularity has led her to write her first book, too. The Money-Saving Gardener: Create your dream garden at a fraction of the cost is a comprehensive, accessible and inspirational guide to propagating and growing from seed, to create a beautiful garden inexpensively and in harmony with nature. Even more impressive is that Anya has done this all in her third language. “When I was approached by the publisher to write the book I joked to my husband, ‘do I even know 40,000 English words?’” she laughs over a cup of coffee in the kitchen of her home in Buckinghamshire.
Anya’s vast horticultural knowledge has been gleaned from lived experience. She grew up in Poland, the eldest of two daughters raised by a single mother who loved horticulture. “She would grow the most beautiful roses, always saving the best ones for my birthday in July and would constantly tell us the Latin names of every plant, which we found extremely irritating. Now I’m doing the same thing with my boys,” Anya laughs.
ANYA LAUTENBACH IN HER GARDEN, SURROUNDED BY THE SEA OF NARCISSUS ‘PHEASANT EYE’ GIFTED TO HER BY HER MOTHER-IN-LAW. IMAGE: BRITT WILLOUGHBY-DYER
They lived with her grandparents in the house they had found after the war, when they returned to Poland after five years of hard labour in Germany. “They had lost everything,” Anya says. “Before the war, my granny had a governess and a butler, but she would say that she had been lucky because she worked in the fields so never experienced hunger; there were some horrendous stories.”
The family survived on little money and self-sufficiency was a necessity. “Only Polish people really know what I mean when I talk about necessity,” she says. “In the 1980s, the only thing available in the shops in Poland was vinegar – you could buy as much vinegar as you wanted but nothing else. So, if you didn’t grow it, you didn’t eat it.”
Anya’s family propagated plants and grew their own fruit and vegetables, swapping with neighbours for the greater good of the community; surely the root of Anya’s approach to sharing her knowledge through social media, and now with her book. “I believe that propagation made my childhood a happier place; seeing roots develop and harvesting your own vegetables creates so much positivity. People were traumatised after the war and didn’t have access to therapy, but they found joy in growing plants.”
By her early teens, Anya knew she wanted to explore the world beyond Poland’s borders. “I looked at the map and thought Germany was the key to the rest of the world,” she says. “I realised that I would need to learn German, so gathered all the books I could find and every night I would write German vocabulary on a roll of old wallpaper I’d hung in my bedroom. I would read them aloud and learnt quickly.”
She discovered there were German classes available on Saturday and Sunday mornings. “For three years, I would ride my bike for 40 minutes to get to my classes, come rain or shine – and it can be minus 20 degrees in Poland,” she says. “My mum would say she didn’t know how I did it every weekend, but I knew that I had to push myself to achieve something.”
Anya realised her dream and moved to Germany to go to university yet felt terribly homesick once there. “I called my mum from Berlin and told her I wanted to go home, and she said, ‘buy a plant: remember, home is where your plants grow.’” Comforted, Anya propagated a few plants on her windowsill and as she saw them put down roots, she felt herself doing the same. “It taught me that home is a state of mind.”
In 2008, she moved to Scotland to learn English, working at Mohamed Al Fayed’s Balnagown Castle. “I couldn’t even speak a sentence of English when I came here,” she says. “It was tough. I’d quit my business development job in Germany and was cleaning toilets; not speaking the language was humiliating and it was a barrier to meaningful relationships or conversations and day-to-day life, but I was determined to learn, and my plants gave me a sense of belonging and made me feel grounded.”
Having moved south to Buckinghamshire, she met her husband who shares her love of the natural world. “The first thing he told me was that he had an allotment and ten beehives. He would sit and listen to the birds, which my grandfather used to do. He reminded me of home; he was home.”
CHEERFUL MUSCARI POT DISPLAYS. ON THE LEFT IS MUSCARI AUCHERI ‘OCEAN MAGIC’, WITH M. ‘BABY’S BREATH’ ON THE RIGHT. IMAGE: BRITT WILLOUGHBY-DYER
They had their first son, moving to their current home in 2012. Occupying an idyllic spot in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the house has half an acre of land bordering on woodland which teems with wildlife, but the garden itself was completely bare when they moved in.
Despite having so much positivity in her personal life, Anya felt isolated and low. “I did struggle a little bit; my son had silent reflux and I felt trapped,” she says. Then she received devastating news from home about the health of young members of her family.
“I had my little baby, the butterflies were flying, the bees were making honey, the birds were singing, and I was totally heartbroken,” says Anya. “One day, I’d had more bad news from home and after I put the phone down, I put my baby in a little swing, took a spade and started digging the garden. I was frantic; not wearing any gloves, just digging and crying – I didn’t even know what I was doing.”
Yet this crisis was the beginning of Anya’s life-changing garden. She asked a neighbour for some lavender cuttings which grew to become her now-famous lavender hedge. Her late mother-in-law, herself a devoted gardener, encouraged Anya to take cuttings from her garden in Durham and passed on her knowledge about creating a garden in a sustainable way.
“Propagation followed me, and I went back to my roots,” she says. “I had no control over my situation, but propagating brought me a level of peace – I was creating life. It reconnected me to the previous generations; I felt comforted by my granny, even though she was no longer there, and it made me want to create for the future generations.”
Within a few years, Anya had grown an idyllic garden all while working full time and bringing up her two boys. While the garden began in a state of grief, she found that she was gardening for joy, and this continues to inform her approach. “I like to keep it relaxed and do it in harmony with nature,” she says. No ‘instant impact’ garden centre plants for her: “where is the sense of satisfaction in that?” she says. “It’s expensive to garden that way, and the journey and the process of growing a garden are just as rewarding as the success and the results.”
In 2019 she felt ready to share her garden, uploading some photographs to Instagram, and her following quickly snowballed. “When I started making video tutorials, I could start to see that I was making an impact on people’s lives through the messages I received,” she says. “I got so much positivity and sharing my knowledge is my way of giving back – that was how I was brought up. I want to inspire people and for them to know how positive gardening can be, and that with propagation you can create a spectacular garden for a fraction of the cost.”
Anya has big ambitions for the future and wishes to use her platform to share the positivity of propagation for wider social causes. “There will be people in jail, or refugees or people in temporary accommodation and they will have found themselves in a place that is not their home, but growing plants and creating life can help them to feel grounded and more positive about the future,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where you come from, or where your story began, you can write your happy ending.”
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