The Nature Of Hope: In Conversation with SSAW Collective

SSAW Collective is a group of florists, growers and chefs. They speak to us about their dedication to living, cooking and eating in line with nature’s seasons and why the conversation around who has access to fresh food is more important now than ever before.

Words by Aimee Hartley

SSAW Collective is a trio of florists, chefs and growers exploring the nature of seasonality through events and collaborations. Chef Lulu Cox, and florists and growers Olivia Wilson and Jess Geissendorfer have an intuitive understanding of how food and flowers, and the act of growing, can bring us closer to both nature and ourselves. Their combined frustration with a faceless, industrial growing system – of being disconnected from the produce they were working with – led them to each other, and SSAW came to life. 

SSAW has since become a platform to support other voices in the regenerative space – a way of farming and growing without chemicals and fertilisers that nurtures life in our soils. Cutting through heavily weighted rhetoric around the future of food, SSAW’s events make space for conversations that are rooted in hope. We talk to Lulu, Olivia, and Jess about how to invite people into the world of regenerative farming, the importance of a hope-based language, and how we can ally ourselves with each other and mother nature. 

How did SSAW Collective come to being?

Jess: We were all doing jobs where nature was the ingredient but felt really disconnected from the process of how it (food and flowers) came to be in our hands. We all wanted to start again, with growing at the centre of what we do. 

Olivia: Working in this way has totally changed our perspective on the food that ends up on our plates and the flowers in our vases – this is something we wanted to share with others.

Lulu: We were all really frustrated by the limitations and facelessness of the supply chain – of not always knowing where our produce and flowers were coming from and the people working with them. We realised that we were all asking the same questions and that SSAW could be a platform to explore them together.   

What does being part of a collective mean to you?

Olivia: Culturally, there is huge pressure on individual success. I’ve gained more personally from working as a collective, one that has a very feminine energy. Society seems to want to tear down the idea of female collaboration as one that is rooted in competition and jealousy. SSAW is an antidote to that.  

Lulu: We were really clear that we wanted SSAW to become something bigger than the three of us. Whether through our events or our journal, we wanted to shout out the people who we work with. This is such a core principle that we don’t even think about it anymore, it's just become second nature. 

Jess: I often think about acts of kindness or the fact that you can offset stress through kindness. As Olivia says, culturally, there is so much pressure on the individual to act and take responsibility. SSAW is a collective space where kindness and community can flourish beyond the pressure we put on individual action.

Your values are so closely woven into the work you do. How does this shape the nature of your collaborations? 

Olivia: We really do what we say on the tin – working seasonally and supporting the people who share our values. When it comes to partnerships with other brands or businesses, we’ve become increasingly confident in saying what we can and can’t do. Anything you want to do with integrity takes time – especially when it comes to growing. Our biggest challenge is communicating this in a culture where convenience has become second nature. 

Lulu: A lot of what we do is educational – looking at ways to remedy the disconnect between our industries and how seasonality affects them as a whole. It's hard work and a slow burn, but we want to work with people who genuinely want to be a part of that change.

Jess: So much of what we do is about communication. If you're sourcing from small scale farmers for an event, anything can happen. Chickens could escape from the farm and eat the tops off of the flowers you were hoping to use. Spring frosts can cause havoc. Promises always need to be caveated based on the (unpredictable) nature of the seasons. 

Events can be a powerful way to tell stories and invite people into a space they might not venture into otherwise. How do they help you communicate your world to others?

Olivia: Our events are about showing as much as telling. We want people to experience something that is a true representation of seasonality. It sounds a bit cheesy, but they’re also about translating the world we see – the taste of something seasonal, the simple beauty of a flower. It’s a space to pause, to create an opportunity for people to see what's already there.

Lulu: They’re about bringing in different voices from across industries and exploring how they intersect. It's also about making space for joy – for conversation and connection. It feels like we’re all so hungry for that, especially since the pandemic. 

Jess: In Mediterranean countries, people still take time to sit around a table and eat together – it's ingrained in their culture. Our guts react not only to what we eat, but how we eat it. At our events, we think as much about the environments we create as we do the food that we serve. 

The cost of, and accessibility to “good food” feels like a tricky conversation to navigate. It's pretty striking that compared to the 1950s, the average UK household spends roughly half of what it used to on food. How do you feel about this?

Lulu: This is a hard one for us. We want our food and events to be accessible, but we know we can’t compete with companies who are using cheaper ingredients, often shipped in from other countries or made in bulk using chemicals or fertilisers. It creates a very distorted idea about the true cost of food and flowers, and access to these things has become a choice that only some people can afford to make. 

Olivia: We want everyone to be part of the conversation, to be armed with knowledge about the true value of things, and the true cost of growing things well. But this still feels like a privileged stance to take, and it's something we’re really aware of. We need to take the pressure off of the individual and look towards creating wider system change to tackle our flawed agricultural system. We can’t keep criticising each other about our personal choices otherwise we’re all just going to lie on the floor and do nothing. It needs to be an invitation, to be a part of something bigger. 

Jess: This is where we feel like we can make a difference – as a growing collective of voices as opposed to a series of individuals. 

How can regenerative agriculture help us better connect with our food, and ourselves? 

Jess: Knowing where our food and flowers come from, and who grows them, gives what we do and the people we share that with, more meaning. Conventional farms today look really different than they used to. Since industrialisation and the use of pesticides kicked in after WWII, the number of people working on farms really dropped. There is a big disconnect between farmers and the food they produce, which can be felt in the disconnect we also feel with our food as consumers. 

Olivia: While intuitively it's the only way I know how to work, sometimes I feel conflicted about the nature of regenerative farming. I often feel like I can’t always see the beauty of it when I'm growing because it's physically hard and for financial reasons, I don’t have the help I need. You want to give yourself the space to think about it more holistically, but the reality is that you’re firefighting most of the time.  

Lulu: I think we need to better value human input in the growing of our food, and regenerative farming can help us do that. Helena Norberg-Hodge (the founder of Local Futures) is an amazing writer and thinker who believes humans are the best environmental solution to create change. We need better supply chains that prioritise people over technology, but this is a work in progress. 

As women, nature’s cycles – spring, summer, autumn, winter – seem to intuitively reflect our own. Has working with the land changed the way you relate to your own bodies?

Lulu: The type of work we do – cheffing and growing – already means that we’re breaking down typical gender stereotypes. Farmers and chefs are often male and white, and the work is often really physical. Personally, though, I don’t think I think I'm very good at being in tune with my cycle. Weirdly, since I became pregnant, I’ve felt much calmer in my brain, like I have more clarity and feel more grounded and sure of my convictions. 

Jess: Reading Period Power by Maisie Hill made me think so much more about my cycle and how I connect to it. It's amazing to think that we go through all four seasons every month, but equally troubling to know how little this has been talked about until recently. 

Olivia: My relationship with my body has changed since I started growing flowers. Nature is beautiful despite being imperfect, and this idea has helped me feel more comfortable in myself. The nurturing aspect of what we do also has a very feminine energy to it. While connecting with my body in this way still feels very new, I feel excited that it's becoming a more natural part of the conversation for a younger generation of women. 

Read the other stories in our FOOD edition.