The Sacred Gardener

Steven Martyn

M.A. (traditional plant use), B.F.A. honours, artist, farmer, wildcrafter, builder, teacher, writer, visionary.

Steven has more than thirty years experience living co-creatively with the Earth, practicing traditional living skills of growing food, building and healing. Steven created Livingstone & Greenbloom in 1986, Toronto’s first green landscaping company.

In 1996, he created the Algonquin Tea Company, North America’s premiere bioregional tea company. He has given talks and run workshops internationally for more than twenty years and taught plant identification and wilderness skills at Algonquin college for 11 years, and at the Orphan Wisdom School for eight years. In 2014, Megan and Steven started the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School. Steven released his first book The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden in 2016, his second, Sacred Gardening in June 2017 and The Roundhouse in 2022.

Learn about:

Consultations with Steven.
Speaking engagements with Steven.

Megan Spencer

Megan is the co-creator of The Sacred Gardener where she shares her divine food creations, made from wildcrafted and cultivated herbs and vegetables. She is a visual artist that works in the local community, the chair of Green Burial Ottawa Valley and a lover of stories, ideas and wild people. She is passionate about sharing how to preserve food through fermentation and integrating herbs and wild plants in our daily lives.

Check out Megan’s work at meganspencer.ca.

The Sacred Gardener

The Sacred Gardener was chosen for our farm/school’s name because it conveys something that we feel is unique in our approach to both growing and teaching here on the farm. While there are many places, books and ways to learn about gardening or working with the Earth, there are very few that put the needs of the Earth first. This means not just thinking about production and convenience for ourselves but making the effort to step forward gently with real ecological/spiritual integrity.

In everything we do we try to honor the ancient agreements with Nature. These agreements, which enabled our ancestors to survive and us to be here now, have long since been ignored and forgotten by western culture. Even radical forms of “environmental” action like organic gardening, permaculture and wilderness skills such as hunting and foraging are done with little or no thought as to the consequences of what we’re taking. We are always in the center of our thoughts and move forward with unflinching entitlement to what we take.

Kind Words

“The Sacred Gardener has taught me the elements of a most basic human way of honouring Earth. With Steven’s guidance and Megan’s culinary arts, I was offered a path to engage dynamically with Earth’s gifts of nourishment. Their approach has given me an intimate understanding of what is asked of me by plant beings in order to find my proper place in the natural order. I feel a greater sense of being at home and of knowing who I am. There is no other way of thanking The Sacred Gardener than to tend carefully in my corner of the world to the seeds they have sown.” – Lorraine

“Spending these past two years with Steven and Megan at The Sacred Gardener School has been the most life-affirming time for me in so many ways. Steven’s ways of teaching about plant and land life takes you to a place that resonates with a deep remembering of how it is to be with those kin that have supported us since birth. Steven invited us and wove ways each time we came of being in relationship, strengthening our understanding of reciprocity to the land and all the living animate beings that we dwell with. Over the two years, Steven’s ability to hold space and nurture opening our hearts and spirits in a gentle way to our humanness and to what we are indebted to was extraordinary. Megan along with her beautiful assistants provided the container and the sustenance through which we were nurtured and held every day. So needed and welcomed! I have never been so held by a people and place as The Sacred Gardener School allowing for learning to be rooted, deep and meaningful. Bringing home with me a deeper understanding of what is available to us in the plant and tree world and how to deepen my relationship to all those that we live among. ” Warmly, Barb

“It is a gift to have discovered a school whose teachings are truly alive and attuned to what is needed at this strange time that we find ourselves inhabiting. The Sacred Gardener is for those seeking to brush the dust of deep forgetting from their eyes and bodies. Steven’s constellation of teachings, from traditional skills and herbalism to story to ceremony, creates a space for remembering the indigenous soul and its ability to be in relationship with the living earth. Megan and Steven’s beautiful partnership is woven with integrity and playfulness, and I am so grateful for everything that they offer.” – Jonelle

“Such a sense of sanity and wellbeing is found at the Sacred Gardener. Daily living is reduced to simple tasks that connects us to ancient ways that are being remembered and cultivated in relation to the land. Time and space are orchestrated in a way that allows one to sink in and come to know a place as well as an expanded sense of self. Steven and Megan work in a collaborate dance to bring a fullness to the teachings that are offered. Time spent a the Sacred Gardener is a perfect antidote to urban living for those who desire a better way to life. Gratitude for your teaching and all that is being offered through your efforts,” – Barbara

“The heart and soul of The Sacred Gardener are the cocreators, Steven, Megan and Mother Earth. The School facilitated a time to ground, reconnect and tune into the divine gifts and wisdom of Mother Earth. Steven weaved his practical, ritual and spiritual teachings so beautifully, supporting and enriching my personal growth on all levels. Above all, I’ve incorporated the teachings and rituals that resonate with me strongly, which has made a shift in my thinking and my perception of the everyday. Megan nourished my body and spirit by lovingly transforming the harvest into delicious satiating handcrafted meals. Steven and Megan’s complimentary partnership always has me leaving feeling whole. I eagerly look forward to our second session‎, to continue our journey in community!” – Melissa

“I arrived for the first session of the Sacred Gardener School, after a day of travel from San Francisco. More than one of the participants, remarked about how long it was to travel, and wasn’t there anything like this where I live? No. No, there isn’t. Nothing even close that I know of. I am a licensed herbalist and acupuncturist, and I have my finger on the pulse of the herbal schools, permaculture courses, and Buddhist meeting groups in my region. What Steven and Megan are living, teaching, and inviting us to embody – is in a category all itself. At the Sacred Gardener School, I experienced the integration of a deep love and reverence of and for the Earth, with the practical skills of homesteading. The days were rich with insight and medicine – for the soul, belly, and lineage. This school is everything I have been looking for, and has refined my compass of where to aim my heart and my life, moving forward.” – Amanda

Sacred Gardening

Long ago before these agreements were forgotten it was clearly understood that we survived through the gifts and grace of the land. While all animals must take to survive we are designed to work within the cycles of abundance that the Earth provides. But humans are born takers, just look at our hands; we can reach outside the gifts of abundance causing imbalance and harm. As hunters and foragers, we did not just have respect but had deep reverence for that which gave us life. This reverence and the need to heal what is out of balance is the origin of art. When we took anything, even what we now think of as “dead matter” like stones and sticks, we keenly felt the hole that was created. In reverential thankfulness we prayed, danced and made images and stories, not to fill the hole – because this is not possible – but to feed that which we have taken from.

When humans first began to garden it was a ritual to feed that which gave us life. Gardening is a literal metaphor of reverence. When our ancestors dug up roots we would create a rift or hole in the ground. We would respond by seeding the ground with prayers and the offspring of the plants (the seeds) then pat our offering gently into the wound. Through this beautiful procreative act we were rewarded with more food and so we made more seed offering and grew more with each passing year. We married our families to the plant families and gave ritual payment each year. The agreements proceeded well for everyone because as we took more land to grow we also took less from Her, from the rest of the Wild that gave us the plants and land to grow. To honor the contract of more land and keeping seeds of the Wild we created altars in and around our gardens to feed the deities of the plants and growth. Not one action of planting, harvesting or tending passed without a prayer for She who gave us life. This is the basis of Sacred Gardening.

In Steven’s Words

In the early 1980s, I learned how to forage before I learned how to garden and I think this changed my view of what gardening could be. My vision was of a co-created area of intensive polycultural foraging that honored the Wildness in and around the garden, as opposed to the fascist dictatorship of Nature that we see even in most organic gardens. As I was working with co-creating this form of garden I traveled to the highlands around Chiapas Mexico and found people (the Lacadonian Maya) who had been practicing gardening this way for millennia.

When I came home after six months I started an M.A. at Trent U. on the topic of “Native Plant Use and Gardening in the Southern Algonquin Bioregion.” From this research I fully realized what I had stumbled into – the original form of gardening – I’d stumbled into Eden. I realized that European Gardening – the standard by which we judge and categorize other “more primitive” forms of gardening, however efficient, was, in fact, a historical anomaly. And that even what we call the Neolithic period and the start of agriculture is skewed because of our backward view of what we think agriculture is – a large monocultural field. Forms of human agriculture started at least a hundred thousand years before when we think it did.

Agriculture is not just something we invented it is practiced by many animals and is, in fact, part of the continuum of evolution here on Earth.