Two years ago, Mayela and I flew to Spain to spend a few days at a garden nursery in Catalonia, learning about holistic planting.

On the surface it looked like any other commercial nursery, but here the signs at the end of each raised bed read Heart, Digestion, Liver rather than the more usual Perennials or Alpines. Each bed was planted with varieties chosen specifically for particular health complaints. The staff brimmed with knowledge and were eager to share it with anyone who cared to ask.

The gift shop held a few souvenirs suitable for the foreigner abroad, but the majority of the shelves were filled with salves, creams, lotions and potions, all made on site using plants grown in the surrounding fields.

As we approached the nursery on that first morning, we walked past fields planted specifically for the manufacture of their products. One field had long strips of plastic sheeting with plants growing at regular intervals along its length — masses of yellow flowers waiting to be harvested.

As the only English person in the party, nobody else quite understood my astonishment at seeing rows and rows of dandelions deliberately planted from seed and cultivated as a crop.

A weekend wasn’t long enough to absorb the wealth of information available. Before leaving, we asked for their list of twenty must-have plants for any holistic garden bed so we could source them at home. Not all were readily available — cannabis being perhaps the most well-known complication.

Surprisingly though, many were native to the UK, so over the last two years we’ve been slowly developing our own holistic bed for teas, salves, face creams and natural bug sprays. This year we’ll be trying our hand at soap making and, with plants such as calendula, mint, rose and lavender thriving here already, it feels very much like the beginning of a new learning adventure.

What began as simple curiosity is gradually shaping into something we hope to share with others next year — gentle, hands-on days centred around the garden, herbs and traditional plant knowledge, inspired by everything we first discovered in that Catalonian nursery.