Much of Niamh’s path has been spent with her hands in the soil and her heart turned toward community – tending seeds, gathering stories, and building places of renewal. Close to her own hearth she began with small, steady gestures – saving seed, planting teaching gardens, and opening ways for children and young people to learn the old intimacy with herbs and wild edibles. Each season she leads workshops that return people to the medicinal plants of their own landscapes, and since 2014 she has tended a summer hedge school – a gathering for young wildlings shaped by story, play, and kinship with the living world.

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Her care for accessibility has taken many forms. She established a free holistic health library and opens her clinic each week for pro bono consultations. She also founded a mobile clinic that continues to travel into the margins – remote, underprivileged, and war-torn places – carrying trauma care, creative therapy, and rites of passage into communities where belonging has been broken.

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As a conservationist, she began the Future Forests reforestation programme – gathering wild native tree seed, raising saplings, and returning them each year to the land. Alongside this she tends rare native medicinals from seed, coaxing them back into strength until they are ready to return to the wild. Her care extends also to the cultural landscape: she hosts gatherings of story, song, and dance, keeps alive traditional skills, and records the lore of her home ground in Ireland. She has also founded both the Alpine Mindfulness & Sacred Ecology Network and the Alpine Wise Woman Gatherings. Each of these projects has been carried entirely through her own teaching income and offered back in the spirit of reciprocity.

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In the autumn of 2024, a freak storm tore through the woodland near her mountain home, leaving the earth raw and scarred. Out of that devastation she co-founded the Heartlands Community – a long-term, self-funded habitat restoration project. She leased nearby land to establish a tree nursery and cultivation site, where wild saplings, pollinator plants, and rare medicinals are now being grown for replanting. Around them a living sanctuary has begun to take shape – a medicine wheel garden, edible beds, a wild colour garden, a native perfume garden, and a pollinator meadow – with plans stirring for a pit kiln, a hazel-framed teach allais (Irish sweat house), and willow groves to feed the old crafts. The Heartlands Community is both ecological repair and cultural renewal – a commitment to restore vibrant woodland and meadow while creating a place for learning, gathering, and remembrance.

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Guided by the belief that if you build it, they will come, Niamh’s longer vision is to open a not-for-profit, self-sustaining healing farm – a place of restoration for creatives, for those carrying burnout, and for those seeking reconnection. It will hold a traditional earthwork space for contemplation, a Celtic Tree of the Year grove, and a sky garden open to all.

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She now divides her time between the Alps, the Balkans, and her native West Cork, where her father and sister still live. Her mountain home, shared with her pack, runs on solar and hydro power, with the long-term aim of reaching zero waste across house, clinic, and work. Here she tends vegetables, fruits, berries, herbs, and medicinals from seed, while gathering wild foods and medicines from the land through the turning of the year.

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Here, as across all her work, she carries the same devotion – to restore, to remember, and to offer what endures.

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If you would like to get in touch with her, she can be reached via the contact form on this website.

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