Niamh was born into the south-west of Ireland, where hedgerows were her first teachers and the kitchen table her first apothecary. From her earliest years she carried an insatiable curiosity for the living world – naming flowers and trees, recognising birds by their song, gathering knowledge as naturally as breath. Her father worked with wood, shaping the grain of native trees, while her mother trained in homeopathy and acupuncture, filling the house with ointments and tinctures. It was within this weave of wild land and healing craft that Niamh first began to make her own remedies, crafting simple balms and body oils from what she found around her. The ethos was clear – if something was needed, learn how to make it, and make it with reverence for what the land provides.

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On a half-acre homestead, food moved directly from garden to table, and wild harvests marked the rhythm of the seasons. Much of her childhood was spent outdoors, drawing in the fields, befriending the creatures she encountered, making herself known to the more-than-human world. The seeds of her later work were sown in those hours of close attention.

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In her school years she turned to art, but it was the encouragement of an English teacher that shifted her path towards writing. She chose journalism over fine art and moved to the city, where her work in radio, television, and publicity began before she was twenty. Stories travelled quickly through her hands, but the noise of the city pressed hard on her sensitive nature. She found refuge in quieter acts – planting tomatoes on her balcony, baking bread, walking the parks, taking the bus to the Dublin Mountains to forage and prepare what she gathered. These small rituals revealed themselves not as escapes but as medicine – ancient ways of self-soothing, and a form of resistance to the accelerating pace of the modern world.

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As her media career widened, so too did her study of health. Her mother’s struggles with addiction drew her into psychology, first at University College Dublin, then later into Jungian thought at Princeton, and onward into the fields of trauma, grief, and intergenerational inheritance. Study was never abstract for her – it was always tethered to lived experience, to the body’s quiet truths.

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In her mid-twenties a car crash altered her path. A back injury required her to pause, and in seeking to understand her body she entered deep study of anatomy, physiology, and injury repair. Soon after, a genetic condition affecting her spine was diagnosed. What might have been a sentence of decline she met as an invitation – to turn more fully to food as medicine, to crystals and natural compounds, to the chemistry and subtle energies that sustain life. Though told the condition was incurable, she reversed her symptoms and has lived without progression since 2014.

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What began as necessity became devotion – a lifelong practice of listening to the dialogue between body, land, and soul.