bridget o brien

“It’s the amount of love of heart that you pour into your work that determines how meaningful and beautiful it will be.”

 

Mata Amritanandamay 

About Garden Juju Collective

Bridget O’Brien and Dr Charlie Brennan lead a team – of designers, experts, skilled practitioners, tradespeople and passionate workers – that we have come to call Garden Juju Collective.

We have many years of experience of a wide range of projects, clients, places, challenges, opportunities and solutions. Charlie and Bridget also travel widely visiting, acknowledging and learning from, as many successful projects as they can. We are dedicated to finding ways to sustain, regenerate and heal places, communities and people. We specialise in creating ways to put aims, ideas, dreams, desires into action. To make it happen!

Garden Juju Collective offers a range of in-person and online workshops, presentations, services and packages. These draw together design, facilitation, social ecology, food justice permaculture, conservation, rewilding, sustainability, environmental education, ecopsychology and deep respect for Indigenous land and culture.

Fully aware of the difficult times we live in, Bridget and Charlie create, travel and teach to support empowered change – to inspire and for the sheer joy of it all.

“…brilliant, artful and functional

design ideas.”

Here’s how ‘Garden Juju Collective’ came about.

Initially it was a bit of a joke. ‘These fruits are delicious juju’. ‘Some people are gardeners and others are not’. ‘We’re never alone, we’re always a collective, even if we don’t feel it’. Ooh look at those roses – they’re so full of sensuous juju. ‘This place has bad energy…’. ‘Pass me the juju sauce please’. And then it became more serious. Only yesterday I wrote ‘juju is the doing’ i.e it’s the energy of making life-full decisions and then taking action. More on this….

Gardening is about cultivation. The current mainstream ethos is exploitation, depletion and running complex systems down. ‘How much can I make out of this?’, ‘What can I get for me?’. Gardening is a set of skills, craft, creativity, aesthetic courage, physicality, sensitivity, and being embodied and grounded. Being in creative relationship with all life. But it’s more than that.
It’s to design and re-create gardens, conservation projects – to work with land and plants – yes. Gardening is also to work with people, organisations, ideas, values, economics, identity, social culture, fashion and aesthetics. It is to be totally focused upon creating regenerative ways of being in the world.

Real gardeners are unusual (these days). They relate equally to both the human and the more-than-human worlds. They are kind of partly in the human-centred world but they also have at least one foot in the other, wider world of life. Their network of felt relationships is wide and alive – way beyond the human-centred world. There’s so much power out there..

Juju sounds a bit like the juice, the essence, nutritious life-fullness – the deepest pleasure. We use this word respectfully. Juju, in Japanese Kanji and Chinese characters, is giving and receiving, transfer, changing. In Hindi, Juju is jump, jumping in and to jump-start. Juju can also be an object that has been intentinally infused with magical power or it also can refer to the West African belief system involving the use of Juju. For us, Juju is ‘play’. We respectfully work with energy, spirit, flow, sacred places, ancestors, and place –  shaping, renewing, and creating. Enjoyed, celebrated but not taken lightly – deepest respects for place, culture and Elders.

We are never alone; we never do anything alone – even if it feels that way sometimes. All life is fundamentally connected and we’re about exploring, re-joining and rejoicing this collective. Plus in this line of work you can’t do it alone. The sheer physicality of working with the land requires collaboration. At this time in history it requires collective energy to push back against mass destruction. Cooperatives are the new way, again. We connect with others through our projects and workshops to share resources, ideas, skills and opportunities. We are part of the 10’s of millions of people around the planet working to find ways to Design. Heal. Grow. ! in, and on, our amazing planet.

charlie photo

Dr. Charlie Brennan

Passionate about cultivating connections.

PORTFOLIO

Our work in action.

bridget photo

Bridget O’Brien

Passionate about planting many forms of food and medicine.