Charlotte Du Cann

Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. She also teaches collaborative writing and art, and radical kinship with the other-than-human world. In 1991 she left her life as a London features and fashion journalist with a one-way ticket to Mexico. After travelling for a decade, she settled on the East Anglian coast to write a sequence of books about reconnecting with the Earth. The first of these 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth documents an exploration into the language and medicine of plants from the Oxford Botanical Gardens to the high desert of Arizona. Recently, Charlotte has written about activism, myth and cultural change for publications including New York Times, the Guardian, Noema and openDemocracy, Her second collection of essays and memoir, After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time, centred around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, was published in 2022.

wheat

Bread of Heaven

To find satisfaction you have to have an encounter with the real world and absorb its great subtleties. It’s difficult to make the deep connections about food without meeting the people that grow the plants or bake the bread, or doing those things yourself.

August 28, 2025

Mark with flowering wormwoods

Wormwood

From here I can return to my old country, neither prodigal nor victorious, but someone unexpected, without history, without illusion, appearing beside a silvery bush whose bitterness frees the spirits of this haunted earth and colours everything green.

August 26, 2025

Standing among the cherry plums

Larder

First you taste the fruit, then you know the territory, then you find the flower. That is the way round it is. Sometimes you travel a long way to come home with empty hands.

February 18, 2025

Fire

The Gathering Fire

Something beyond history happens in these topsy-turvy moments—a crack in time, a glimpse into another way of being human. The fire is a bridge.

February 11, 2025

Crossing the Minch, Outer Hebrides.

Ocean

What happens when you leave your ordinary life behind and put your attention on the vast mysterious being that surrounds our  homelands in a time of disruption and loss?

November 21, 2024

Mark Watson

The Plant Pamphlets

From 1999-2024, Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson taught and demonstrated the art of holding a dialogue with (mostly) wild plants. Part-manual, part-memoir, this small book is a distillation of his hands-on practice, ‘hanging out’ with twelve flowers and a tree over a year: from a conversation with burdock in a community garden, to lying alongside sea kale on the Suffolk shore, to foraging for mallow leaf fritters and flower teas.

November 19, 2024

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