From its start in 1990 until last year, Jessica Davies, who has died of cancer aged 65, was the manager of the Cherry Tree Nursery, a commercial plant nursery in Dorset set up to give a meaningful occupation to people with mental health problems.
She helped take a derelict four-acre site near Christchurch and create a community and place of safety, where growing plants brought some happiness to volunteers and helped restore their dignity. The Cherry Tree Nursery has inspired many similar projects.
The only child of Marjorie, a teacher, and Henry, a civil servant, Jess was born in Epsom, Surrey, brought up in Banstead and went to Sutton high school. Her father was a Quaker and although Jess was not religious, she believed in making things better for other people.
I met her at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. Beautiful and popular, she embraced anything that could have “alternative” put in front of it, supported by a sharp intellect and well-researched views.
Archaeology was an important strand in her life – she worked on digs in Suffolk, Turkey and North Uist. While at Cambridge, she had the idea of reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow, Suffolk, on the original site of the excavation. Jess gave West Stow a strong scientific and research-oriented start – it has recently celebrated its 40th anniversary – and felt strongly that the Anglo-Saxons had much to teach us.
Archaeology took her to Dorset, where she met Adam Bailey, who became her partner, and she started working for the Manpower Services Commission, trying to find useful employment for vulnerable people. As the MSC was being wound down in the late 1980s, and those she had been helping were sidelined, Jess helped to start Cherry Tree Nursery. She came to know each of the volunteers personally and would buy each one a Christmas present. This sometimes meant buying 400 gifts, a mammoth task that took her all year.
Jess was an unassuming revolutionary. As a girl, she went on CND marches with her father, at Cambridge she was on the frontline of many demonstrations and she was at Greenham Common in 1987. Later, she used her spare time to work for the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico. She learned Spanish and overcame her dislike of flying to travel extensively in Central America, at first with Adam.
After he died in 2002, she spent several weeks each year working with the Zapatistas, helping record testimony and translate documents.
Although she had no close living relatives, Jess’s woodland funeral was attended by more than 200 people. She sustained throughout her life her ideals of equality, social justice, lack of materialism and, as she said, “the endless struggle for humanity against what is now called neoliberalism”.
