My friend Mehr Fardoonji, who has died aged 95, spent 60 years developing and running the Oakcroft organic market garden in Cheshire, one of the earliest farms to be registered with the Soil Association.
She made her living selling the fruit and vegetables she grew there, while supplementing her income for many years as a yoga teacher. An early participant in the British yoga revolution, she collaborated with June Johns on her book Practical Yoga, published in 1974.
Mehr was born in Lahore, in British India (now in Pakistan). Her father, a businessman, died when she was five and afterwards her mother, Dinah, took Mehr and her brother, Ferdinand, to Britain for their education. After attending Great Moreton Hall near Congleton, a boarding school run by Manchester city council, and then Mary Datchelor girls school in Camberwell, south-east London, she went to the London School of Economics.
Graduating with an economics degree in 1953, she then returned to India, travelling overland alone for several months and working in a kibbutz in Israel along the way, before training to be a village worker in Sevagram, Gandhi’s ashram. Afterwards she spent four years in Shantipur, in the foothills of the Himalayas, helping to settle 63 families of landless labourers on to land near the village, where they farmed co-operatively.
On her return to England in 1959, Mehr and her mother settled at Oakcroft, where the house had extra accommodation for visitors and workers on the four acres of the market garden she developed and maintained. She also had a spinning wheel and was a potter and a knitter. Many of her workers stayed for years and became long-term friends. In 1990 she married Nicholas Gillett, a Quaker teacher and peace activist who joined her at Oakcroft.
A member of the Chester branch of Women for Peace, she was regularly involved in protests against cruise missiles in the 1980s, and visited the Greenham Common women to provide supplies and moral support. She also taught various courses, including yoga, for the Workers’ Educational Association.
Mehr will be remembered for her warm smile, her humanity, her decided views, indomitable spirit, vitality, and her concern for the future of the planet. At her death her land at Oakcroft passed to the Soil Association, as she had wished, so that it can always be farmed organically.
Nicholas died in 2008. She is survived by his five children from a previous marriage, and by 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
