Our Story
In 2014 best friends Kate Mosley and Amy Shepherdson came together to create The Garden. Since then we’ve grown and flourished from small seeds to fully-fledged fruition as a health and wellness destination - and there’s still more to come!
A place where health and happiness go hand in hand
The Garden started life after we spotted a huge gap in the market for a healthy, plant-based eatery in Hale – but the inspiration behind it was intensely personal. I (Kate) am a huge lover and now teacher of yoga and I started juicing after my sister introduced me to the health benefits – quickly leading to a love of all things healthy and nutritious – raw desserts, smoothies and plant-based food. I couldn’t believe that you could eat well and it could taste amazing…it blew my mind that food could be healthy and taste delicious! My husband Chris and I quickly found we had nowhere to go out to eat – as there weren’t any healthy, wholesome options locally.
At the same time Amy’s Dad was sadly diagnosed with cancer. She began to research the benefits of an alkaline diet, raw living foods and veganism, learning about and implementing this knowledge to support him as he underwent treatment. Together our exploration of health and wellness gained momentum, as we began to incorporate our newly found knowledge and experimentations into a lifestyle.
Tragically Amy’s Dad passed away in April 2013. It was a huge wake-up call for us and we decided to just go for it and partner in business, setting up a wellness space to share our love of delicious, healthy, plant-based food with the local community. I left a secure job as a primary school teacher and Amy jumped in with both feet despite the pain of recent events – but we followed our hearts and trusted in our concept completely.
With that, the seeds for The Garden were sown – and once the decision was made the universe conspired to make it happen. Originally the vision was for a juice bar or raw food café concept – but that soon expanded into a healthy eatery serving up deliciously nutritious food. The perfect place opened up in Hale, the vision for the space itself came together beautifully and a nutritionist came to help us create our healthful, wholesome I Am Well tonics and juice cleanses. It all happened for us within the space of a few months – we felt fearless and driven by destiny, aligning with our true purpose. We opened our doors on 9th December 2014, and we’ve been bringing our delicious plant-based, nutritious cuisine to the people of Hale ever since!
Seeds of change
The Garden’s philosophy is all about sustainability - healthy body, healthy mind, healthy earth. We are a small, independent business and our values are fuelled by true love and passion for everything we do. We’re committed to sustainable business practice – we’re not perfect, but we’re constantly improving and introducing little initiatives to ensure that we are as eco-conscious as possible. Our ‘Love Your Mother’ sustainability campaign, launched in 2018, focuses on earth-friendly products and keeps us accountable for sustainable business practice.
The Garden concept has expanded into a holistic wellness hub over the years, building an amazing community of like-minded people and becoming a source of education through offering wellness workshops and events.
My husband Chris joined the team in April 2017 opening and running our commercial kitchen premises, which is where we produce all our cold-pressed juices, smoothies, raw cakes and bakes. We offer juice cleanses locally – and are soon to launch our online nationwide juice delivery service!
Our future growth
In December 2019 we celebrated our fifth anniversary – and with so many exciting new developments on the horizon we hope you’ll join us as we continue to promote plant-based cuisine and prove that healthy food can be delicious and daring. Thank you to everyone who continues to support us and our vision of wellness and holistic health for all. We always love hearing from our customers so if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback please feel free to reach out to us via email kate@thegardenhale.co.uk. We hope to see you at The Garden very soon!
Lots of love,
Amy and Kate xxx
