At the very centre of the Central Range, the heartland of Trinidad, a forest is re-growing. Part of this forest is the Ajoupa Pottery Garden, brought back from barren scrub by Bunty and Rory O’Connor for 35 years.
Bunty O’Connor tells Pat Ganase what it took to recreate a garden in Chickland.
Rory and Bunty O’Connor and their three children moved from Cascade and Santa Cruz to Chickland, in Trinidad’s Central Range, in 1989. They had bought a piece of the Les Lilas estate, last owned by Charles Melizan, with the intention to survive the recession by creating a pottery business.
For two decades, Ajoupa Pottery produced bowls, mugs, mini-ajoupa houses and other wares that were sold throughout the Lesser Antilles. The potter now devotes her time to artworks: mosaics, murals and clay creatures celebrating life in a forest.
The most serendipitous legacy of Ajoupa may be the regeneration of a garden on five acres of a Central Range hill.
Bunty O’Connor has written a detailed, heart-warming account, Re-Greening the Ajoupa Pottery Garden, in the Quarterly Bulletin of The Field Naturalist, published by the Ttinidad and Tobago Field Naturalists Club (TTFNC). You can read it online at the website ttfnc.org; look for Volume 1/2, 2023.
It is a crown and triumph of the couple’s working life and career. Moving out of the mainstream was a brave and revolutionary act, with many lessons about resilience, independence and raising children.
Most of all, it is the story of a garden, the O'Connors' home at the Ajoupa Pottery.
“Rory and I came to the TTFNC late in life. We had no time early on to enjoy the benefits of being members. It is a great organisation. You don’t have to be a scientist with a PhD to be a member, but there are lots of university graduates who are members, and they are all people to learn from.”
Shortly after they acquired a few acres of the Melizan estate, it was renamed Ajoupa, the name suggested by John Newel Lewis, architect and artist, who wrote a book by that name, after the early indigenous shelters.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, it was an estate growing grapefruit and coffee. The Melizan family owned the estate from the days of indentureship. The old people in the village told me their grandparents received their first pay packets there. I am guessing the house dates from around the 1850s. The house was built of cedar, cut on the estate with other hardwoods like tapana and fiddlewood. There were three cocoa sheds.
“One of Charles Melizan’s projects was to build and furnish a ceramic factory in the 1970s, with the help of a consultant from Stoke on Trent in the UK. When the consultant died, Charles did not have the knowledge of local clay to carry on; he left Trinidad.
"I had been making pottery for some years before and we were looking for a space to grow our business. Although the place needed repairs, the equipment was in good shape. We were able to buy the factory and find people to train in and around Chickland.”
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