In the BBC Radio 4 Illuminated series “we journey together in some strange and fascinating places, like the community by the sea, founded by a group of utopians who somehow turned rough sand and soil into an unlikely Eden.”

In this programme, which was aired on 19th October 2025, we are treated not only to interviews with present Community members Jonathan Caddy and Judy McAllister but also to a lot of historical recordings, including the voices of Magnus Magnusson, Peter Caddy, Dorothy Maclean and Robert Ogilvy Crombie (ROC), and performances from the early days.

This treasure trove alone makes the programme well worth listening to, yet there is more than that, as the producer Jonathan Webb endeavoured to record sonic traces of higher elemental worlds during his stay at Findhorn. He weaves all this together into an intriguing programme with echoes and reverberations of the Community’s ‘magic’.

The programme received several positive ‘Pick of the week’ style write-ups in major British newspapers, which  according to  Jonathan Webb “is hugely surprising because it’s quite an unusual, narrator-less audio piece“.

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You can listen to the programme on the BBC website. For international readers it is available on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify.

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The following is a synopsis based on the transcript of the programme:

In the vast, strange world of spiritual communities, few places shine as brightly—or as bafflingly—as the Findhorn Garden on the sandy shores of the Moray Firth in Scotland. This programme takes us back in time to this unlikely Eden, where in 1962, a small group, led by Peter and Eileen Caddy, along with Dorothy Maclean (who in the early days went by the name of Davina), set out to transform rough scrub into a miraculous garden.

The Miracle in the Sand

The community began simply: a caravan, sandy soil, and a radical belief. When the Caddys and Dorothy first settled, the land was nothing but scrub, yet, in time, astonishing things began to happen. Visitors from around the world marvelled at a horticultural miracle: plants of all varieties didn’t just survive on the meagre sand – they thrived. Stories of forty-pound cabbages, gigantic carrots, and lush growth filled the air.

The secret to this phenomenal success, they explained, was not mere organic husbandry, it lay in cooperation with nature’s unseen forces. Dorothy Maclean was able to communicate telepathically with the devas, or angelic intelligences, that serve as the architects of the plant world. Through her attunement, she received practical advice which guided their gardening practices. This contact with the devas, gnomes, and fairies was the spiritual power plant that fuelled the extraordinary growth.

Faith and Fellowship

In the 1970s Findhorn became a spiritual community, a ‘university of light’, drawing people from all over the globe, from young ‘executive drop-outs’ to the over-seventies. Newcomers, like one speaker who sold their house and gave up their job to come, often found themselves wavering, struggling to reconcile the enormous, mystical concepts with common sense. They arrived wanting to see the ‘fairies dancing on the toadstool’ but found a warm, friendly community centred on attunement – a form of meditation intended to connect with the higher spirit worlds.

While many members, like ROC, claimed to see and converse with the “little folk,” others admitted they only held a faith that these spiritual presences existed. Sceptics remained, wondering how to test these ‘mystical experiences’. Some rationalised the garden’s success with the massive amounts of composting, but the Findhorn faithful insisted there was an undeniable, spiritual factor at work. They believe the entire world of nature spirits is a great unity, and the veil between levels of consciousness is thinning.

In the end, whether one sees them as living light, energies, or simply a reflection of humanity’s fervent need to believe that there is more to life than the mundane, the story of Findhorn Garden persists. It is a place where sincere intention and love for the plants, backed by a firm belief in the guidance of the devas, transformed the unlikeliest of landscapes into a bountiful, and sometimes baffling, paradise.