Bridgeton star Adjoa Andoh reveals her backyard is her ‘sanity’

On-screen, she’s the regal Lady Danbury in the hit Netflix romance series Bridgerton, but, in reality, Adjoa Andoh is anything but afraid to get her hands dirty.

In fact, getting her hands covered in mud is a pastime that the Bristol-born actress, 60, calls her ‘sanity’.

The actress, who has also starred in the likes of Brotherhood and Invictus alongside Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, now lives in a Victorian house in Brixton, south London, having moved from the Cotswolds.

Despite moving around, nature has been a constant for Adjoa, making gardening not merely a hobby but an activity she owes her mental and physical wellbeing too.

Speaking to the Telegraph, the actress revealed: ‘My garden is my sanity. It’s my constant reset. I feel my blood pressure go down the minute I step into it.’

British actress Adjoa Andoh (pictured), best known as Lady Danbury in Bridgerton, has revealed the health benefits gardening has on her 

As such, Adjoa’s first act of every day, regardless of the season, is to step outside into her garden, dressed in her slippers and nightie.

The actress will take time, even if it’s just five minutes, to be in nature – letting her Labrador Millie out for fresh air at the same time.

She explained: ‘There’s something about being in the garden that makes you slow down… that halts the speed of everything, no matter how busy you are. For those precious few moments, it’s just you and the plants.

Adjoa roots her love for the outdoors back to her childhood in Wickwar, a small village in the Cotswolds, where she moved at age four.

She can still envisage the garden today – filled with delphiniums, foxgloves, lupins, hollyhocks, and roses.

Her mother would keep the garden brimming with fresh produce during the summertime, growing strawberries, raspberries, peas and beans.

The thought of her childhood garden fills Adjoa with warm memories, a feeling she attempts to recreate in her own green space today.

She added: ‘In many ways, my garden now is an attempt to replicate the garden of my childhood.’

To start each day, Adjoa (seen in April 2024) will step out into her garden in south London for five minutes 

Adjoa’s career means she can be away from her garden for prolonged amounts of time at once, leaving things to grow wild.

But the first thing the actress will do once she’s back from set is get on her gardening gloves and get stuck in.

But aside from making her green space look pleasant to the eye, the 60-year-old believes that the practice instils life lessons.

In a world where instant gratification rules, gardening makes Adjoa remember to enjoy the wait.

It comes after Adjoa revealed how racism has blighted her life – from having her head smashed against walls at infant school to being barred from friends’ houses and potential boyfriends, then seeing her parents’ divorce contribute to a nervous breakdown.

The actress, born to an English mother and an upper class Ghanaian father, told how she would not even have been born if her mother’s ‘racist’ sister had her way and prevented her parents’ marriage.

The couple eventually did go on to tie the knot in a wedding boycotted by her mother’s side of the family, including her mother’s parents.

The Bridgerton star told how the suffering started as early as infant school, where any school friends she did make forced her to leave their homes before their parents saw her. 

At secondary school she even became a punk because boys were scared to go out with her for fear of getting in trouble with their parents.

Adjoa Andoh has revealed how she was blighted by racist bullying while at infant school, before detailing how she suffered a nervous breakdown after her parents’ divorce

Asked what her first memory of pain was, Andoh – who played Lady Danbury in Bridgerton – said: ‘Having my head smashed against the wall in the infants, and it’s a traditional Cotswold stone county primary school, so Cotswold stone it’s bumpy.

‘You know like in the Beano you had ‘”Gnnhhh!! – all those exclamations of pain. As my head would hit I would see stars, but I would also see the cartoon bubble of “Gnnhhh!!” ‘

She said the violence only stopped when she learned to headbutt people, adding: ‘It stopped when I realised there was this thing I could do to make it stop.

‘I was aware of being walloped a lot, and then I was aware of having to fight back, but I sort of thought that was what happened at school until I was a bit older and friends would say “Oh, we’re going to go back to mine, we’ll have to get out before my mum comes because you’re not allowed in our house”.