Green Goddess

She's the former model who swapped the catwalk and high heels for wellies and a life down on the farm. Lucy Siegle travels to Devon to Meet Sheherazade Goldsmith - one half of the eco movement's most glamorous couple
I'm grateful to Mrs Zac Goldsmith before I even meet her. The wife of the multi-millionaire editor of the Ecologist has left me a voicemail message confirming arrangements, which also reveals how the hell you pronounce her name - Sheherazade. Having canvassed opinions from a variety of sources, I'd become very unsure. Turns out, it's said how it's spelt, without the weird inflections I'd been trying out. So, in one way, I'm nicely prepared. In another way, I'm not, because Sheherazade is such a slip of a girl, as your grandmother might say, that for a moment I wonder if we've got the wrong 300-acre estate - after all, there are a number of big landowners in Devon. Against a cavernous hallway she looks like the prettiest girl in the fifth form and not a mother of three - 'Everyone is always surprised because I look about 12,' she says later.

A few years ago, when it was a fashionable expression, she'd have been known as a 'yummy mummy'. Being young - she's just 30, well-heeled, a small size eight and fashionably attired, she fits the criteria, including, of course, a clutch of angelic-looking children - Uma, four, Thyra, two, and James, one. And it's a brood she'd like to increase. 'I'm addicted to that age between nought and three months,' she admits. 'Very dangerous, because you always want more.'

She also has what you'd describe as a 'pleasant speaking voice', pleasingly plummy but not too clipped. Like many faintly aristocratic types, she often sounds as if she's just getting to grips with the age of technology and television. So she'll say, 'I mostly drive one of those four-wheeler motorbikes' - meaning quad bikes - the Goldsmiths' concession to petrol-powered vehicles and, 'I saw a Panorama programme on television. Did you see that Panorama programme about the way a Dutch firm was injecting beef protein into chicken? There was a Panorama programme all about it.' Then, when we're watching six Gloucester Old Spots running around a field, she says: 'If pigs are in a big field like this, well you can't smell any shit.' It's a bit like a children's presenter swearing.

Neither are pig-husbandry techniques, beef proteins, water-meat ratios and the shortcomings of industrialised agriculture your usual conversational openers. But she's fired up by a couple of days in Italy at a Slow Food festival. The Slow Food movement promotes and nurtures small, low-intensity, low-environmental-impact food producers and fights the destructive march of industrialised agriculture. Sheherazade presents articulate and impassioned arguments for organic production and natural farming, and rails against supermarkets and the government, quoting an impressive amount of statistics. I had, quite unreasonably, assumed that her husband, Zac, being the editor of the Ecologist and a well-known environmentalist, would be the one with all the strong views. Zac took over the Ecologist in 1997, the same year in which his businessman father Sir Jimmy Goldsmith died. But she can clearly hold her own, particularly when it comes to her specialist subject, children's food.

Not that she'd dream of preaching to her friends, though she does sometimes phone their local authorities to order recycling bins for them, and she has been bulk-buying copies of the two most feisty polemics on the conventional food industry, Shopped by Joanna Blythman and Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence, to give to friends for Christmas.

Mostly, she says, their friends take the piss out of her and Zac for being eco warriors. 'If one of the children is ill they'll say, "God, your lot are always sick. It must be all that organic stuff."' But she understands scepticism. In fact, she explains, when she first met Zac six years ago, her favourite food was white bread and Marmite. 'Zac had to persuade me about the whole food issue.' Evidently the girl's no pushover: 'The only way I was convinced was through documentation. He would present me with official reports. Of course, this is all six years ago when there just wasn't the widespread information.'

Official documentation aside, she thinks becoming a mother automatically makes people more ecologically aware; and then, of course, there's the farm. 'If you spend any time outdoors, working with animals, you see that natural, traditional farming - I don't necessarily think of it just in terms of being organic - makes a great deal of sense.'

To present some extra evidence, she finds me a pair of pink wellies and takes me on a farm tour. The land is beautiful. It might border the moors but it's more rolling pastures than Brontë bleak. She and Zac have done a lot of work since they moved in five years ago: planting hundreds of trees, flower meadows and creating a wildlife pond - 'There's a massive difference between the amount of birds we hear now and the few we heard when we first arrived,' she insists. 'And the whole place is full of butterflies in the summer when the flower meadows blossom.'

But while the ecosystem's all trotting along nicely, they haven't been able to green the manor house to the extent that they would have liked. 'We really wanted to put solar panels in the roof, but,' she adds regretfully, 'it's a Grade I listed building so we can't do much with it.' Most people would consider that kind of heritage a bit of a boon, I suggest. 'Yes it's a beautiful house,' she reasons, 'but the truth is we didn't even see it before we made up our minds to buy. We'd only seen the land. I said to Zac, "What about the house?" and his response was, "I don't care about the house." He'd already fallen in love with the land.'

In fact, she has a hard time dragging herself away from either house or land these days, but Zac needs to be in London for part of the week. And now Uma has started school she says, 'It's really important that I'm around for her all the time.' Not that Sheherazade isn't at home in London. Born and brought up in Chelsea, she sheepishly confesses to being one of those pretty posh girls who spent her teenage years hanging around McDonald's on the King's Road. 'I do look back and cringe, only appalled that my girls might do the same one day. It makes me think even more that I must move out of London as quickly as possible. Every time I see a young girl walk past with her bellybutton out, or very low-slung jeans, I just sort of cringe like an old woman.'

But given that she's not an old woman, and could feasibly still be hanging out in London with her own midriff on show, does she ever think that she and Zac have taken on quite a lot of responsibility for a young couple? There's the house, the land, the London life, the kids, the animals - including three herds of Dartmoor ponies, kept purely to protect the species, and even three different types of compost to be maintained. She's also started a course on practical horticulture. 'If it works as part of your life, it doesn't exhaust you,' she reasons. 'Coming down here is ideally how we'd like our lives to be. It doesn't feel like I'm running it, it feels like I'm living it.' She did, however, give up her newpaper column on organic food when pregnant with James.

'I loved doing it, but it was very stressful with two small children, never mind three. I'm not a natural writer and I did find myself phoning them up and telling them the children had vomited on my copy to buy some more time.'

With that particular stress out of the way, they've also managed to stock the farm to take into account that they're not there full time: 'For example, all our animals are hardy, and relatively low maintenance. The Gloucester Old Spot pigs are well suited to this area. We've planted hundreds of apple trees and they eat everything we don't. The sheep are tough - we haven't lost any lambs to foxes, and the cows are South Devons ... and obviously perfect for this environment.' Not that, of course, the livestock are left home alone. They inherited a 'brilliant' farm manager, Peter, who was the previous film producer-owner's gardener. 'He was really being under-utilised,' Sheherazade explains, 'and he doesn't have to be told about organic systems because he naturally farms that way anyhow.'

The farm means that they are almost self-sufficient - but, again, because they're not there full time, they no longer produce butter or cream. 'I do think we have the best sausages in the West Country, though,' she says. If she stops and thinks about it, before her white bread and Marmite phase, Sheherazade says she was 'brought up to value good, natural food'. Especially each summer, when she accompanied her nanny, Lola, back to Northern Spain to her village.

Lola is still with the family, now looking after Sheherazade's children. 'She's wonderful; she's always been with me and now she's like a grandmother to my children.' Right on cue Lola appears and there's much chat, half in Spanish, half in English, about the baby alarm. Sheherazade also speaks French and Italian, which allowed her to be 'terrible at school because I knew I could just do languages'. So she got three A grade A-levels in French, Spanish and Italian plus a B in English, and 'the teachers hated me'. At 17 her formal education ended when Richard Branson spotted her in South Africa - she was accompanying her mother Vivienne, a travel PR, who now lives in Miami - and put her in touch with Sarah Doukas at Storm.

'I got involved in that [modelling] because frankly it's a great thing for giving you instant independence.' She mainly modelled for catalogues such as Littlewoods, and insists: 'I was really quite bad at it. I just didn't like it because I felt like I wasn't achieving anything. Therefore it lowered my self-esteem a great deal. You know, I'd get a bit depressed. You just feel very pointless. And Milan was really seedy; it was everything they say it is, and more. Milan was the last straw for me.'

She concedes that there are some bonuses to modelling: 'You get to go to all these amazing places you'd never get the chance to visit.' I raise an eyebrow, because it wasn't as if she was from a family that didn't have the means to travel. 'What I mean is, you're fast-tracked to the most beautiful and interesting parts of a country on a shoot. If you're interested in travel that's a real bonus.'

As it transpired, it was a fortunate thing that Sheherazade managed to indulge her travel bug back then. 'The thing about travelling for me now is that if you lead quite an environmental life it is a big issue. So you do think about things like needlessly travelling across the world for no reason at all.' However, their decision to limit their flights is not just environmental: 'Zac is pretty fearful of air travel, actually,' she admits, 'and silly as it might sound, since 9/11 there's something at the back of my head about putting the children on a plane.' Cutting back on car use has been more difficult, because it 'was a much easier option. But Zac found it very difficult to come to terms with preaching about using the roads for importing and exporting food, and then driving backwards and forwards to Devon.' As we walk round the farm, I keep a lookout for a sneaky Maserati or some other high-performance vehicle to prove that Zac's a secret petrol head. But apart from the quad bike there's nothing.

The family conduct their peripatetic lifestyle courtesy of the rail network, so how's it going? 'Um, it's fine. Except everyone else on the train hates me, but it's amazing how quickly you can clear a carriage when you've got three children,' she laughs, 'We do go in first class, but we might not really bother. The second we get on everybody moves.' Recently, Sheherazade got a reminder of her old modelling days when she and the children sat for Mario Testino for a Vogue shoot. Did she enjoy that? 'Well, Mario Testino is such a nice man and he's the best,' she begins by saying, which suggests there's some less positive information to come, 'and I'll look back in 20 years and I'll be really happy that I had a picture taken by Mario Testino, but ...' she doesn't find it easy to be rude about people, 'actually my children absolutely loathed the experience. They were so annoyed. James fell asleep, Thyra told Mario to go away and leave her alone. We were there all day, it was too long and the children were just bored. And it was funny for me because they got very feisty about it and were behaving badly, and I couldn't stop laughing, which didn't help. They were saying, "Can you just ask them to sit down?" And I said, "No they're just little children."'

It's not surprising her children were bored. A stifling photographer's studio must seem like torture when you're more accustomed to'digging in the soil and feeding the sheep', playing on swings (sustainable wood, of course) or if you have a reconditioned gypsy caravan in your garden.

I wonder if they're showing the same interest in the environment as their parents? 'I definitely see that they're not afraid of nature,' says Sheherazade. 'Even my little girls are not afraid of frogs or snakes or spiders or anything like that. Whether or not they'll be passionate about it, I'm not sure.' I suggest it's unlikely they'll end up driving gas guzzlers and running supermarket chains. 'Zac and I laugh sometimes, because we say we'll spend all these years planting trees and so on, achieving this, then we'll die, and the children will go, "Let's chop down the forests or get some GM seeds in."' She watches the sheep making their way up to some young trees they planted. 'Obviously I'd like it if they didn't.'

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