Botanical Products
Psyche
Christchurch, NZ
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Psyche is inactive from March - August. 🦋 We'll return in September 2026.
Welcome to Psyche | the Garden of Theophora
Welcome to Psyche | the Garden of Theophora
Psyche began as a butterfly host-plant garden and has grown into something larger: a botanical brand born from a single, self-sustaining garden in Christchurch.
For eleven years we have raised butterflies. Now, with our own soil at last, that garden does more than shelter them — it sustains itself. The ancient Greeks had a word for this: the oikos, the household that provides for its own, tended with care so that nothing is wanted and nothing is wasted. That is what Psyche is. The beds that feed caterpillars also flower, seed, and yield; the harvest becomes what we make; and what remains returns to the soil to begin again. Every Psyche product is drawn from that one closed circle — a small sanctuary keeping itself.
Our first Monarch Butterfly release, in 2015.
What's behind the name
What's behind the name
Psyche (Ψυχή) is the Greek word for the soul — and, in the same breath, for the butterfly. One word held both, because the Greeks saw the same truth in each: a life that transforms, leaving one form to rise in another. In myth, Psyche was a mortal woman who, through love and trial, was made immortal — the soul that passes through hardship and emerges winged.
That is the meaning at the root of this garden. Everything here is built on transformation and return: egg to caterpillar to wing, seed to bloom to harvest to soil. Psyche is the soul of the garden made visible — the patient change that turns one thing into the next, and gives it back.
Our future offerings
Our future offerings
Butterfly Host Plants
Butterfly Host Plants
Grown from our garden — the essential food for the caterpillars of local butterflies. The beginning of the loop, and the beginning of your own butterfly garden.
Botanical Products
Botanical Products
Seeds of butterfly host plants
Worm castings
Pressed-Flower Cards
and more!
Our host plants and seeds follow guidance from the Moths and Butterflies of New Zealand Trust. 🦋
The Closed Circle
The Closed Circle
This is the idea at the centre of everything we make.
The Hellenic household was meant to sustain itself — to give and receive in balance, wasting nothing, returning what it took. Psyche is built on that principle. Not sustainability as a modern add-on, but the old, patient logic of a garden that keeps itself.
The garden grows. Host and nectar plants sustain butterflies, bees, and pollinators.
The harvest is gathered. Flowers and foliage become hydrosols, potpourri, and pressed-flower keepsakes.
Nothing is wasted. Spent greens feed our rabbit, Charli; her manure and our worm farms become rich fertiliser.
The soil is fed. That fertiliser returns to the beds — and the circle begins again.
Every Psyche product is one turn of this circle, offered to you: the plants that begin it, the harvest it yields, and the fertiliser and castings that feed it onward. The soap-water and the manure are not opposites here — they are the same principle, seen at different points in the round.
Find us at the markets
Find us at the markets
Throughout the year we take our stalls to markets around Christchurch and Selwyn. Each market features one primary brand from the Theophora family — so you might find Psyche's plants and botanical products there, depending on the season.
Beyond Psyche
Beyond Psyche
Psyche is the Garden — but it's one door among many in the Theophora family. The garden's harvest doesn't stop here.
Aphrodite | Bath & Body
Aphrodite | Bath & Body
Where the harvest becomes ritual — botanicals grown in our beds worked into soaps and bathing goods.
Melissae | Beeswax
Melissae | Beeswax
The pollinators the garden feeds, and local hive's gifts in return — beeswax candles, wraps and essentials.
Life at the Oikos 🐇
Life at the Oikos 🐇
The household the closed circle runs through — including Charli, Head of Earthworks.
Why Choose Psyche?
Why Choose Psyche?
Built on an ancient principle. The self-sustaining oikos — the household that feeds itself and wastes nothing — is the idea every product is drawn from. Sustainability here is not a feature; it is the foundation.
A closed circle you can hold. Plants, harvest, and fertiliser are three points on one round — nothing bought in, nothing wasted between them.
Grown, not just bottled. Every product traces back to one garden, our own, not a supplier's warehouse.
Eleven years of practice. Not a new venture dressed as heritage, but a decade of raising butterflies, finally rooted in permanent ground.
Hellenic in spirit and in principle. Psyche — the soul that becomes a butterfly — names the garden's meaning: transformation, care, and return. Made alongside Theophora's Aphrodite and Melissae lines, part of one considered ecosystem.
Our philosophy: the circle keeps itself.
Our philosophy: the circle keeps itself.
Everything here belongs to one round — the garden feeds the butterflies, the harvest becomes what we make, and what's left returns to the soil to begin again. Nothing is bought in to prop it up, and nothing is wasted between the turns. That isn't sustainability added on top; it's the old logic of the oikos, the household that provides for its own. When you take home something from Psyche, you're holding a single turn of that circle — and helping it come round again.
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Your opinion matters
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