It was during her first winter in Orkney that the nature writer Victoria Bennett experienced the joy of baying into the sea during a storm. “There’s something very physically releasing about howling,” she says. “It’s quite animalistic and powerful.” On a stormy beach, when waves are crashing on the rocks, “you can really let rip”, she says. “The sound just disappears.”

Until that moment, Bennett had been struggling with her decision to move to the remote archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. “I was beginning to feel like I was in a fight against the sea, and against the weather.”

As the storm began, she frantically weighed down the contents of her nascent garden – the first she had ever owned – and felt a little frightened. There is no way to get off Orkney in bad weather, she says: “We can’t even go to the main town, the barriers get shut, and if you’re walking, you can get blown down the street.”

But a few hours later, as she stood on the shore and howled into the wind, the feeling that she was in a battle with the elements evaporated.

In her forthcoming memoir about her first year on Orkney, The Apothecary by the Sea, Bennett describes how she first visited the archipelago of more than 70 islands and islets more than a decade ago.

On the anniversary of the day her sister drowned in a canoeing accident, she went down to the seashore and cried her heart out into the salty wind. When she got back to England, the islands “whispered” to her, she says, urging her to return and make her home there.

By the time she heeded their call, it was 2022 and she was 51 years old. “I was ready to find my own shape again, and Orkney was where I needed to be to do that.

“I needed to be there, by the sea, in that strange, flat place,” Bennett says.

But that first winter, after she upended her life in Cumbria and bought a Victorian terrace house in Orkney with her husband and 14-year-old son, she felt vulnerable and, at times, frustrated.

For Bennett – whose 2023 nature book, All My Wild Mothers, won the Nautilus award for memoirs – the solution was to turn her back yard into an apothecary garden: a reflective space full of traditional medicinal and culinary plants that would nourish her, body and soul.

But she soon discovered that this would not be easy on Orkney. “When a wind comes from a certain direction off the sea, in 24 hours, the garden gets wiped out. That happened twice last year. The salt-burn destroyed everything.”

Forced to accept the dominance of the sea over the land, she began to swap plants that could not survive such onslaughts, such as elderberries, for similar but hardier species, such as fuchsia berries. “That’s part of what living here involves: an acceptance that whatever I’m growing is in relationship with the sea, with the elements around me.”

The garden is fertilised with foraged seaweed and she has learned to look at the plants that flourish on the coastline when she goes swimming in the sea, which she does every day.

“Thrift, sea campion, roseroot – the coastline showed me what I could grow, because if it would grow wild there, it would grow in the garden.”

Bennett’s small walled garden, which measures 9 sq metres, has a central circular spiral bed of medicinal herbal plants, surrounded by a circular path. This is bordered by a micro-woodland of goat willow, elder, wild garlic and bluebells, as well as dwarf fruit trees, roses, wildflowers and larger apothecary plants such as mint, geranium and catmint in sunnier spots.

“There is a focus in the borders on colour, pollinators and scent,” she says.

She also grows Mediterranean and culinary herbs such as oregano, rosemary, tarragon and marjoram in pots on her patio and has a half-barrel pond of aquatic plants with marsh marigold and water mint, surrounded by flag iris and goldenrod.

“There’s not much room to stand in,” she laughs. “But I find it very peaceful and I love seeing the wildlife that live in it.”

Orkney is so far north there are up to 18 hours of light on summer days and an equivalent amount of darkness in winter. Bennett feels there is something magical about the islands – “something caught in the expanse of sea and sky, in the contrast of light and dark”.

Especially in winter, she says, living there has shown her “the most beautiful light is found in the darkest time”.

Now 54, Bennett is chronically ill: she has hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that causes joint pain and digestive issues, and genetic haemochromatosis, which means her body absorbs excessive iron.

Learning that she must stop fighting with the wind and the sea in her garden has taught her a bigger life lesson: that she must treat herself with more compassion and forgiveness, and love her body with all its flaws. “Coming here and growing this garden by the sea has helped me loosen and release into the ebb and flow of life,” she says.

Letting go can be necessary, she understands now, and what seems like a loss can, with acceptance, be reframed as an exchange – just as, when the tide goes out, the waves are exchanged for the shore.

“Relinquishing control and allowing my garden to be what it is – without wanting it to be something else – was a really important way of understanding that in myself.”

Michael, the big-budget Michael Jackson biopic, has shrugged off bad reviews and a troubled production to launch with a $97m opening in North American theaters, contributing to its enormous $217m (£160m, A$303m) worldwide box office and shattering the record for the biggest biopic opening of all time.

The film, a highly authorised portrayal of the “king of pop” that was co-produced by the Jackson estate and stars Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson, took $120.4m internationally and $97m domestic – combining to surpass Oppenheimer’s $180.4m worldwide opening weekend in 2023 and Bohemian Rhapsody’s $124m in 2018.

The film has now opened in most of the world – one notable exception being Japan, home to a huge Jackson fanbase, where it will open in June.

Michael’s $97m domestic debut also surpassed records set by previous biopics in North America, including Oppenheimer ($82m in 2023), Straight Outta Compton ($60.2m in 2015) and Bohemian Rhapsody ($51m in 2018).

Critics have criticised Michael for glossing over some of the less convenient aspects of Jackson’s life but audiences have been far more enthusiastic: on Rotten Tomatoes its critics score is 38%, compared with 97% from audiences. A few weeks back, estimates for Michael’s North American opening weekend were closer to $50m but this rose to $70m – which it wildly overperformed.

“From the beginning, all of the signals were that something like this was possible,” the Lionsgate chairman, Adam Fogelson, told Associated Press. “We were seeing massive engagement with every conceivable audience segment that you could identify.”

Even in the lucrative market of music biopics, Michael was an audacious bet by Lionsgate on a controversial figure. The reputation of Jackson, who died in 2009 at the age of 50, has been repeatedly tarnished by allegations of sexual abuse of children. Jackson and his estate have maintained his innocence, though the pop star acknowledged sharing a bedroom with other people’s children. He was acquitted in his sole criminal trial in 2005.

Some Jackson family members opposed the film: his sister Janet Jackson was uninvolved and doesn’t appear in it, while Jackson’s daughter, Paris, called it “fantasy land”.

The film also had an unusually rocky production. After shooting was completed, producers realised they had made a costly mistake. The third act focused on the accusations of Jordan Chandler, then 13 years old, whom Jackson paid $23m to in a 1994 settlement. The terms of that settlement barred the Jackson estate from ever mentioning Chandler in a movie.

A huge chunk of the film was cut and reshoots for as much as $50m were done at the estate’s expense. Director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter John Logan reworked the movie to conclude in 1988, before any accusations were made.

“I would take issue with the idea that we as a studio or as film-makers were running around in a panic,” Fogelson told AP on Sunday, labelling it “a unique and challenging circumstance” instead.

Yet as bad as things once looked for Michael, the movie turned into a huge hit. The film’s total production cost came close to $200m. To defray costs, Lionsgate sold international distribution rights to Universal. A sequel is in development. A third film after that, Fogelson said, is “not inconceivable.”

Director Antoine Fuqua has said he would like to direct the sequel, telling Deadline on Sunday: “It would kill me if somebody else did it.”

Cut footage could be repurposed as the shoots went “pretty far”, Fuqua added: “We went through the Jordan allegations we couldn’t use. We went farther than that. Maybe a year or two after that (1995) when things turned against Michael.”

Plans for Michael were first announced in 2012, three years after the release of Leaving Neverland, the 2019 documentary about Jackson’s alleged sexual abuse of children. The Leaving Neverland director, Dan Reed, recently told the Guardian: “It kind of fills me with horror, the degree to which everyone can turn a blind eye to the fact that this guy was a bit of a monster.”

Bohemian Rhapsody, the Queen biopic, remains the highest-grossing music biopic of all time after taking $910m at the global box office, while Oppenheimer holds the record for overall biopic with $975m.

Associated Press contributed to this report