Here’s Jo Wood’s cure for a broken heart: sheep’s yoghurt and tea. And if the rock chick-turnedqueen of organics is anything to go by, it definitely works. She is curled up on a sofa in her huge, oak-panelled sitting room in a casual tracksuit, her trademark blonde hair in a wispy cloud. She’s 53 and she doesn’t look younger, she just looks remarkably good.

There’s a shoot being set up in the main hall, and the photographer, lighting man and stylists are milling around. Jo has designed a special Christmas tree — with organic decorations, of course — for The Sunday Times Save the Children Christmas appeal, and everyone’s waiting for her three-year-old grandchildren, Leo and Lola, to arrive. It’s hard to believe she has grandchildren at all, but with her daughter, Leah, and daughter-in-law, Jodie, both pregnant, she will soon have six. “I’m so excited!” she says. “I love the house when it’s full of kids.”

Jo freely admits she was devastated when her husband, the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, recently ran off with a 20-year-old Russian cocktail waitress, Ekaterina Ivanova, but she has worked hard at getting her “mojo” back. Hardly a week goes by without a picture of her at some glamorous party or other, and she’s preparing to have all the children and grandchildren over for Christmas. (Ha! Festive greetings, Ronnie.) Then she’s off with her old friend Jerry Hall and both their families to celebrate new year on safari in Kenya.

She hit on the sheep’s yoghurt at the Buchinger clinic in Marbella, where a girlfriend took her to get over the shock of Ronnie’s departure. “It was just what I needed. We went hiking, we walked by the beach every day, we had massages, acupuncture, the special diet . . . It was a good lesson in how to look after yourself — actually, in letting other people look after you for a while,” she says. “I’ve stuck with the yoghurt: I love it.”

Maybe the yoghurt — and a comforting cup of tea rather than vodka — did the trick, but it’s more likely that letting someone else look after her put her on the road to recovery. Wood spent 30 exhausting years hovering over Ronnie, sharing copious lines of cocaine in the early years of their marriage, fretting over his alcoholism in the latter, and touring with the Rolling Stones throughout, when she would look after his every need. She would travel with a portable cooker so she could whip up an organic fry-up whenever he was hungry, and choose his clothes, hanging around every night with a fresh T-shirt so he could change as he came off stage.

In 2005 she started her business, Jo Wood Organics, making beauty and bodycare products, partly as a way of taking her mind off her errant husband. “I was always worried about him: what’s he doing? He’s whipped down the road, has he gone and got another bottle? Looking back, it was like looking after a huge child,” she says.

It’s only now she is starting to get some perspective. “I wasn’t expecting any of it to happen, but I was determined I wasn’t going to fall apart. I kept going to the gym, working out, eating, sleeping, concentrating on myself. Initially, it was very hard, but the more I did it the stronger I got. So he’s most probably done me a favour.”

The Christmas tree she has designed is to be auctioned in aid of our Save the Children appeal. It’s comfortingly old-fashioned, with red and white papier-mâché decorations, strings of popcorn winding among the branches and bundles of cinnamon sticks exuding a rich, warm fragrance.

Everything’s organic. Wood has had a totally organic diet since 1991, when she was wrongly diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, put on steroids, and, subsequently, decided to go in search of a natural cure. “People thought it was really peculiar at first. I became this horrible person who would be fussing about what I was eating when I went over to friends’ houses. In restaurants, I’d ask, ‘Is your food organic?’ and they’d think I was a vegetarian. Imagine explaining to waiters what organic food was.”

Now she has an almost totally organic lifestyle, thus her determination to find suppliers of organic tree decorations. “I love to do an eco-Christmas,” she says. “I wrap my stuff in brown paper and do little drawings on the parcels. I save the ribbon from last year’s presents.”

The money raised by Jo’s tree will help Save the Children’s work in Kingsville, a village in Liberia, where the British charity supports a clinic. After the two civil wars that tore the country apart, Liberia is peaceful, stable — and desperately poor. Medical care is so scarce that one in nine children does not make it to their fifth birthday, and one in 12 women dies in childbirth, a casualty rate almost unimaginable in the privileged West, where bearing children has become so safe.

Jo’s bodycare products and fragrances have Swahili and Xhosa names, such as Amka, Usiku, Tula and Langa, betraying an intriguing link to Africa. Her great-grandfather settled in South Africa and had two families: an official family with his wife, and an unofficial one with a black servant girl, who bore him seven children. One of them was Jo’s grandmother.

“I went to Africa for the first time when my father died in 1992, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I cried when I left,” she says. “It grounded me, I came back feeling better. I really have a great affection for Africa. When I’m there I visit the little villages. The people are lovely, but their life is so, so hard.”

www.jowoodorganics.com

Jo Wood’s tree will be auctioned at the Save the Children’s Festival of Trees event at the Natural History Museum on Tuesday evening. If you would like to bid for the tree, or many other items, go to www.savethechildren.org.uk/festivaloftrees; if you would like to donate to The Sunday Times appeal, click here.