Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival

Product Information

This book emerged from a deeply rooted desire to share the stories of women who are silenced and overlooked. In doing so, Alice fosters connections with gardeners that unfurl into a tender exploration of women’s lives, their gardens and what the ground has offered them, with conversations spanning creation and loss, celebration and grief, power, protest, identity and renaissance. When I wanted to know why women turned to the earth, I thought about some of the reasons. I thought about grief and retreat. I thought about motherhood and creativity. I also thought about the ground as a place of political change, of the inherent politics of what it is to be a woman, to be in a body that has been othered, dismissed and fetishised for millennia. I thought about the women who see the earth as an opportunity for progress and protest. Anne is a Fellow of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists, a Member of the College of Practitioners of Phytotherapy, and a Member of the Ayurvedic Professionals Association. On paper, my 20s looked great: a fun job, a nice place to live, a seemingly stable relationship and enough disposable income to go on adventurous holidays. I was fortunate, and I knew it. But I also carried a shroud of loneliness around for several years: while many of my friends were rampaging through Tinder or finding their way home from nightclubs in the small hours, I was cultivating a quiet domestic life that left me unsatisfied. I’d moved in with a boyfriend. We took out a mortgage, navigated a relationship among the slings and arrows of mental ill-health and broke up 18 months later. I felt unmoored amid a sea of change I had no control over Why Women Grow is a much-needed exploration of why women turn to the earth, as gardeners, growers and custodians. This book emerged from a deeply rooted desire to share the stories of women who are silenced and overlooked. In doing so, Alice fosters connections with gardeners that unfurl into a tender exploration of women’s lives, their gardens and what the ground has offered them, with conversations spanning creation and loss, celebration and grief, power, protest, identity and renaissance.

This podcast is inspired by my book, Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival, which is available from all good book shops. Gardening also summons up ghosts, whether recalling skills learnt at a grandparent’s heels, or, like Fernanda, coaxing a recalcitrant herb, shiso, from a windowbox, 29 storeys up, to regain a flavour left behind in Hong Kong. When Fiona reworked a corner of her garden to commemorate a stillborn child this process not only offered a sense of beauty and meaning, but its sheer dogged slowness mirrored the changing nature of grief in a way that steadied her. When I was confident we could meet socially, or off-the-record, we embarked on that all-too-rare thing in adult life – a new friendship. There’s Diana, now 84, whom I see most weeks, cycling to her house for lunches of posh leftovers served on green plates, often with wine. Despite the 50-year age gap we share a predilection for astrology, inventive outerwear and composting. After interviewing Hazel, a floral designer in her 40s, a box of bright pink biscuits spelling out “BRING ON THE BARBICAN” arrived on my doorstep – we’d spoken about our mutual love of the brutalist estate and hatched a plan to sit in Nigel Dunnett’s Beech Gardens together. We ended up chatting for so long we made ourselves late for our subsequent plans. Several glorious dinners, catch-ups and voice notes later, I invited her to my wedding. Nurturing life from neglected spaces yields a good deal more than homegrown peas. Marchelle, a Cambridge scholar originally from Trinidad, was lured to buy her house in Somerset by the siren song of stream that changes according to where you stand in the garden. Tending it makes her feel “mothered” now she is so far from her family. In a similar vein, 21-year-old Mel countered solitude as an outsider in her village. “I do think loneliness goes with being indoors … In the garden, there’s always some noise … it would be hard to dwell on that feeling if you’re outside.” A glorious, sweet-scented joy of a read, it's the literary equivalent of a stroll through a cornflower meadow on a warm summer's evening"Once again I felt unmoored amid a sea of change I had no control over. Loneliness came at me in surprising ways – as anger and frustration and listlessness. Unable to forge ahead with a big night out or arrange an indulgent dinner party, I sat down and made a list of names: women whom I admired or was intrigued by, all of whom I wanted to meet. Wise, curious and sensitive, Why Women Grow follows Alice in her search for answers, with inquisitive fronds reaching and curling around the intimate anecdotes of others. Why Women Grow shows the beauty and grit of tending the soil in difficult times. Alice Vincent shows us that the cure for uncertainty is to get mud under our nails" I did skim through the last third of the book, as after a while I started wondering why it still felt like the author was saying the same exact things that she was at the beginning, and why it still felt like I was reading the introduction of a work rather than unraveling the core of it.

The Why Women Grow podcast is produced by Holly Fisher, and theme music is by Maria Chiara Argiro. Thank you to Canongate and Uprooting, by Marchelle Farrell, for supporting this episode. We are grateful to our hosts at Charleston House and to Hollie Fernandes for her beautiful photographs of Jamaica Kincaid taken there. A conversational odyssey from a Canary Wharf balcony to Charleston, the Bloomsbury set's hangout, and a windswept smallholding in Denmark. Why Women Grow is the splendid-looking account of these encounters. The narrative unfurls like a vagabond anthology of potted biographies, confessions jostling alongside social commentary [...] If you enjoy window-shopping other people's lives, you'll relish this staggeringly diverse array of individuals. Vincent's affection for her subject is infectious" Women have always gardened, but our stories have been buried with our work. Alice Vincent is on a quest to change that. To understand what encourages women to go out, work the soil, plant seeds and nurture them, even when so many other responsibilities sit upon their shoulders. To recover the histories that have been lost among the soil. In Rootbound, the author rekindles a long lost love for the outdoors and gardening, as she answers these questions as she goes along. These days, Alice Vincent has breached her thirties and everything has changed since she wrote Rootbound. Married, moved to a house, a home and as importantly, a garden. But with these changes, new questions arise...questions around womanhood, motherhood and how not to lose oneself in all what society seems to ask and expect.One simple concept, a million cookbooks sold: Rukmini Iyer’s Roasting Tin recipe books have transformed dinner times around the country. But the writer and food stylist is also a keen amateur gardener, growing first on a balcony and, later, in a garden on a quiet street in leafy South London. Iyer’s adventures in growing food to eat collided with the arrival of her first child, and gardening has given her a new perspective on what it is to feed and nourish. We catch up with the author of India Express at home to discuss her strategies for raising enough aubergines to feed a crowd, and why she’ll always prefer to grow from seed.

The creative mind behind Hill House Vintage and author of Hill House Living, Paula Sutton is a stylist, writer and - perhaps most of all - a purveyor of joy. After navigating a career in the fast-paced and glamorous world of fashion magazines, Paula relocated from the streets of South London to Hill House, an idyllic Georgian home in Norfolk 12 years ago. There, she decided that she was going to live - and raise her three young children - with a focus on what made her happy. Gardening is something that she has discovered later in life but has, she explains, become a crucial part of living in a more meaningful way. A compelling, enriching read. Above all, this is a wonderful tribute to the perseverance and tenacity of women [...] a joy, full of restless curiosity about gardening, life, the longing for meaning, and the simple yet quietly feminist act of creating a space for yourself" Poppy Okotcha describes herself as an ecological home grower working to inspire reconnection to the land and the living world through the story of food and herbs. She came to gardening after a shift in her personal life: having moved between the UK and South Africa during her childhood, Poppy had a career as a model. When she was left burnt out by the fashion industry, she began to cultivate a slower kind of life, growing organically on top of a canal boat in London and learning about biodynamic and regenerative growing. We were invited into her magical, Tardis-like garden in South Devon, where Poppy tends to a space that has been grown on for centuries, sharing her gentle stewardship of the land with her considerable social media platform.I love hearing from Carole, who grew up on the estate behind my Brixton flat in the 70s, and has the best stories to tell. Sometimes I bump into her in the neighbourhood while she’s on one of her sprawling south London walks; sometimes I pass her equipment or plants for her community gardens. Every time, it feels like I’m part of a community I didn’t previously know existed. I regularly meet Elaine, an artist on the cusp of her 60s, for an outdoor sandwich, following the first spontaneous picnic we shared that she pulled, Mary Poppins-like, from her bag years before. She’s lived a remarkable and inherently feminist life, giving women’s voices space in her work. The last time I saw her, she gave me a flower press she’d made from old table mats that belonged to her mother. I have always learned about plants through their stories: how they came here, what they represent, what silent powers they hold and who they mean something to. I have made my career as a storyteller: as a journalist, I have told stories daily for more than a decade. Now, I wanted to hear – perhaps even tell – these women’s stories. I wanted to learn more about what had driven these women to garden, perhaps to better understand my own need for the soil, perhaps to better understand what it was to be a woman. Don’t expect tips on mulching or how to sweet-talk your dahlias. Vincent bills herself an explorer not expert, keener on people than imparting techniques. Her last work, Rootbound, was a hybrid of heartache memoir and horticultural history. This time around the narrative unfurls like a vagabond anthology of potted biographies, confessions jostling alongside social commentary. Its driving question is what gardening reveals about female motivation. Above all, Vincent hoped to untangle her own ambivalence, as a freshly engaged thirtysomething, nervously eyeing up “heteronormative” marriage and motherhood, and troubled by her privilege in being able to garden at all. Could life lessons from strangers spur personal growth? Kayla, eking out the last months of her sentence in an open prison, cannot see her children due to Covid, but finds solace restoring glasshouses to grow tropical plants for city millennials. Vincent notes the pricey blow-dry of a woman whose overgrown plant Kayla capably splits in two before admonishing her to clean the pot. The message is clear: purpose restores pride and hope. We talk about everything, from motherhood, to gardening for a better planet and finding your place in the world.

Both tender yet fierce, this book is written with an acute sense of women's relationship to the land and how vital that is. I loved it" Bonus episode: Writer and novelist Jamaica Kincaid redefined garden writing with books such as My Garden (Book) and Among Flowers, as well as changing perspectives on the post-colonial experience through titles such as A Small Place and Lucy. We meet the Antiguan-American author in the halls of Charleston House, Sussex, where Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant made art, a home, and a life-long relationship. In a quiet moment away from Charleston’s Festival of the Garden, Jamaica tells us about how gardening sits alongside her writing practice, how she converses with her plants and what they teach her about mortality. One of those rare and special books that reminds you why, especially during trying times, you might suddenly find more joy in caring for a plant, or seeing the turn of Spring. Highly recommended!"Vincent sympathetically draws out the women who speak about loss, abusive relationships and racial prejudice [...] she brings women and their problems to life" Over the course of 14 months I spoke with 45 women, ranging in age from 22 to 82, from the depths of Somerset to the remote, salty horizons of Danish islands. Some were single, some were married, some were widowed, some were imprisoned, some were immigrants, some were artists, some never spoke about their day job, some were mothers, some wanted to be. I met with them with the intention of research: I wanted to glean and tell the stories of the soil that were conspicuously absent from gardening narrative, many of which would inform a book, Why Women Grow. What I ended up with was not only that connection I’d been missing, but a host of new friends I didn’t know I needed. We’re very excited to welcome Alice Vincent, writer and Maya Thomas, herbologist, chef and writer for a talk on the book ‘Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival’, 2023. Why Women Grow shows the beauty and grit of tending the soil in difficult times. Alice Vincent shows us that the cure for uncertainty is to get mud under our nails.’ KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering Anne McIntyre has been in clinical practice working as a medical herbalist for over 40 years, having also trained as a remedial masseuse, aromatherapist, homeopath and counsellor. Anne runs her busy practice from Artemis House in the Cotswolds and for over 30 years she has incorporated Ayurvedic philosophy and medicine into her clinical practice, producing a unique integrated approach to the care of patients and prescription of herbs.