We are delighted to be hosting the official launch of garden writer Alice Vincent’s new book ‘Why Women Grow’, a major narrative exploration of the relationship between women and the soil. Ahead of the event on Tues 28 February, here is an exclusive extract from the book:
In the middle of this stuck year [2020], I opened a green notebook and wrote down a list of names. I listed the women I wanted to speak to – strangers, most of them – about their gardens and about their lives; women whose work had interested me. Because women have always gardened, but our stories have been buried with our work. For centuries we have learned the soil’s secrets. We have ushered herbs from the ground and dried them for healing; we have braided seeds into our hair to preserve legacies even when the future looks bloody and uncertain; we have silently made the world more beautiful, too often without acknowledgement. I wanted to try and change that. I wanted to see the gardens that women made. I wanted to know what had encouraged them to go out, work the soil, plant seeds and nurture them, even when so many other responsibilities sat upon their shoulders. I wanted to know how their lives had taken them to this place, and what it brought them now they were here.
For six years I had grown things with quiet compulsion on balconies, the first one smaller and brighter than the other. I had gardened through joy and through loneliness, through communality and through heartbreak. I had gardened to celebrate and to soothe. I had become dependent on plants, on looking at and to them, to feel balanced. After nearly three years of turning a shady strip of a balcony into a verdant, welcoming oasis, I was faced with the blank expanse of a back garden.
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.
At first, I approached women I encountered through social media or researching online, asking if they would meet with me in a green space of their choice – pandemic restrictions willing, us living between lockdowns at the time. But I was increasingly conscious that there were many narratives and many women that lay beyond my reach, so I made a simple online form. Along with a few basic questions – age range, location – was the one I would come to find most crucial and addictive: ‘What drew you to gardening?’ I shared the link online and by the next morning there were more than 500 responses.
I read through them with hunger, these notes from generous strangers. All corners of life were here, in short, no-nonsense sentences. Postnatal depression, loss, grief, migration, recovery, identity, motherhood. These women gardened to carve space out of the situations their lives had placed them in. I saw patterns emerge: lockdown was a persistent motivator; moving to a home with a garden, perhaps unsurprisingly, was another. Some women, often older, had simply taken on gardening along with other domestic duties that their male partners quietly ignored. The word ‘mum’ or ‘mother’ came up most frequently. There had been botanist grandfathers and farming fathers who had helped to usher these women towards the earth, but it was mostly other women I was reading about here.
The stories came from South London and Switzerland, New York and Newcastle upon Tyne. To read them was enthralling and bittersweet: there was no way I could speak to all 700 of the women who eventually responded; I would be doing well to manage 10 per cent. Some, though, fascinated me. I sent out a flurry of emails.
I would open my inbox to find replies, with suggested dates and addresses. I snatched days to travel across the country and sometimes the continent for a few hours of conversation. Sometimes I would leave feeling flat and frustrated; the conversations were always warm and pleasant, but some left me struggling to find answers for a question I was still trying to ascertain. Still, I couldn’t shake the determination to speak to women about their relationship with the earth, to find out what drew them to the soil time and time again.
Many times, I would head home buoyed on the insight I’d been fortunate enough to hear, storing away snippets of stories that I’d come to play back weeks and months after, in my own garden or while walking down the street: glimmers of wisdom that changed how I saw the world. As with many growing things, the process took time, care and good fortune. I was often surprised to hear parts of a conversation I’d had replaying in my brain while doing something wholly unrelated.
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.
And so, when I was looking for women to speak to, I would develop a kind of instinct about what we might discuss. Sometimes this was due to the reasons they had given me when answering my research form; sometimes it was because of what they’d posted on social media or the stories they had already told about their relationship with the ground; sometimes it was just hunch. Quite quickly, I learned that whatever I thought I might glean from an interview – whatever reasons I had guessed had taken a woman to ground – was different from what unfolded. Stories I thought might be about heritage were about salvation; stories I imagined to be about retreat ended up being about confines. I’d meet someone expecting to talk about something straightforward and leave carrying their joys, their losses, their trauma and their learnings. When this happened, I felt the substance of these conversations as heavy and solid as stone.
I was nervous before every meeting. More than anything, I was overwhelmed by the generosity of these women, who shared their lives with a stranger, and trusted her with their stories. Often, I’d share myself too, talking through my thoughts and fears about getting married and having children more intimately with these women than I had with anybody else. Sometimes, after I switched the dictaphone off, we’d sit and share a more balanced conversation, where advice and wisdom were doled out with care – often towards me, as I sought out the experiences of women who had been through what I hadn’t. These women and the conversations I had with them helped me to see my life differently, but they also helped me to see my garden differently.
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