Margaret Howell, Paula Sutton, Rukmini Iyer, Sarah Raven, photos by Siobhan Watts
Alice Vincent
Alice Vincent is a writer, broadcaster and multi-platform storyteller fascinated by the often-overlooked parts of life. Her books include the bestselling Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival, which was shortlisted in the 2023 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and Rootbound, Rewilding a Life. Both were longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
Beyond the page, Alice is the host of the Why Women Grow podcast – which topped the British podcast charts during its first week and unearths stories of the land with inspiring women.
An Introduction to Why Women Grow
Ahead of the exhibition, Alice introduces how her exploration of why women grow began:
“Sometimes writing a book is like pulling on a thread: you start doing it because you’re curious, or bored, or not entirely aware that you’re pulling on it at all. You tease and tug, the thread gets longer. If you’re lucky, you end up with an unravelled jumper and a lot of wool – you’ve alighted on something far bigger than you could have imagined.
It was nearly three years ago that I started pulling on the thread that has come to shape my life – that thread was a question, and the question asked: why do women grow? I’d been wanting to better understand my own desire to garden. I was a kind of horticultural cuckoo: fortunate enough to have been raised feeling comfortable about the outdoors, but undeniably happier inside. And yet when I hit my mid-twenties I became hopelessly addicted to growing things – learning about them, summoning them from the ground, looking at them and writing about them. I was a music journalist living in South London: it didn’t entirely make sense for me to suddenly want to be a gardener…”
An introduction to Why Women Grow