Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival

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Loneliness strikes at different times in life. The Campaign to End Loneliness, which has been publishing reports for over a decade, claims that more than 3 million people in the UK would describe themselves as chronically lonely, a state in which someone feels lonely most of the time. Nearly half of British adults, of all ages, attest to loneliness at least some of the time, with older and widowed people particularly affected. We talk about everything, from motherhood, to gardening for a better planet and finding your place in the world.

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: This podcast is inspired by my book, Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival, which is available from all good book shops. 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 This seems like something a 30 year old woman would write. Lots of talk about “becoming a woman” and longing for recently lost youth. Pondering that youth (over and over). Considering becoming a mother. Talking about how all your friends are becoming mothers. Lots of references to old heartbreak and few references to the fiancé living beside her in the house. How long ago was the last epic breakup? It might be time to keep that info in journals and let it go. 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.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. At her best Vincent captures a garden in its mid-October glory: “Masses of purple asters, the last of the scabious, nigella and salvias; one brave, bright purple foxglove clinging on five months after its siblings bloomed.” Elsewhere her writing veers into repetition. Few interviews deviate from generalisation into toothsome anecdote, and a meeting with Cosey Fanni Tutti of 1970s band Throbbing Gristle skitters by in a quote-free paragraph. 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. It’s definitely poetically written but it is wayyyy too inwardly focused. If she could use her writing talent to get out of her own head and experiences, this would have been a great book. I’m saddened by the perfunctory glances at very interesting women, overshadowed by Alice, Alice, Alice. A stunning meditation on why women are drawn to the soil, featuring contributions from Ali Smith, Hazel Gardiner and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

So she turns to women all around the country...women with different stories, all separated by time, space, upbringing and personal history, but all connected by two similarities: their awareness of their own womanhood and the love of their gardens and green spaces. 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. 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. 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.

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This book was more about the writer telling her experience interviewing these women, rather than truly diving deep and finding a deeper understanding of the concepts that she set out the intention to write about. This book barely scratched the surface of some really beautiful and meaningful concepts that it brought up, which was such a waste of potential and such a pity.

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. Alice Vincent has written something wonderful. Why Women Grow is a book that not only presents us with the beauty of the earth but asks one of the most fundamental questions to the human condition: what does it mean to create? I loved the way she wrote about the ambivalent power of the maternal question . . . We need more books about women, wombs and our role in the world; Alice has done that with charm, humour and an impressive depth of knowledge.’ 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 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. 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 Reading this book felt like finding a good amount of beautiful insights and reflections that got you excited, only to leave you feel extremely unsatisfied and wishing there was more (not in a good way), because it was all just left at aphorism booklet level, among a whole lot of other rather boring and unnecessary information. I wish there was less telling us about how she found these people and describing all the steps they took around their gardens and listing all the flowers they planted, and more diving deep into the concepts that were revealed. The description got redundant and after the first quarter of the book it just felt like empty rambling about things she already had said before, and honestly did not add anything valuable to the book at all. 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? 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.

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. 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. 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. I feel like this is two separate books. The book I’m interested in is the one where we hear the voices of all the amazing women she interviews, and their lives. 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.

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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.