Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival

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We talk about everything, from motherhood, to gardening for a better planet and finding your place in the world. 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. A stunning meditation on why women are drawn to the soil, featuring contributions from Ali Smith, Hazel Gardiner and Cosey Fanni Tutti. 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.

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.

Anne McIntyre

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.’ 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. 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. Women have always gardened, but our stories have been buried with our work. Why Women Grow is Alice Vincent's much-needed exploration of why women turn to the earth, as gardeners, growers and custodians. Join us for a book talk and signing event celebrating Alice's new book Why Women Grow. There will be time for a 15 min Q&A at the end of the evening.

This podcast is inspired by my book, Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival, which is available from all good book shops.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 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 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. Alice Vincent is a writer. Her books include Rootbound, Rewilding a Life and the forthcoming Why Women Grow. A columnist for Gardens Illustrated, Alice writes for The New Statesman, Vogue, The Guardian, The Telegraph and other titles, and is the features editor of Penguin.co.uk.

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.”

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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. 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. 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.