Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival

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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. 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: 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 delves into what it is that makes women want to garden, uncovering what drives the urge to sow seeds and nurture plants, and by doing so goes on her own journey of discovery" 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

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. 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. 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" 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. We talk about everything, from motherhood, to gardening for a better planet and finding your place in the world.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.

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.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!"