Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival

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A beautiful meditation on the overlooked history of female gardeners, tracing how women have drawn strength and power from the natural world" 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. 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 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.

In Rootbound, the author rekindles a long lost love for the outdoors and gardening, as she answers these questions as she goes along. 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"

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.

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" 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. 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. Vincent sympathetically draws out the women who speak about loss, abusive relationships and racial prejudice [...] she brings women and their problems to life" 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.

Bios

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.

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!" 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. 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

Anne McIntyre

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. We talk about everything, from motherhood, to gardening for a better planet and finding your place in the world. Why Women Grow is a much-needed exploration of why women turn to the earth, as gardeners, growers and custodians. 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. 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.