Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival

Product Information

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. 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?

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. 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. 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.” 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. 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 WinteringWhen 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Maya Thomas

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.