Why I Grow…
Why Women Grow is a book by author Alice Vincent, I had been thinking about reading for a while. I first came across it on the author Alice Vincent’s Instagram when it was first released. The title, the subject matter and the book cover all being everything that is right up my street, and yet I hesitated to purchase the book for quite a few months. Maybe deep down, I knew it was something I could only read after my mother died, and strangely enough after she passed away at the end of October last year, I had the urge to order the book.
This isn’t a book review but an expression of my own self-reflection and discovery, learnt through reading the evocative pages laced with stories of women, motherhood, gardening and Alice’s own personal journey. I felt inspired to share my own inward deep delve into what led me to where I am today…
A question that I never really asked myself, as a woman, why I grow? It was just something I found a calling to a few years ago in my late twenties and not something I did much of before then. Whilst some of my earliest and favourite school memories are enveloped in nature, such as planting daffodils on the road verge, growing watercress and marvelling at the new life of newts in the school pond, and much of my favourite past times were and still are, countryside hikes. For me, it felt like this calling to nature only developed following my yoga teacher training in 2018.
A Calling to the Earth
The yoga teacher training was an awakening and a realisation, that we are all living on this planet, mother earth, without much of an awareness or respect for the soil itself. An awareness that, whilst living in London for the whole of my twenties, I was taking for granted the sun, the moon, the micro seasons, the fruit, the vegetables, the grass on Clapham Common, which burnt to a crisp every summer and became a sandpit due to the hotter summers and heavy footfall of the young city dwellers.
With much inner turmoil, I returned to my London life, snatching yoga classes and teaching yoga in between 14 hour long, stressful office days. Fiercely determined to live a sustainable, plastic free, vegetarian life and tread more carefully on this planet, I marched my way over to frolic at an Extinction Rebellion protest… as anyone would do.
Fast forward a few years, lockdown was a period where I found myself living with my boyfriend (now husband) who had a large patch of grass for a garden in East Dulwich, something that I had never come across in my rented Battersea/Clapham paved courtyard gardens. We began to plant roses, fruit bushes, and dig a border round the garden. As predictable as it sounds, maybe lockdown brought me to gardening, although I think a seed was planted long before that. What that lock-downed time did gift me, was an awareness that I wanted to work more with nature and feel more fulfilment in my work. I remember wishing I could find a career that was more sustainable yet still creative.
A seemingly sensible transition from Interior Design, was Garden Design so I plodded forward into a garden design course in the beautiful walled garden of One Garden Brighton, it was my weekly escapism from London, and an incredible experience to witness the gardens changing each week throughout the year. I became aware of micro seasons, how one plant may have a fleeting glory and others steal the show all summer long. Contrasting textures of fluffy grasses, delicate spires and fluttery pastel petals graced my vision weekly.
Whilst the design element of the course was a very easy transition from my decade long career as an Interior Designer, it was the plants, the nature and the horticultural element that wowed me, but also overwhelmed me. Feeling like a fraud, I wasn’t sure I could be a successful garden designer when I had only picked up a trowel a handful of times, with no existing relationship to the plants that I would be campaigning for a well-deserved spot in others gardens. So, I plodded on again, to follow this calling I had to the plants, embarking on a gardener traineeship in a private Heritage garden, to work with my hands in the ground, to build a connection to the earth and the plants within it.
This time spent tending to the earth in the private walled garden was the pivotal moment. I loved working outdoors, working with like-minded, plant obsessed people, who marvelled at the unusual shape of a seedpod or the extra-long stem length of a flower. A rare breed who could reel of the Latin names of the surrounding trees, identifying them by their leaf shape. I loved feeling tired but revitalised from a day moving my body and shifting the biggest bulk bags I have ever seen, which we had filled to the brim with clippings from the four meter tall and 100 meter long, beech hedge. The physical tiredness was a tonic compared to the mental tiredness from the London office job.
Loss of a Mother
It seems important to reflect that during this time, the urge to garden coincided with processing the news of my mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. My mother passed away not long ago and looking back now, nurturing the mother earth was a form of nurturing myself but also my instinct to nurture a mother who was fading slowly away. I developed an obsession with flowers, the beauty of the natural world, the scent, the colour, the joy that flowers bring. I loved cutting from the most bountiful borders I had ever seen, and each week putting together even bigger and more impressive arrangements for the main house.
The thing that struck me the most during my traineeship, was the process of propagation by seed. It was a marvel that a tiny speck of a seed only needs soil, water and sun to sprout and blossom into the most beautiful of flowers. With an annual flower, this can all happen within a mere few months and bloom all summer long. It blew my mind. It was magic.
From there I brought a greenhouse, in our new countryside garden less than an hour south of London. I discovered the emergence of British flower growers, the movement towards sustainable floristry, and became obsessed. A realisation that I could create, with flowers, sustainable and beautiful sculptures that bring joy to people’s day and do not cost the earth.
I naively planned to launch a flower farm on my neighbour’s field, but after adding up all the costs, the lack of water and a promise of only a year or so on the land, I decided best to start small scale in my garden. I had hundreds and hundreds of seedlings which I dispersed through the garden, gifted to my mum and gave away on marketplace. This nativity was the greatest gift in the last year of my mother’s life, the many seedlings I gave her, got her out in her garden, planting all spring long. Whilst undergoing treatment and following a major surgery, my mum determinedly got out in her garden, lugging bags of compost, digging new borders to gain more space for these mini plants of hope. These little seedlings gave mum a forceful, renewed desire to garden and tend to the earth. She planted the biennial foxgloves seedlings I gave her which she knew she would not get to see bloom this year, she bought and dug in Viburnum bodnantense and a Magnolia tree which she knew she wouldn’t see blossom. Seeing her working away during her morning bursts of energy was ever so inspiring, nothing was going to stop her from carrying on. My perspective of gardening changed, I believe we garden for the earth, to tend to mother nature, but I believe more so that we are tending to ourselves, to heal ourselves from the casualties of life.
In the Why Women Grow book, many women tell tales of their mothers or grandparents’ gardens. In all honesty, I don’t feel like I was ever particularly inspired by any of my families’ gardens. Whilst both my grandmothers and parents have always had one, I don’t recall ever being amazed by them or marvelling at the fact that they all gardened in some way. I do feel particularly fond of my heritage, knowing my Jamaican grandmother is the daughter of a farmer and grows vegetables in her Nottingham city garden still today. And I now find myself saying my mother’s words when it rains ‘The garden needs it’, a sign of growing older for me, or a sign of becoming a gardener, others may say.
Babcia’s Garden
Feeling inspired by my mother’s and grandmother’s own gardening quests came only in the past year. My ambitious greenhouse sowings not only gave me the gift of growing with my mother last year, but it also enlightened me to my Babcia’s (Polish grandmother) green fingers. When she visited our new home for the first time, she stepped into the greenhouse and immediately identified the rows of tiny seedling leaves as Calendula. I was shocked and amazed to discover that she was a fellow grower. She too, can identify plants at early seedling stage. For as long as I remember, she was usually in her Nottingham garden when I phoned her during the warmer months, but I just put it down to that she was elderly and gardened. As I had always thought with my adolescent mind, that was what people did when they got older.
It feels poignant that I am writing this post, after the loss of my mother and my babcia, who passed away just two months after my mother. It strikes me that it was only a mere few months ago that I experienced something amazing in her garden. It was last August, often when I went to see my babcia in Nottingham, it was usually around Christmas time or Easter, when it was too cold to go out and we would have lunch inside. Her garden was very long, stepping down and extending to what felt like forever, I remember the lower area being wild and we would pick blackberries. Whenever I now pick blackberries from the bushes in our nearby fields, I am always transported back to her garden as a child.
My last summer memory of her garden was many, many years ago before I knew plants, and my visit in August took me by surprise. This time, my memory is marked by how abundant and feminine her garden was. The small garden close to the house was bountiful. Pale pink Phlox paniculata that was up to my elbow, pale pink Weigela towering above my head, the soft lilac-pink of Japanese anemones that bobbed by my shoulders, with a few of the white ‘Honorine Jobert’ scattered through. Purple penstemon grazed ankles, tree mallow twisted with fuschia roses hovering high above, and colossal ferns that look prehistoric tucked under the trees.
I was mesmerised, took a quick film on my iphone and in true millennial fashion, later posted it on my Instagram titled ‘Babcia’s Garden’, which belittles the feeling this garden provoked. Never, had I been in a garden that felt like it had poured from my own soul, I instantly recognised that my babcia also adored beauty, and created a garden of beauty for herself. I realised she was an incredibly talented gardener and intuitive garden designer at heart. I feel saddened that I won’t be able to ask her about it but it will forever be a source of inspiration for the many gardens I hope to create for my years to come.
To answer the weighted question, of Why I Grow? I know that it was not because of my babcia’s beautiful garden, but something deeper that stirred through my yoga practise, a yearning to connect to our mother earth. Living sustainably, in tune with our seasons and being guided by the sun and the moon is at the heart of my why, but through this process I have learnt that we all have this yearning with in us. A yearning to heal the hardship of life, to connect to the greatest mother we have, live in harmony with the earth, develop meaningful connection and enjoy the beautiful bounty.
