Why Women Grow is a book in which Alice Vincent goes back in time and researches the connection between women and gardens. It is also a series of interviews that she conducted by travelling across the UK to meet women and their garden. And finally, it is a personal reflection of her own relationship to gardening as a woman. We discover stories of love, identity, family and grief. Through these pages, we come to get a better understanding of the close relationship women have always had with their gardens. Whether they genuinely loved taking care of it or had no other choice, to feed their family. This book is a voice for all the women today in the world, and all the women that lived before us, who’s voices are and were silenced and existence almost ignored.
I have been discovering an interest in gardening, taking care of plants and flowers this past year and this book came into my hands just at the right time. I found a lot of answers and connections to my life when reading what these women had to say. A book I will definitely return to.
I will leave this review with a line from the book: "And yet we frame nature as a “retreat”, a means of escaping the problems seemingly constructed by our non-natural lies. We expect to be revitalised by spending time there without realising how far we’ve been removed from it,…"
