As I sit down to write about women’s relationships with gardening, my thoughts travel back to my mother, Avril Juliet, her name an evocation of spring and summer. I see her standing in the garden of my childhood home, her arms slung round the shoulders of her best friends Daphne and Joan. All midwives, the three women were adept at bringing life into the world. Life in all its wild beauty and rage. They were also excellent gardeners.
“Here, Daphne, that bit of Salvia I promised.”
“My honeysuckle you’ve got just the sunny spot for, Joan, love.”
I was often go-between in these quiet propagations. Seeds, cuttings, clippings slipped in the pocket of my anorak, tucked in the corner of my school bag. I marvel now, as I did then, at their ability to breathe life into the most desiccated shoots. Soft fruit bushes were Joan’s pride and her joy: raspberry, loganberry, three kinds of gooseberry. Sometimes she would meet me from school, take my hand and we would run to her house.
“I’ve made a fool!” she’d cry, as we raced down the alleyway. “We’ll eat it straight from the bowl!” Her hands smelt of sugar and cream and Marshall’s fertiliser.
Daphne’s hands wore a light dusting of soil. When she came to tea, crumbles of earth would fall as she lifted her cup. Her face was kind but her eyes distant, as if she had just been wrenched from what she loved most and was longing to get back, sink with relief into the familiar hold of her vegetable patch. Her fingers twisted and flexed in her lap as if she were already there, earthing up her potatoes, stringing her runner beans like plucking notes on a harp. My mother understood Daphne’s yearnings for the feral comfort of her garden, she felt the same pull. At the end of a day’s gardening, she would appear, bramble-scratched, nettle-stung, a dash of blood across her chest. Radiant. She made me think of those dancing princesses who returned from adventures with their shoes ripped to shreds.
The relationship women have with gardening is both practical and poetic; women garden to provide food and nourishment, women garden to create something beautiful. There is a will and a want to nurture, to not only bring life into the world but to protect and tend it. In gardens as well as in allotments women are growers, artists, providers and care takers.
The relationship women have with gardening is both practical and poetic; women garden to provide food and nourishment, women garden to create something beautiful. There is a will and a want to nurture, to not only bring life into the world but to protect and tend it. In gardens as well as in allotments women are growers, artists, providers and care takers.
In my allotment plot in St Leonard’s on Sea, England, I tend the flowers and vegetables planted by the previous custodian who moved to Dublin to escape Brexit. As I water the handsome artichoke she seeded, breathe in the perfume of her lavender, I think about this woman I never met. I wonder how she is in her new life, and I thank her for the gifts she left, grateful for their distinctly European flavour.
I took over the allotment just as Covid hit and it was both haven and hospital, a place in which to relish life’s beauty and to recover from the virus. I am now about to move and prepare to pass on the legacy of my own plantings. My gladioli, my kale, my Gertrude Jekyll roses that smell like Turkish Delight. These plants hold memory and mark time, the journey of writing my novel The Invisible Women’s Club, a story set on an allotment, my mother’s cancer diagnosis, my niece’s stellar school report.
My allotment gave me a front-row seat from which to watch women of all backgrounds and ages tend their plants. Gardening is physical labour in all weathers. It is breaking ground in the cold dark of winter, it is endless weeding, backache and sore knees, it is dealing with the devastation of a late frost.
Val, in her seventies has created the lush plot opposite. Her hazel runner bean frame is a work of art, her raised beds immaculate and bountiful, her grass borders as crisp as Wimbledon. Val works at her allotment every day of the year, occasionally setting an enamel kettle on her Calor stove and shouting out “Who’s for a cuppa?” Now and again, she reaches over the fence and hands me a cauliflower or a sweet pea bouquet. Fiona has the plot next door, filled with raspberries and strawberries. She waters my tomatoes when I am away. I don’t even have to ask. She just does it. Generosity, like hard work, is second nature to these women.
A couple of years ago I made a site-specific performance which aimed to celebrate biodiversity and make audiences aware of simple ways to counteract human-caused damage in their own environments. As part of my research, I worked with botanists at the Carnegie Institute. One day I asked the director of the centre, botanist Sue Rhee, what it was that had drawn her to spend her life studying plants. She didn’t miss a beat.
“I love plants for their patience. I love them for their ability to stand their ground and fight for survival whatever comes at them.”
I associate that patient stoicism, that sense of holding on, with the female experience. Gardening links us to past, present and future, when we garden we are collaborating with invisible hands from the past, labouring for the future. It’s a kind of faith. There is a promise held in the earth, a promise of life. In winter you stand on the frozen ground and imagine the buds of spring, fruit ripening in the summer, the scents of the autumn harvest.
Gardens provide a sense of belonging, safety even. Allotments, gardens – these are places where women can take up residence, where they can be powerful, where they can be themselves. Virginia Woolf called for a room of one’s own as a necessity for women to create, to thrive. This may well be a study or writing nook. But it might also be the garden, the allotment, or as it was for Woolf at Monk’s House, the garden shed.
Avril Juliet, Daphne and Joan brought the wild indoors. In jam jars and old coffee tins they smuggled shrubs and shoots into their houses, seeded secret gardens in their kitchens. I watched them tend their wards, strap, nametag and date delicate stems. I watched them incubate seedlings in cellophane cots, perform their horticultural obstetrics. Looking back, I realise I witnessed something else too. I watched them care for each other, through sickness, through divorce, through grief, their support as intricately interwoven as the bamboo canes holding up their sweet peas.
The Invisible Women’s Club by Helen Paris is published by Doubleday, £16.99
