the why women grow podcast

we're back!

Two years after we set out on what became a three-season, cross-country adventure (detailed below) to record the first season of the Why Women Grow podcast, the team were reunited to make another mini-series. It launched yesterday, and I’ve already been so touched by the response. Since releasing the first season in early 2020, the podcast has witnessed more than 200,000 downloads, a chart-topping debut in the iTunes chart, an exhibition at the Garden Museum, one bonus episode, many requests from listeners and the small matter of a baby.

This summer, while I take a bit of a long-overdue break, I’m sharing pieces from the savour archive paywall free. This is the behind-the-scenes story of how the podcast came to be:

I was in a long queue for ice cream when I got the email. It was mid-July, 2021, and we’d gone to Bosham for a weekend steeped in blue and green. I watched the tides shift and turn through sash windows and we went to West Wittering for a Saturday afternoon that felt out of time. It was the midst of the second Covid summer and these things felt like a treat: a relative freedom, an escape from the city, a little getaway.

Wrongly or otherwise, it’s often in these moments of retreat that my brain throws up new ideas. I’m impatient, so I tend to share them quickly. A few hours later - waiting for ice cream - my agent replied: “I think this is a great idea!” I’d gone to her with something tentative but with an undeniable heartbeat: “I'm envisaging a six-eight ep podcast. Like the book, it would theoretically be about gardening but actually be about all other aspects of women's life.”

Anyway, here we are - not-quite Spring, 2023, and the first three episodes of the Why Women Grow podcast are there for you to listen to. This isn’t an audio version of the book, although that has been recorded by the excellent Fiona Hampton, who did such a lovely job of Rootbound, and can be pre-ordered (I released the introduction exclusively in last week’s savourites). Instead, it’s an extension or another chapter: new women, new gardens, new stories.

Aside from a few bits on radio and a bit of short-form video, I’ve never broadcast like this before. The interviews I’ve conducted throughout my career have been far more intimate affairs - me, a stranger, my Voice Memos app open on my phone on a surface between us (I’ve wrangled with dictaphones, this remains the best solution). To do this in the presence not only of a (very smart) producer, a photographer and a potential audience of thousands of listeners feels, well, exposing.

Between June and November I travelled from South Devon to Norfolk with magic-ears producer Holly Fisher and magic-eyes photographer Siobhan Watts, to gardens of strangers kind enough to take us in. We spoke to novelist Salley Vickers in Kew Gardens; stylist and writer Paula Sutton in Norfolk; designer Margaret Howell and chef and writer Rukmini Iyer in south London; ecologist Poppy Okotcha in Devon and, in East Sussex, writers and growers Claire Ratinon and Sarah Raven in their respective gardens. We traced the seasons and chased the sun (Siobhan) and bumblebees (Holly). I felt like I was walking a tightrope of listening, learning and asking while the recorders picked up conversations that swerved from laughter into poignancy and revelation. In a summer heavy with the world around it, making this podcast felt like freewheeling.

In the first teaser trailer we put out, I explained that Why Women Grow “isn’t a podcast about gardening”. “Sure,” I continued, “there’s bit of that, but we discuss resistance, motherhood, spirituality, saving the planet and much more.” We really did. Much as I’ve found myself telling people that Why Women Grow - the book, where all of this began - isn’t really about gardening, so the podcast isn’t either. Gardens hold and shape these conversations, rather than define them.

What do I hope you get from it? A better understanding of the remarkable women we speak to. A sense that maybe you’re hearing something that resonates with you. Something to listen to while you’re outside, grabbing a moment for yourself. The motivation to acknowledge that your own story of connection with the earth is worthwhile. A whisper of what is to come in Why Women Grow (pre-orders, for what it’s worth, are still massively important and massively appreciated).

I wonder if you’ll hear the stuff behind the scenes in these episodes. The road trips and reunions at Paddington station. The Pret sandwiches. The lunches by the river. The way three women got to know one another gradually over five months as their lives changed and unfurled. We all want to do another series, and another one after that. We know there are more stories to tell, more photographs to take, more sounds to record. Whether that happens depends on this series, really. So I’d urge you to click on a link, subscribe, listen, and ideally rate and review and share. Making this made me see gardens differently. I suspect listening to it may change how you see them, too.

---

more on why women grow