Why Women Grow

Cynthia Fan was undertaking a pHD in plant molecular biology when her colleagues at the Edinburgh Botanics noticed how much she loved being in the greenhouses - and how she could do amazing things with a flower frog. She’s now an artist and researcher, weaving together scientific inquiry and visual expression through one persistent question: why does a plant do that? We were delighted when Cynthia...

Mary Keen has worked in, documented and designed gardens all over the world for decades. But it’s the garden she’s made at home, during her ninth decade, that she writes most affectionately about.  In her seventh book, Diary of a Keen Gardener , she reflects on both a life shaped by plants and her more recent years, when she has weathered grief, illness and aging. It’s an honest love letter to wha...

When singer-songwriter Yazmin Lacey found herself adrift after the release of her first album, Voice Notes, she discovered an unlikely muse in the earth. And she decided to study for her RHS Level 2 qualification in horticulture at the Walworth Garden in London. What started as an unlikely affinity bloomed into a new way of living and creativity  - and in turn inspired others to stop and listen. T...

I’ve long been fascinated by roots - and the crossover between our families and the land that we are raised on. And it seems I’m not alone: Maggie O’Farrell was drawn to the Wild Atlantic Way after hearing stories about her heritage. Years later, and her latest novel, LAND, is inspired by her own family history and the potent mythology of the Irish landscape.  Maggie O’Farrell has sold more than f...

The sun is high, the ground is warm, and we’re inviting you to take a moment to pause this summer with the Why Women Grow podcast. This season, we’re speaking to women who have boldly ventured beyond what’s expected of them - and made incredible things happen in the process. From writing to floristry, soul music to garden design, our guests have trodden new paths to do things the way they want. Jo...

For many around the world right now, the green spaces that hold so many memories are caught in conflict.  This is the case for the activist, writer and chef Olia Hercules, who has seen the garden her mother made occupied by Russian soldiers during the invasion of Ukraine.  Now based in East London, Olia has built a garden of her own that she feels has an ancestral connection to the one she knew as...

With a clutch of medals from RHS Chelsea and Hampton Court flower shows, a bestselling garden design book and more than half a million social media followers, Pollyanna Wilkinson has gained a well-earned reputation for making elegant, contemporary and liveable gardens accessible to all. But while hundreds of thousands of people look to Polly’s approach for inspiration and guidance, her own garden...

When you become known for your garden - and what you grow there - what does it mean to up peasticks and move? ⁠Milli Proust⁠ is a gardener, writer and floral designer based in a remote corner of West Sussex. She spent a decade transforming her garden, but when we visited her she was just about to leave it. We met Milli - and her gorgeous whippet Jimmy - under the shade of an enormous oak tree to r...

There’s a school of thought that believes the garden to be an extra room of the house - albeit, outside. If that’s the case, then India Knight is a masterful host. The author and columnist, who has written 13 books, is a homemaker with an unabashedly joyful approach to how we make our lives beautiful. In the days when the quinces are beginning to ripen, sitting in the doorway between her green and...

It's been a bleak old winter, but spring is upon us and with it comes a brand new season of the Why Women Grow podcast. This Spring, we’re exploring what it means to leave behind a garden that changed your life, how can we start again, and how can we connect with lost loved ones in a time of war?  Once again, we’ve been talking to brave, inspiring and witty women about their lives and gardens....

Daisy Johnson made headlines when she became the youngest person ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, when she was 27. But, as she tells us in this episode, her shortlisted novel Everything Under was born of a time of great transition and growth.  Water ripples throughout Daisy’s work, from the remote rain-lashed house in Sisters to the ambiguous murk of Fen, with its shapeshifting chara...

Today we are at the Knepp Estate - a huge rewilding project across 3500 acres of land, undertaken by the writer and conservationist Isabella Tree and her family. As she outlines so beautifully in her bestselling memoir Wilding, when Isabella moved into Knepp, then her husband’s family estate, she inherited more than just a castle. A crumbling property and a financially precarious farm were part of...

What is it that makes a home? Interior design may not seem the first port of call to consider when we think about our gardens, but Michelle Ogundehin’s approach to how our environments affect us shows just how important the outside world can be on our wellbeing.  Michelle, who is a series judge on Interior Design Masters, describes herself as a homes therapist. After training as an architect, she...

Leaves are falling, the sunsets are glowing, and we’re taking every moment we can to reflect here on the Why Women Grow podcast. This autumn, we’re exploring beyond the garden: into the stories crafted alongside fairytale rivers in Oxford, beneath the wingspan of storks flying over rewilded land in Sussex and getting lost in the woodlands of Kent.  We’re delving even deeper into the matters that m...

When Jeany Cronk moved her young family from London to the south of France, she did so on a mission to not only make delicious wine, but shake up the whole rose tradition in the process. The co-founder of Mirabeau, Jeany and her family decided to put sustainability at the heart of their company.  After waking up on the vineyard, we are treated to a tour of Jeany’s farm, which is the first Regenera...

What does it mean to be split between two places? Where we come from, and where we work? For actor Louise Pascal, putting on a character is part and parcel of her daily life, but one that relies on her returning to her childhood garden to ground herself in the realities of a landscape weathering the climate crisis.  We meet Louise in the village of Cucuron, over an Orangina, next to a pretty, tree...

It’s easy to dream of building a whole new life, but it’s quite another to actually do it. Jamie Beck is a woman who knows - the American artist, photographer and author swapped her high-flying career as a fashion photographer in New York to live simply and slowly in Provence.  Since 2016, Jamie has amassed a following of over 400,000 people for her beautiful portrayals of life in the South of Fra...

Summer is upon us - and the Why Women Grow podcast has gone on tour in Provence. Among the lavender fields, chateaux, rose gardens and town squares of Southern France, we meet three women who have made dramatic and inspiring life choices to work with nature in a different way.  If you’ve ever dreamed of giving it all up for a wilder way of being somewhere warm, our guests have plenty to offer in t...

Few Chelsea Flower Show gardens are designed by women. Fewer Chelsea Flower Show show gardens are created by the people they are intended for. And there has never before been a Chelsea Flower Show garden inspired by and made for female prisoners. But The Glasshouse Garden, garden designer Jo Thompson and founder of social enterprise The Glasshouse, Kali Hamerton-Stove, have done exactly that: crea...

Some people move house for the location, some people move for the fireplaces: for Ula Maria, it was a neglected, overgrown garden in South London that confirmed her future home. The Lithuanian garden designer is arguably the most celebrated of her generation: Ula became the youngest person to ever win Best In Show at Chelsea in 2024 - and only the third woman to take the prize in the Flower Show’s...

Sarah Price is a landscape gardener who’s always seemed to exist on another plane. Her designs work with the environment to create something that feels both otherworldly and of the earth.  After undertaking a degree in Fine Art, Sarah went on to design gardens for the London Olympic Park, Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery and a Maggie’s Centre in Southampton.  But she’s also made some of the most rem...

It’s the biggest gardening show on earth - and this spring, the Why Women Grow podcast is finding out what it’s really like to be a female designer at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. This is The Designers, our Spring miniseries, which has taken us from dappled shade of South London gardens to the foothills of Welsh mountains and straight to Main Avenue. We’re troubling gardening’s toughest glass ceil...

How to capture the sound of something humans can’t hear? How to make a song about a mushroom? That was the challenge put to Scottish musician, Hannah Read, in the wake of her father’s death. Hannah, who lives in California, fell into an earthy world of mycelium in 2020, and her album, The Fungi Sessions, captures a growing fascination with fungi in through beautiful folk music. We were fortunate e...

Today we are on an adventure - to the sticky, secret depths of Wales’s peatlands. This intriguing landscape could be the answer to the climate crisis, but it also hold so many stories in its mysterious history. One artist who is trying to unravel them is Manon Awst, whose art, performance and poetry explores how peat bogs can teach us how to live in ways that are more connected with the earth we d...

As Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy explain in our first Earthly Matters episode, people come for the flowers but they stay for the soil. Since forming their company, The Land Gardeners, in 2011, they have combined their cut flower-growing and landscape design businesses with a mission that fuels them on a daily basis: researching the earth beneath our feet to better understand how to repa...