Why Women Grow with Roz Chandler and Alice Vincent

If you're someone who has a pressure for cut flowers, our environment and wants to make the world more beautiful, you're in the right place. Whether you're growing flowers for pleasure or profit, I'm on a mission to empower flower enthusiasts and professionals to help change the world around them. Whether you're just starting out and needing help in hand or looking to scale a substantial flower business, I'm your cut flower woman. Welcome to the Cut Flower Pods. Today I'm joined by a wonderful guest, Alice Vincent. Alice will tell you all about herself in a minute. So I'm very excited about today's podcast. So Alice, tell us a little bit about your, you know, where you are now, how you've got your journey just to give us some background about you. Sure, hi, Rose. Well, thank you for having me. It's very nice to be here. I'm a writer, ostensibly, who happens to garden. And I have spent the last 15 years, mostly as an arts journalist. I spent a long time as a music journalist. I was the bulk of my career was spent in house at the telegraph. And then in the last few years, I've been working all over the place. And I've written about gardening as well. And one of the ways that I understand the world is by researching it and writing about it. So when I, in my mid 20s, sort of fell, kind of surprising me and love with gardening in a way that like all good love affairs snuck up on me without really expecting it, it was instinctive to me to go out and talk to people from Columbia Road flower market sellers to house plant innovators and small space flower farmers and write about it. And in the process, my curiosity as to why we go to the ground and write about that deep in this well. So I've had gardening columns at the telegraph at the New Statesman. I'm currently a gardening columnist for The Guardian and Gardens Illustrated. But more broadly than that, I write books as well. So the latest one is Why Women Grow, Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival. And a few years ago, I released Rootbound, which is sort of my origin story into gardening, but blended with the phenomenon of why people go to the ground at times of trauma. And fittingly, that came out a few weeks before the pandemic when we all started gardening the night. So a million of us apparently started gardening in, in Covid. So tell us, why do women grow? What is it about going outside? You know, when I launched my first seed to vast course, it was doing Covid. And then at the end of that first year, I wrote a book about their journeys in Covid. And it was all about, it was quite humbling actually, about what people got out of gardening. It was their experiences, not mine. And it was the first time I'd ever realised, I suppose, what gardening was about, really. Of course, I realised it was happiness and joy and I'd done it for many, many years and I did it commercially, but I didn't really realise that it combated loneliness and depression and anxiety and bereavement and, and, and, and. So what did you discover in writing the book about why women grow? I mean, I think the, you summed it up there. I, while you were writing that book, I was, I spent 14 months between the summer of 2020 and the kind of the dredge, the end of 2021. Speaking to women in their gardens, I spoke to 45 of them, everyone from rehabilitating prisoners and Kazakhstan refugees to auto-genarians with gardens. They've looked after 40 years, you know, to 22 year old drag kings who became market gardeners, a huge breadth of people and two things I would say that for me, certainly were carried a lot with space and control. And those are two things that as women, we are constantly by society told to take less up. You know, society constantly wants us to be smaller, to take up less space, you know, not to push into those slightly awkward places, not to be as loud, not to be as opinionated. We're constantly rid of certain kinds of control. I mean, I wish it wasn't the case, but this book is coming out at a time when our reproductive rights are being hampered the world over. But more broadly than that, I had conversations about motherhood about and that went everything from baby loss to fertility struggles to actively not wanting children and gardening instead, to really heady political identity reasons, you know, gardening as a reclamation. Gardening as a means of taking on huge council initiatives in the middle of London who want to build high rises at the expense of public space. So in short, they have a lot of reasons to grow, but all of them are so deeply felt and a lot of, and I was constantly astonished by the depth of what the conversations were. I thought it was just going to, we were going to turn up and talk a bit about people's gardens and like these conversations are some of the most intimate things I've ever experienced. Yeah, I think it's about, I'm also about encouraging women to grow. You sort of got involved in gardening in your twenties, didn't you? Yeah. I mean, getting people involved in their twenties, I mean, Instagram has definitely helped that to get a younger population. But my daughters are in their early twenties and I can't think of anything less than I'd like to do. So they're both living in London. So it's, you know, how do you encourage a younger generation to do it for all the reasons that we know it's good for you? I think one thing is that you have to find it for yourself. So I was catching up with one of the women from the book actually, who's become a dear friend and she's in her eighties. And she was saying that one of her neighbors was like, well, you come and help me with my garden. And she was like, I can tell you what to do, but I can't make you love it. And I think one thing that occurred in all the conversations is that you would learn how people came to gardening. And for some people, that was when it started when they were really young and some, it was a midlife thing and some, it was anywhere else in between. I do think it's different for everyone. I think they'll always be those people who, you know, you get a garden in your thirties and you have a baby and then it all kind of comes together. But I think it's changing. As you say, social media has changed it, but also I think millennials and Gen Z who, you know, your daughters presumably fit into. Everything is so inherently tied to the climate catastrophe that we are in the midst of that it offers a way of engaging with the land that we have been so wrenched from. And rootbound, which was my previous book, dealt quite a lot with this, just asking why are millennials, this gender is bucking the trend in being this generation that are going to ground and are becoming fascinated with house plants and want to connect with the earth. And I think it's because we've grown up with having a media seat around us at all times. We can order a date or a takeaway or a cab with the swipe of a button, but you cannot rush gardening. And that's very, very soothing when you feel very overwhelmed. So I think it will, I think maybe younger people will start to do it more even if land access, as in the case of your daughters, is not there. But that's a huge problem. Man access is a huge problem. Getting somewhere to grow, understanding how community gardens work. And beyond that, I think we just need to present different voices and different representations of gardening. It's not all rose pruning and cute little trunks and beautiful lawns, right? There's a lot of good meaty stuffing gardening. Yeah, there's none of that actually, mostly. I mean, it's right as I was going out and covering my, I've got 2,800 dahlias arrived last week. And I was worried about the weather last night, they're undercover, but I thought it's not warm enough. We moved them via the dump a truck we had, we moved them and then we covered them with fleas and then I've got a heater in there and 11 o'clock and going out to check them. That's gardening as well. It's kind of like, they're my babies, they're sitting there waiting to produce this summer and they need to be looked after. So it's kind of, yeah, gardening's quite deep actually, a lot deeper than you think it's going to be. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think actually giving people the opportunity to think on that, which you've obviously done with. The work and the book hopefully is encouraging people, reading it to think on that as well. It's about shaking up that notion, that kind of very stiff RHS Chelsea, David Austin catalog, which landed in my place this morning. And I was like, there you go. And I'm like, beautiful stick on the coffee table. I'll have a look at it at some point. But for me, that's not what my garden looks like. And that's not what my understanding of gardening looks like. No, no, no, no. Not the Gingham dress and the truck, like you say, and the skipping to lovely music. No, definitely not. If you saw me in my garden, it's more like dandruffy as a hat and a pair of gloves. It's not. Sounds very practical. So tell us about your current business and you've got how many books have you got then Alice? Which books have you got rooted? So, yeah. So, yeah, those root bound, why women grow? There's a strange, very lock downy audio book that I wrote in record and locked down the called Seeds from Scratch, which kind of is a meditative guide through to seeding. And then there was my first book, which was released five years ago, just called How to Grow Stuff. And there's a very kind of practical beginners guide written while I was still gardening on a balcony. So I spent six years gardening on balconies in South London. And then I got a garden also in South London about two and a half years ago. So I myself taught urban gardener. My business is very much as a writer. And I happened to write a lot about gardening, but also quite a lot about other things. I think the things that fascinate me are the kind of overlooked corners of life. So all the stuff that we don't pay attention to that tells us more about who we are. And so I spend my days sort of sitting around writing things and then not going to garden as much as I should, which is a curse of all people I think professionally involved in gardening. And people just think that we spend all our time in the garden, not really fit. And I have a podcast called Why We Mean Grow as well. Yes, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant, well recommended. It's like me, I built upon a couple of years ago on the bottom of the land thinking I would do it to a foundation nature reserve and that'd be lovely. And more so, you know, I had some branches and how their jobs get in and it was all created very lovely. And my dream was to sit once a day when I walked the dog because I have to pass it without a fail to sit there and contemplate, have I ever once done it? No, so I have a dream of doing it. And now I'm thinking, well, I'm just going to put a seat there around a tree and that is going to be my place. Maybe that's place for writing. But it's kind of if you could just sit there and watch for even 10 minutes, that would be worth it. But it's like you come the time you just get so engrossed with writing that you're not going outside to even see what's happening. So, yeah, it's so interesting you bring that up. There's a bit in number one I can find relate and we are in theory landscaping the garden pretty soon actually. And part of the reason to do that is because I'm creating somewhere to sit. You know, one thing about happens when you have, you know, this garden is amazing to have access to land in breaks and is great. But, you know, I spent so much time worrying about plants that I didn't actually really make a place to sit and I'm making one to sit. But my mum said the same thing and I remember writing it into Woehame and Groves. I went back to that childhood garden which they've since moved away from trying to trace my gardening legacy really. And I remember her saying, I just want to go to the bottom of a garden and sit in it. And I don't think she ever did that. I think she was too busy, you know, she made beautiful things happen but she didn't go and sit at the bottom of my garden. I think that's a constant tussle, isn't it? It's how do we engage with that space and also find the time for ourselves, isn't it? Definitely, definitely. And I suppose it becomes a habit that if you just go out for 10 minutes a day and sit there, I had this thing that I was going to take a photo from the Portland across the field because it's out into open field to take a photograph on the first of every month. And so I'd have to sit there to think about it. And then the first of every month you would see all the seasons were changing and how beautiful is that and you bring it all around to the end of the year. So maybe from today, I'm going to convince myself, I'm going to spend 10 minutes out there and sit there. I would love that. I think you should do it. I think also remove the determination to make it the first day of every month because it's so easy to be like, oh, well, I've missed the first. So I'll just sack it off now. I think there's like one photo a month at some. Yeah, that's true. What we do, you know, same place and then add it all together. We'll be quite fun. I'm going to start that. Yeah, we all start that. Great. That's why I love them. I'm glad we've resolved this. So tell me about a couple of people that you did interview that inspired you. I mean, I find some of the people you interviewed quite amazing that how they got involved, they must have been, it must have all been quite humbling. Oh, yeah. I mean, enormously so. Like, you know, essentially you're kind of, I was emailing people. All of the women with the exception of one or two were strangers. Yeah. So emailing these people, imagine you're just, my new business out of the building, you get an email from someone that you may or may not have heard of and they say, hi, can I come and interview you about your relationship with the earth? I think maybe it could be a book, but I'm not sure yet. And I will travel to wherever you want to go. Oh, by the way, we're in the middle of a mess. You know, like it was quite a flex. And yet I only had one woman saying no and she said no, who I did know and she said the most eloquent, beautiful email as to why she didn't want to do it, which I'm not going to divulge, but everyone was so generous. They really were. And so in, you know, I'm asking questions, I expect 45 women, I could have included all their stories. The book would have been considerably longer than it is. And I, so about sort of 20-ish have made it into the book. And I'll tell you a story of a woman called Hannah, who's a couple of years younger than me, so she's in her early 30s. And she lives in a juice brie in Yorkshire and she works for mental health and charity up there. It's an incredibly deprived area. And I met her in, it was around this time of year actually it was the spring equinox. So we were out in the class between winter and spring and very much enough out of the pandemic to be able to get on a train for work reasons, but still so much in the pandemic that she was trying to offer mental health care and support to people remotely via their phones because people didn't have the internet because they couldn't afford it. So it, you know, in this very kind of post-industrial landscape of New Yorkshire and Hannah has what she calls a yarden. And she wanted to meet a park called Oakwell Hall, which is near her on the outskirts of Leeds and juice brie. And I had gotten in touch with Hannah because I thought it was really important to navigate the understanding of gardening and motherhood and nurturing. There's all these kind of very hackneyed associations that women nurture because they're nurturing as women, as mothers, and that's why they want to nurture the ground. And I was like, well, that seems a little too simple for me. And so Hannah at the time had been trying to have a baby for six years. And we spoke about that, but we spoke about lots of other things besides. And one of the things that she liked to grow, one of the huge changes that she made in her life is to move out of the flat and move into this space with her yard. And she filled it with sunflowers. And I said to her, yeah, amazing. And I was, she had no garden experience. She did it all in pots. And I was like, well, why sunflowers? And she said that they reminded her of herself. She said that they're resilient and they're strong and they're beautiful. And even in the sideways rain coming through this concrete yard, they stand up. And she said that, you know, she grew all these different varieties of them. And when the season had ended, she didn't cut them down. She just left them there. And then the birds came. And she was like, I just couldn't get rid of them. Like they just had to stand there. I feel like they have to stand up and take on whatever comes at them the same way that I do. And I've never been able, later a couple of weeks after that, I did say some sunflowers in my garden as well. And kind of in honor of her, but also just that strength and that resilience and that completely unabashed, no nonsense, honestly. She had no idea who I was. And she agreed to meet me and we spent several hours together. Lovely. Yeah. And there were so many interactions like that where, you know, just the innate intimacy of these conversations with complete strangers, all in spaces, these green spaces that meant a huge deal to them. They let you into their lives, really. I mean, that's really what they did. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, one of my daughters works in addiction. It's a psychedelic addiction. And we've talked a lot about gardening and there is an Amy Winehouse Centre, the other side in Hackney. And she was involved. She was there at one point and she was involved in doing gardening there. And I got involved there. And that was a group of young women between 18 and 23, probably. And in fact, you needed to be able to be able to be housed in the Amy Winehouse. It was all part of her trust. And the one joy they got in COVID was they had this little square and I mean, literally a square was putting flowers in pots, honestly, and growing. And it was something they could do and focus on. And it isn't perfect. So they could get rid of all their perfectionist streaks that everything has to be perfect and everything's going to be done on time. No, gardening never is perfect. And I think it was a real learning that they had to do the moment in time. They can't think about tomorrow or yesterday. It's just today. So I think there's a lot more in gardening than we actually give it credit for. So it's totally, totally so exciting. So you're not trained autocopterless and neither am I. But I often think, you know, 12 years of flower farming, are you trained autocopterless? The answer is no. The answer is I got this piece of land. I was really fortunate at the house of Sterelect. We had land. It didn't know what to do with it. So I know I love chickens, going to chicken calls, sketch chickens, going to goat calls, get goats, going to big calls, get pigs. What next? What about these flower things? I don't know what these flower things do. Didn't know anything. Went on a half day course and then thought, oh, wonderful. Did anything in this? And sort of dug a bit deeper. I'll tell you a little bit about it a little bit. I'm not sure if I can get a little bit of attention. I'm not sure if I can get a little bit of attention. I'm not sure if I can get a little bit of attention. I'm not sure if I can get a little bit of attention. I'm not sure if I can get a little bit of attention. I'm not sure if I can get a little bit of attention. 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But I kind of always knew that we'd want to do some hard landscaping out there because it's got the world's most disproportionately large patio, which is in the wrong place and doesn't really serve anything. And, you know, I need to build a garden studio out there because I've got a baby on the way and my writing space has been occupied by the baby. So those are two main changes, but also last summer it just became apparent that the things I was growing were not going to work in the world and we have 40 degrees, and I refused to water. So, yeah, introducing a gravel garden, in a dry garden, introducing a planting palette that's a bit more responsive to, I hope, to the conditions. And, yeah, that's about it. A little baby. Yeah, doing all of this with a tiny baby, Rose. I mean, what could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? When did you do Alice? Two weeks today? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Your life is about to change beyond all reason. I know. And I had this conversation. I went on a... People traditionally go on baby moons with their birth partner and I went on one with my mum and my sister and I remember I was sitting there at a restaurant and I was like, we've been so messed around by the council with this landscaping stuff and everything's done so slow. And I don't know when to start the work in the garden. And they're very practical, no nonsense women. They were like, well, if it's important to you, I mean, it's going to be... everything's going to be mad. So you might as well. So talk to me in a month when there's a skit and various other things and a grab and delivery. But yeah, I don't know. I just, you know, to go back to that notion of having somewhere to sit. I wanted somewhere to sit. Yeah. It's going to be even more important. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Wow. I did read about your wedding. Yeah. And even then, obviously, environmentally and homegrown and couplumes was a big part of it. Is we important to you then? Yeah, I mean, it's always been... I mean, I was not fully admired anyone who grows their own flowers for their wedding. Props to you, not for me. I got married last mid-April and it was one of those things that actually I just delegated everything to people I can create and trust. So, you know, could trust the photographer forever. Could trust... We chose somewhere that made seasonal food. So I was like, I don't need to think about the menu. You're just going to dish it up fine. There wasn't much Pinterest going on, shall we say. But yes, with the flowers, I always knew they had to be sustainably grown. They had to be British. They had to be seasonal. I didn't even really care what they were. I didn't have a colour scheme. I just knew that for me, I had to be India, Hearst of verbaten flowers. And fortunately, she said, yes, and I gave her an incredibly open brief, which is, do what you want. This is how much money I've got. We had what we took over at George and House in Central London. And I was like, just fill the dining room and make us some bouquets. That is a grand piano. Have fun. And it was great. I'm so glad that when people ask all that should do flowers, the main bit of advice I give is just make sure that your photographer takes a lot of photos of them. Because I was so delirious with the whole thing. I didn't really take it in. So India Hobson, who's fantastic photographer and has shot several flower books as well, really went to town up there. So got the photos. But it was in Narcissus and Frittleria and Blossom. Yeah, it was perfect. It was gorgeous. Perfect and gorgeous. It's like the awaking of spring, isn't it, is what you've got in April. And you're a perfect bride, actually, to just say to a florist. Sustainable eco, do what you want. This is the kind of vision I've got and not, and allow them to move within there. You trust them to allow them to do their creativity. Because when we're doing weddings, what we want to do is we want to create something that's best at that time. Yeah, cool. So we don't want to be tied to a particular Queen of Sweden Rose or a color palette necessarily if that's better for them. But more kind of, this is our style and it's natural and it's elegant and we'd love to produce that, isn't that what you'd like. And we work best with an open brief, actually. I mean, the thing is from my perspective, even as a gardener, as a florist, you know, you've got more weddings than I have. I've never done a wedding. I don't know. So I would much rather be like, you're the expert. You do this. And then we had a very, very tiny legal ceremony with two witnesses about 10 days before and Millie Proust did a bouquet for that. And that was, again, I was just like, oh, when you do me a bouquet, like a bouquet, and she turned up in the morning before we walked to the registry office. And that was hella balls and some early tulips and narcissists. So yeah, similar, just lousy and full of the joys of spring. Yeah, that's what it should be. Absolutely should be. I think people's mindsets are changing. I mean, when I say to people 90% of flowers in the UK imported, they go, yeah, really? And then they come from Holland, don't they? No, they come from Africa and Colombia and lots of South America and Kenya, our roses and Valentine's Day come from Kenya. And they're shocked because the knowledge isn't there. And the reason the knowledge isn't there is because none of them have to be labeled. And so you can buy them in a supermarket and nobody knows where they come from because they're not labeled. So my big mission in life is to somehow make labeling. So people have a choice. Everybody can have a choice then and we can choose to be sustainable or not. But at the moment, we can't make a choice because we don't know. And I think, you know, the closest you're going to get is that sort of that British flag you get on bunches, which is something that doesn't actually tell you anything about whether it's been grown in a polytunnel, whether it's been grown with a load of artificial light, whether it's been like grown in a polytunnel. So, you know, we're getting into supermarket tulip season on Instagram. And, you know, flowers have to be accessible for everyone. But as you say, it's an education thing. And one of the statistics that I did fold into why we wrote, there's not a lot of statistics because it's a piece of it. No, there are not. Not a fact book, but one of them is about the carbon footprint of a bouquet, which is akin to taking a flight to France, like flying London to Paris. And, you know, standard bouquet was kind of shot bought. Go to a monies, pick up a bunch of tenor, or you might as well have just taken a flight from London to Paris. That's what the carbon footprint of it is. And, you know, I think it's not that people are willfully acting badly. It's the same way that people are like, I'm going to be vegetarian for the planets. I'm going to buy and eat all of this inorganic tofu that has an enormous carbon footprint. It's just that people don't know. I think if that was made a little more clear, so yeah, all power to you and your labelling, I hope it comes up. That's my big thing, and trying to get involved with Defra and so on. But hopefully I leave. That's my legacy that all flowers will be labelled and then people will have a choice. But I think the whole carbon footprint of things becoming a much bigger thing, having been a flower farm for 12 years, I can see that it's moving in the right way. It seems that price will drive the market too, and imports are more expensive now, and Brexit has done that. One of the, perhaps a good thing to Brexit, one of the only things, it's made flowers more expensive to import, in which case price will drive the market again. And people will, well, I'm not willing to buy that. How about if I buy British because it's cheaper? So there will be some price advantages, and maybe that will help. But the whole sort of learning and keep going on about it. Yeah, because I sort of fell into flower farming, but my degree is in environmental chemistry. And I fell into that because I wanted to be a doctor, but I was a failed medic. I could never have gotten, I wasn't clever enough. So I ended up doing an environmental science degree, and then you think, well, I did that because I thought it was the only thing I could do. But it was obviously then, even when I was 18, there was something that had said, hold on a minute about this environment. And you can imagine then a long time ago, the environment wasn't anything that anybody talked about. So, and it's kind of a full circle, so it's quite interesting to see. That is interesting. And I do think it's a shift in aesthetics as well. I mean, we've been seeing, you'll know this far better than I will, but we've been seeing this shift to a kind of more wild and free, sustained, like seasonal aesthetic in forestry, you know, for a good five to eight years now. And I think a lot of it is about shifting people's understanding. So you don't have roses in November. You know, you don't have peonies in March. I think people better understand that you can have. It will hopefully start to change. But then I don't know, I go to work in an office, which is full of like every week. It's these completely bonkers lilies and everything else. And I'm just like, oh, that's so lovely. And I'm like, oh God, don't sniff them. You'll get a little exercise in your face. Like, I'm just like, good for you. Not for me. Yeah, we're going to move on. It's, you've got to know when to pick your battles, I think sometimes. I know, just don't smell them. It's true that no one ever really buys me flowers. I've got some of my book from this, I'm going to talk about these absolutely beautiful enemones and five, five fistfuls of daps. What did you, I wanted to be a book illustrator. Oh, close then. Yeah, I love art. And I nearly did art instead of English at that crucial. What do you do? Yeah. A university point. So I loved art. And I think now I create in the garden. And I guess with my work and to a certain extent, my Instagram account, maybe. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But yeah, so I don't think I would have been an artist though. I'm too neurotic to make a living from something like that. But one thing that I always had as a backup plan was to be a plumber. It's quite a lot of money in plumbing. I grew up in a series of doeruppers, shall we say. Right. So very conscious of the need for plumbing. And I guess it's a similar sort of, I like novelty. I like meeting people. I like different changes as seen. And also the other dream job was being an aperist or a beekeeper. Yeah. They've always thought, oh, that would be quite fun, which again is quite outdoorsy. Connect to glam. So, you know, a few, a few other things. Bees definitely. Definitely. I follow Dave Goldstone, who's obviously all about bees. Yeah, he's amazing. Really interesting. So yeah, beekeeper sounds quite good. Yeah, my husband's in construction. There's always need for plumbers. Always need a common massive respect to try and come and sort an issue out or sort of problem out or massive respect for plumbers. So yeah, either of those two. Not particularly salubrious again. No, but there's actually apparently there's more, I read something about this more money commercially and stuff that isn't glam. Go to the opposite end, go into rubbish, go into things that people don't want to do. And obviously that there's more then, then in what we would perceive to be a much nicer place to be. So it's quite interesting. Maybe I'll be a plumber in my next life. So tell us about your podcast. You mentioned your podcast. Tell us about it. Yeah. So why would we grow the podcast? So perhaps confusingly, it's not the voices of the women in the book. So essentially, I wrote the book or I researched the book and it was sort of about halfway through. It was the first summer of researching it. But I had this sort of idea and I remember being from the beach in Bosam, which she would down that way and emailing my agent and being, I think, we needed to podcast this because all of the women in the book are non-amised for obvious reasons to a certain extent. They will know their first name and maybe where they live. That's about it. Whereas obviously you can't do that if you're doing a podcast with people, as you know. And so I've done all this research and this writing and I realised that these conversations were so rich and so deep and that I could write about them to a certain extent. You wouldn't get the capturing of people's voices. You wouldn't get the pattern of their speech. You wouldn't be able to have that real intimacy of conversation. And that was something that I really wanted to capture and to go into. And also very much in spirit of the book, I wanted to show the relationship between women in gardening and women who weren't known for gardening. So that was sort of the spirit of the podcast. So I invited quite well-known women, who most of whom were not known for gardening, with the exception of Sarah Raven, who obviously is. The interesting thing with Sarah is that people might know her catalogs and her books, but people didn't realise that she used to be a doctor, for instance, or how her business started. So we spoke about that. But otherwise the, you know, design in Margaret Howe, Hill House Vintage Call of Saturn, Sophia Cottcher, as I mentioned, Rick Minnie-Eyer, who wrote the Roastin Timbooks, Claire Ratonan, who is a writer, Sally Vickers, who is a novelist. Yes. And these women all had a really meaningful connection with gardening in their lives, but it wasn't necessarily something you'd know about. And as with the book, it was really important that we recorded in a growing space of their choice. So for the most part, that was their gardens, but with Sally, she chose Q Gardens. No, it should have been this really fascinating beat throughout, from her kind of infancy, all the way up through three generations of raising children for her. And I worked with an all female team, so I worked with Holly Fisher, who's an incredible producer, and Siobhan Watts, who's an amazing photographer. We commissioned the female artist to do the artwork and a female musician to make music. We worked with a feminist studio. So the whole thing is this like awesome, powerful girl gang. And the response to it, I mean, we loved making it. And the interesting thing was, traveling around as a team, it was a summer that in hindsight was actually a huge summer of change for the three of us. And we would see each other, it was over the course of about five months in the end. And every few weeks we'd catch up in another kind of slightly wild thing that happened in our lives. And so we're all completely determined to do another season. Just need to get a few ducks in a row. Have a baby, have a baby, get some funding, you know, small things. I'm sure it'll be fine. Yeah, absolutely. That'll be fine. I'll probably add my mum to the podcast crew to the cart for the baby. We'll see. Yeah. It'll be useful. But yeah, and the response has been wonderful, just in the sense that, you know, as this test, a lot of people have maybe not thought about why they grow. And there's a lot of reasons as to why people do and podcasts has been showing some of those reasons. Yeah, no, it's perfect, absolutely perfect. So any thoughts on future plans, obviously a baby, the baby, another podcast series. Yeah. Another book maybe coming out. Well, wait a sec, but yeah, there's a few, there's a, we'll see about that one. And there's always, there's always the desire. And then yes, that's giving up. But in the immediate, there was a few book events, talking about why we've been growing, but also mostly sitting in the garden, seeing whether the landscaping of my dream is going to like a match. And yeah, motherhood. Wow, that old stuff. So, I can laugh hysterically on that one. And think, okay, we're in mind now 27 and 24. So it's, yeah, it's a journey. It's a journey. It's the same as growing, really. It's not perfect. Yeah. Anything right now. And it has lots of same attributes to gardening. Yeah, that's good advice. Yeah. I have perfectionist tendencies, but I would this I have completely very low expectations of my capability. So I'm hoping that somewhere in between the two, it'll balance out. It won't be perfect. I have to tell you that. And there'll be days where you'll be overwhelmed and days when you're born and it'll be like gardening. And just think about that day. You know how I think lots of mothers worry, you know, when we walk, when we talk, how we do this, what will happen here? And is he behind his friends or above his friends? Or what about this? Oh, gosh, it's exhausting. It was just about now. He's not going to be wearing nappies when he's 18. I wouldn't worry about it. You know, it's kind of like, yeah, maybe I should do a book on the reflections of motherhood when you're older. Looking back on it. Like what you're trying to take. You've got it nailed. Yeah, absolutely. I'd read it. Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, Alice, I want to really thank you for coming over today. Thank you for having me. Thank you. I look forward to next week's episode. Please don't forget to subscribe and rating with you on the channel. I've been rating with you on your podcast app. We do have some wonderful free resources on our website at the cutflowercollective.co.uk. We also have two free Facebook communities, which we'd love you to join. For farmers or those who want to be for our farmers, we have cutflower farming, growth and profit in your business. And our other free Facebook group is Learn with the Cutflower Collective for those starting out on their flower journey. All of the links are below. I look forward to getting to know you all. ♪♪