Why Women Grow

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 the package too. By the late 90s th...

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 was the Editor in Chief of Elle Deco...

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 make us human: what it is to mother,...

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 Regenerative Organic Certified accred...

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-lined pond. There, she tells us abo...

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 France. In the shade of the Chat...

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 this new series: The French Life. 

Sta...

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: created a show garden that breaks bound...

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 century-long history.

But behind th...

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 remarkable - and memorable - gardens on ...

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 ceiling - and learning about grief, joy...

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 enough to catch Hannah while she was ...

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 depend on.

Manon is a Welsh artist wh...

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 repair the soil that feeds nearly every...

Introducing Earthly Matters

A new season of Why Women Grow is coming soon - and this time, we’re getting dirty.

After two years of celebrating the bold and the beautiful, we’re back - and we’re going under the surface to explore what lies beneath.

In Earthly Matters, the first of four brand new miniseries for this year, we’ll be exploring the powerful possibilities of soil, peatlands and fungi with some incredible women. And we can’...

Floral designer and broadcaster Hazel Gardiner has been part of the Why Women Grow sisterhood long before we hit record: she was the first woman I interviewed for the book. I’d been aware of Hazel’s distinctive approach to floristry and her advocacy for diversity and inclusivity in horticulture for some time. But when I learned of how gardening had helped her when she was undergoing treatment for a rare form of cancer, I realised h...

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She’s a rare example of someone who straddles the world of academic science and indigenous teaching; by crossing the gulf between the two, she’s transformed how people understand the outside world. Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is a remarkable example of wisdom that thrives on being passed on: it took seven y...

Chef and bestselling author Anna Jones has inspired the way hundreds of thousands of people cook for years - and we were delighted to be invited into her courtyard garden in East London for this episode of Why Women Grow.

Anna won’t profess to being a great gardener but her approach to food extends far beyond the kitchen. She works with edible flowers, seasonal produce and has written whole books about cooking in a more enviro...