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 accredited vineyard in France. There, along with meeting a couple of pigs and ...
Jun 10, 2025•24 min•Season 5Ep. 4
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 about how to live a life caught between the bustle of Paris and the ...
Jun 10, 2025•21 min•Season 5Ep. 3
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 Chateau de Mille , looking over idyllic rose gardens, we meet Jamie after sh...
Jun 10, 2025•28 min•Season 5Ep. 2
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. Stay tuned for new episodes of the Why Women Grow Podcast, with me A...
Jun 03, 2025•1 min•Season 5Ep. 1
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 boundaries. Behind the duo’s beautiful show garden, in the heart of th...
May 20, 2025•28 min•Season 4Ep. 4
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 the scenes of a skyrocketing career, Ula was navigating considerab...
May 20, 2025•26 min•Season 4Ep. 3
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 the Chelsea Flower Show Main Avenue, winning two gold medals in t...
May 20, 2025•30 min•Season 4Ep. 2
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, survival and creation on the way. Join me, Alice Vincent, for a...
May 18, 2025•1 min•Season 4Ep. 1
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 in her Edinburgh hometown before she went on a UK Tour. At the c...
Feb 25, 2025•28 min•Season 3Ep. 3
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 who explores how we connect to more-than-human environments - what...
Feb 25, 2025•29 min•Season 3Ep. 2
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 everything we build our existence upon. Their work has seen them trans...
Feb 25, 2025•35 min•Season 3Ep. 1
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’t wait for you to dive in with us. Join me, Alice Vincent, for a...
Feb 18, 2025•1 min•Season 3Ep. 1
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 how deep and unique her relationship to the earth was. We celebrat...
Jul 23, 2024•30 min•Season 2Ep. 3
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 years to land in the New York Times' bestseller list, then stayed ...
Jul 23, 2024•23 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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 environmentally conscious way. Anna spoke about how she navigates the world ...
Jul 23, 2024•24 min
Why Women Grow is back with a new mini series, featuring three women who have fundamentally changed how I think and live. This summer's mini series features the chef and bestselling author Anna Jones, botanist and Braiding Sweetgrass writer Robin Wall Kimmerer and floral designer Hazel Gardiner.
Jul 18, 2024•2 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Bonus episode: Writer and novelist Jamaica Kincaid redefined garden writing with books such as My Garden (Book) and Among Flowers, as well as changing perspectives on the post-colonial experience through titles such as A Small Place and Lucy. We meet the Antiguan-American author in the halls of Charleston House, Sussex, where Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant made art, a home, and a life-long relationship. In a quiet moment away from Charleston’s Festival of the Garden, Jama...
Oct 03, 2023•16 min
The creative mind behind Hill House Vintage and author of Hill House Living , Paula Sutton is a stylist, writer and - perhaps most of all - a purveyor of joy. After navigating a career in the fast-paced and glamorous world of fashion magazines, Paula relocated from the streets of South London to Hill House, an idyllic Georgian home in Norfolk 12 years ago. There, she decided that she was going to live - and raise her three young children - with a focus on what made her happy. Gardening is someth...
Feb 27, 2023•25 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Margaret Howell has been designing men’s and womenswear for five decades, prioritising understated quality over trends: she makes beautiful clothes that work well. Fifty years after she started to design and sell clothes from her home in Blackheath, South London, there are now 80 Margaret Howell stores across the globe, from Paris to Tokyo, and she has been appointed a CBE for services to the retail industry. Margaret has been inspired by the natural world since childhood, citing the impact of g...
Feb 27, 2023•21 min•Season 1Ep. 6
One simple concept, a million cookbooks sold: Rukmini Iyer’s Roasting Tin recipe books have transformed dinner times around the country. But the writer and food stylist is also a keen amateur gardener, growing first on a balcony and, later, in a garden on a quiet street in leafy South London. Iyer’s adventures in growing food to eat collided with the arrival of her first child, and gardening has given her a new perspective on what it is to feed and nourish. We catch up with the author of India E...
Feb 20, 2023•24 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Sally Vickers is a Jungian psychotherapist and the author of books such as Miss Garnet's Angel , The Other Side of You and, most recently, The Gardener . The daughter of two communists, Salley was a teacher before she retrained as a psychotherapist, and her writing delves into the stuff that makes us human. She is also a keen gardener, especially at her country home in Wiltshire. In the midst of the downpours that broke England’s heatwave last summer, we met Salley at Kew Gardens, a place that h...
Feb 20, 2023•26 min•Season 1Ep. 4
If you’ve ever bought plants or seeds online, or through mail order, you’ve probably encountered Sarah Raven . The gardener, writer and teacher is also a nursery-owner and businesswoman, developing, trialling and selling plants to Britain’s home gardeners. Over the course of three decades and seven books, including A Year Full of Flowers, Sarah has changed how British gardens grow, ushering bold colours and flavourful fruit and veg into our homes and kitchens. Today we’re heading to her home and...
Feb 13, 2023•24 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Claire Ratinon is a food-grower, speaker and writer. In 2022, she released Unearthed , a powerful memoir about understanding what it is to become a custodian of the earth as a Black woman, and how the process of doing so helped her gain a sense of belonging in a post-colonial country. In 2012 Claire was working as a documentary producer in New York when she stumbled upon Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in the middle of the city. Having always felt alienated from nature, she embarked upon a journ...
Feb 13, 2023•27 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Poppy Okotcha describes herself as an ecological home grower working to inspire reconnection to the land and the living world through the story of food and herbs. She came to gardening after a shift in her personal life: having moved between the UK and South Africa during her childhood, Poppy had a career as a model. When she was left burnt out by the fashion industry, she began to cultivate a slower kind of life, growing organically on top of a canal boat in London and learning about biodynamic...
Feb 01, 2023•26 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Introducing the line-up for the first season of Why Women Grow: writer Claire Ratinon designer Margaret Howell chef Rukmini Iyer gardening gamechanger Sarah Raven novelist Salley Vickers environmentalist Poppy Okotcha and stylist and influencer Paula Sutton We talk about everything, from motherhood, to gardening for a better planet and finding your place in the world. The first season kicks off on February 13, with episodes from the gardens and brains of Claire Ratinon and Sarah Raven. Make sure...
Jan 23, 2023•2 min
The first listen of the forthcoming Why Women Grow podcast, launching February 2023 from Alice Vincent. This podcast is inspired by my book, Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival , which is out on March 2nd and available to pre-order now . The Why Women Grow podcast is produced by Holly Fisher, and theme music is by Maria Chiara Argiro. Thank you to our partners at Seedlip . We’ve also been photographing our guests and their gardens and you can see the beautiful images capture...
Dec 14, 2022•41 sec
