Book of the week
Rootbound: Rewilding a Life by Alice Vincent (Canongate, $33)
‘I like gardening,’’ the novelist Alice Sebold once said. ‘‘It’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.’’
Nurturing mute, green things offered similar solace to journalist Alice Vincent after her heart was broken in 2017. Her sprawling recovery-through-horticulture memoir has the potential to become the Millennial generation’s answer to self-help books like Eat Pray
Love. A kind of Peat Prune Gloves.
In an attempt to slow the frantic, screen-lit pace of digital life, Vincent’s generation upload carefully curated photos of their ‘‘leafbabies’’ to their social media accounts: #PlantMama, #PlantPapa. Those who mock Millennials for spending hundreds of dollars on a weeping fig while complaining about being broke should read Vincent’s book. She makes a level-headed and poetic case for her peers’ need to seek refuge with their photosynthesising friends.
Vincent was a child who preferred books and indoor crafts to the mucky outdoors. In the 90s of her youth, front gardens were paved and decked. Houseplants were replaced with incense sticks and potpourri.
She dreamt of moving to London and becoming a rock critic, of tumbling out of noisy gigs into offlicences then rattling her ideas into print. A gifted writer, she quickly landed her fantasy job and began interviewing her pop idols for The
Daily Telegraph in her early 20s. But – as so many of those rock stars could have told her – the music business can be a weary treadmill. You’re always looking to be first with a sound, or a review. The public attention span is short. Albums are now released online to the press and the public simultaneously and a journalist has little time to judge whether the streamed sounds are capable of sinking roots into the listener’s heart. Singles are cropped, consumed or left to wilt like cutand-come again salad leaves.
No wonder Vincent began spending more and more time with restful greenery, coaxing sweet peas up the railings on the balcony of her south-east London flat. When her partner left her unexpectedly, she tried to move through her shock and grief with the unhurried tenacity of her plants, stretching out little tendrils of hope and turning her tear-streaked face to the sun.
The journalist in Vincent ensures her book comes packed with great tales of gardeners past – particularly women. She draws comparisons between Millennials and the Victorians, who also turned to houseplants to steady themselves against the pace of the industrial revolution. I particularly enjoyed the story of botanical artist Marianne North (1830-1890) who, condemning her sisters’ marriages as ‘‘a terrible experiment’’ that turned a woman into ‘‘a sort of upper servant’’, began travelling the world alone in search of exotic new plants to paint.
At the end of her exploration of Millennials and their perennials, Vincent allows herself to fall in love again. A full cycle of seasons has been weathered and she stands on her balcony as a calmer woman with ‘‘fewer expectations and happier to challenge them’’. I hope she continues to blossom.
The journalist in Vincent ensures her book comes packed with great tales of gardeners past.