Gardening and women's rights?

[SuperLoudPoppingAction]

There are three things keeping me relatively sane at the moment. One being discussion with like-minded women who are passionate about women's rights, another being (surprisingly, as I am dysphraxic and a bit crap at it) swimming.
The most reliable, though, is being out in my garden. I love being in nature generally. If I had more energy I'd like to go on walks more, but I've been fairly knackered lately.

The cyclical nature of planting, growing, harvesting etc feels very significant to me.
Also, the fact that I can make mistakes and that everything will still basically be ok is so lovely. It's an antidote to anxiety that I feel with loads of other stuff.

I've had such lovely conversations with women about gardening. One woman gave me some of her tiny gooseberries from her allotment and I made chutney with them. Another woman told me that parsley only thrives in a household run by a woman.

Alice Walker talks a lot about gardening. alicewalkersgarden.com/2010/10/in-search-of-our-mothers-garden/
Susan Brownmiller [[http://www.nycitywoman.com/the-feminist-gardener/]]
I love this as well. www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/03/margery_fish_s_we_made_a_garden_is_a_feminist_manifesto_disguised_as_a_gardening.html
"a harmonious, informal, frothing sort of a garden, its borders filled with “green” flowers, its shady corners crammed with hellebores, primroses, epimediums, and, most important of all, her beloved snowdrops."

I keep thinking about how important it is to experience a Space of One's Own. Even if it's a terrarium with a couple of air plants in it (like in my last house, where the garden was not private enough for me to enjoy it).

It's not going to revolutionise gender politics in itself, but is nurturing a connection to nature something that anyone else connects with feminist politics?

Lovely thread. I only have a small garden but love it. Sadly my tomatoes have got blight in the last couple of years so I'm having to give them a break this year. I'd love an allotment.

I’m not really a gardener, but the posts about people’s mental health struggles and especially the poster who had survived a strangling have made me very emotional . I love a garden to look at (as long as it isn’t too colourful) and have many books about gardening but wouldn’t know where to start in real life! Shame, really. Nice that you all are enjoying your gardens and birds. That’s all I wanted to say, really. Thanks everyone for sharing.

We have a vegetable patch in our garden. DH has helped with some of it, but mostly it is mine. I dug out tonnes of bindweed, ground elder and rubble. I dug back in sacks and sacks of compost. I picked the plants and seeds. I put the fence around (DH helped with that one). I decided we should extend it and where, and marked it out. I've weeded it and dug it and watered it.

This year we should hopefully have carrots, broccoli, peas, beans, potatoes (bit of a mystery as they appear to have self-seeded and I do not know how ), peppers, courgettes, butternut squash, pumpkin, strawberries and raspberries - if everything goes according to plan - and I will be very pleased. It is extremely satisfying. I'm still not totally sure what I'm doing, so it's also always a lovely surprise to get something edible out of it . And I find it very calming to know that i can feed our family, if needs be - I can get quite anxious, so having that little sense of self-sufficiency (no matter how illusory) helps.

Has anyone read that Bill Bryson book about the history of the home? There's a very interesting section on gardening and how it became acceptable for women - with a very funny (to modern eyes) but earnest passage from an early gardening book aimed at women, describing digging in careful detail. I will try to find it! And about how revolutionary a concept it was, for naice ladies to be permitted to get their hands dirty.

I love gardening and am very lucky to have a massive wilderness to tackle.

It's funny you should conflate it with feminism, as it's something I have been pondering this week. I used an example of the work I'm currently doing on another thread about gender stereotypes, as I've been felling an old and mostly dead 30' hedge (which has involved a lot of chainsaw work!). I've built one small retaining wall in a rockery and am about to embark on a bigger retaining wall for a steep bank, which will involve digging proper foundations and so on.

I love the cycle of renewal and the way that the garden responds to nurturing - which can be gentle (fertilising and mulching) and also quite robust and tough (hard pruning etc.).

Start with radishes, Fascinated, if you ever do fancy a go of it.
A)they are very likely to germinate
B) they don't mind being close together
C)they are a feminist pun
D)you can make pesto with the leaves.

Or you can buy ready-made finished product plants like begonias and lobelias and all you have to do is water them, really.

I've done Advanced Gardening this year. I have always wanted to make hypertufa planters. I've moved house about 8 times since I bought a pamphlet telling you how to make them from Durham botanical gardens. Finally I have a planter. And... half of another one, which I may or may not finish this week. we shall see.

The link to feminism is quite instinctive, for me - something about taking up space, exerting ownership or custodianship over land, being self-sufficient and putting your energy into something that is positive.

Also being a bit stronger than I'm used to, at times. I've been so unwell over the past decade or so, and it's a barometer of getting a bit better. Also, we have a lot of bonfires and I associate that with trips to Horton Women's Holiday centre.

Here we go - the relevant passage:

"...Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies [by Jane Louden], published in 1841... was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions - working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts...

The value of Gardening for Ladies wasn't what it contained so much as what it represented: permission to go outside and do something."

So there you go - we are continuing a feminist revolution right there.

That's really nice to think about, spudlet.

I worked in the industry since leaving school at 16 and saw it change from quite unusual for women to be working as gardeners to seeing it far more accepted and women be better supported and encouraged in the industry....

...until you arrived at a level where you actually knew what you were doing and needed to get the men you were working with to listen to you because you had a responsibility for health and safety and getting the job done. I'll never forget driving to head office on the other side of the country with the lad I was supervising, only to have management talk past me and directly to my staff member about the job I was being paid to do. I resigned that evening and started working for myself the next day.

I curtail my enjoyment of gardens to my own and making good money in other people's now. Sad, because it was my whole life.

Ohh gorgeous thread thank you OP. I am very very unwell and physically not very able at the moment and I miss my garden so much. I’ve gone from building a sandstone patio by hand with DH 3 years ago to unable to weed this year. I absolutely love growing vegetables and the unbelievable taste and freshness you get from growing your own makes it so satisfying. It’s very interesting to know more about the history of women and gardening it’s not an angle I had ever considered so thank you!

Ooft.
I know other women with similar stories, sadly.

I hope you feel up to pottering again soon, Badger.

In the meantime, have you seen 'A Little Chaos'?

I really wanted to see it at the cinema but DP and I got confused and ended up at a fairly late night screening of a live action disney film - cinderella or something - and we were too mortified to leave once we'd worked out why we were surrounded by 8 year olds in princess dresses.

Thats twice i've heard mention of the horton centre. I looked it up. Amazed such a place exists. Am definitely going to save up to go in the next two years.

Regarding self seeded potatoes, they can grow from seed but you have no control over the variety that grows as a result. My dad told me some time ago and so I cant remember why that is. Someone else may know more.

I second radishes. Almost impossible to fail.

Wilko is brilliant for veg seeds. Had 100 percent success with theirs even though they are quite cheap. Also do great beginner kits.

I want to do lots of things but don’t have the get up and go to actually do them... I don’t know why!

never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts...

This made me smile - rather wryly as it reminded me of yesterday afternoon when I was out planting some fushia plugs and the heavens opened with the most almighty crash of thunder for good measure

I'd second Wilko for seeds. Also don't overlook B&M either for gardening basics. I've just bought a couple of bags of white spar from B&Q to line a hedging bed (I wanted bark but it would be an open invite for the local cats to use it as a litter tray). You can imagine my chagrin when I discovered that I could have had the exact same product from the B&M garden centre for half the price...

That’s interesting about “Gardening for Ladies”. See I was actually thinking that an affinity for growing things in females was actually perhaps quite deep-rooted in human terms... I was thinking about hunting and gathering times when presumably the females and children (?) were responsible for foraging in woods etc and would therefore have had to know about edible v non-edible plants etc?

The value of Gardening for Ladies wasn't what it contained so much as what it represented: permission to go outside and do something

I love this! Makes me feel connected to those ladies!

onbeing.org/blog/a-gardening-poem-about-living/

Feministy gardening poem by Marge Piercy

Lovely thread. I've got into gardening recently after being terrified of it for years. My old house had a massive, overgrown back garden and all we ever really did was try to keep it under control. We now have a tiny but lovely garden, and I have claimed it as my domain . There's something incredibly calming about pottering around deadheading roses or training creepers, and something very satisfying about a good prune or tidy. Love it!

I'm absolutely positive that poor women would have kept kitchen gardens if they could, but it wouldn't have been something to which you aspired. But naice middle-class ladies were meant to be decorative, and certainly not to have compost under their fingernails. It's something that they would have been cut off from.

Although going back further, ladies would have been expected to be able to keep a kitchen garden, dry herbs for medicines and so on - although I'm sure they would have had staff for the actual digging bit! But they were expected to know and be able to direct operations, I think (based only on my reading of historical potboilers, mind you ).

Posters are so right about gardening being good for mental health.

I love mine, even if it’s smaller than I would like. I live on a very busy high street, when I potter around in the front garden it’s very social. I’m always chatting to neighbours and complete strangers.

The back gardens private though. It’s so peaceful, unless the kids are playing football.

I need to set up a small compost heap. That’s my next job.

I got a brilliant food composter via a council discount scheme. You can chuck ANY food waste in at all, plus your usual garden waste, and because it’s a hotter compost system with different microbes it breaks down faster than the black tardis ones.

Superloud - I love the poem.

By the way, arf at SLPA and DP at the cinema watching Disney when you expected something else.

I love that poem!