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A review by philippakmoore
All My Wild Mothers: Motherhood, loss and an apothecary garden by Victoria Bennett
5.0
This is a wonderful book - lyrical, tender and deeply moving. I was absolutely spellbound by it. Poetic, compelling, heartbreaking yet hopeful, it’s beautifully written and I am quite in awe of Victoria Bennett’s strength and resilience, and her determination to create something beautiful out of life’s inevitable grief and harshness. And her young son sounds like the most adorable, wise little boy.
Each chapter is named for a wild plant, or medicinal weed, its stories and healing properties, and then what follows is a recollection from Bennett's life, either in the present where she, her husband and son are trying to make a wild apothecary garden in the yard of their council estate house and having to manage her son's diabetes, the prejudice and bureaucracy one has to endure when one is dependent on the welfare system, and her elderly mother's recent terminal diagnosis; or at various points in the past where Bennett reflects on loves, losses and times of change and growth that were the seeds of the life she is now living. "In the broken ground of grief, I just wanted to see what could grow," she says in her author's note.
There are so many wonderful sentences and images in this book. These are a few of my favourites:
"Plant the seed. Find the small thing worth the gift of your hope. Whatever else comes, trust that it will grow, even if you do not see it flower."
"Life and death have no balance sheet, or fair-promise to keep. It is not luck, good or bad. It is as simple as this: sometimes, terrible things happen."
"In this one act, he has learnt that society has one rule for those who have wealth, and another those who do not."
"I did not know where I could belong. In that lonely space, I dared to ask the question: what if the thing that makes us a weed in someone else's perfect garden is the very gift that makes us shine?"
All My Wild Mothers is a deeply moving meditation on what it means to be resilient in a world that can be very unfair and what it means to carve out a space for beauty and cultivate a love of and reverence for nature when we live in a world that is all about "progress", wealth accumulation, regulations and profits.
I cannot recommend this book more highly to everyone but particularly to gardeners, mothers, poets, nature lovers and to those seeking a gentler yet wilder path.
Thank you to the author, Two Roads/John Murray Press and Netgalley for an ARC.
Each chapter is named for a wild plant, or medicinal weed, its stories and healing properties, and then what follows is a recollection from Bennett's life, either in the present where she, her husband and son are trying to make a wild apothecary garden in the yard of their council estate house and having to manage her son's diabetes, the prejudice and bureaucracy one has to endure when one is dependent on the welfare system, and her elderly mother's recent terminal diagnosis; or at various points in the past where Bennett reflects on loves, losses and times of change and growth that were the seeds of the life she is now living. "In the broken ground of grief, I just wanted to see what could grow," she says in her author's note.
There are so many wonderful sentences and images in this book. These are a few of my favourites:
"Plant the seed. Find the small thing worth the gift of your hope. Whatever else comes, trust that it will grow, even if you do not see it flower."
"Life and death have no balance sheet, or fair-promise to keep. It is not luck, good or bad. It is as simple as this: sometimes, terrible things happen."
"In this one act, he has learnt that society has one rule for those who have wealth, and another those who do not."
"I did not know where I could belong. In that lonely space, I dared to ask the question: what if the thing that makes us a weed in someone else's perfect garden is the very gift that makes us shine?"
All My Wild Mothers is a deeply moving meditation on what it means to be resilient in a world that can be very unfair and what it means to carve out a space for beauty and cultivate a love of and reverence for nature when we live in a world that is all about "progress", wealth accumulation, regulations and profits.
I cannot recommend this book more highly to everyone but particularly to gardeners, mothers, poets, nature lovers and to those seeking a gentler yet wilder path.
Thank you to the author, Two Roads/John Murray Press and Netgalley for an ARC.