'All My Wild Mothers' with Victoria Bennett

This July for Words on Wednesday, an intimate weaving of memoir and herbal folklore, ALL MY WILD MOTHERS is a story of re- wilding our wastelands, and the transformation that can happen when we do…

On October 19th in 2007, Victoria Bennett was looking forward to new motherhood. At seven months pregnant, she was excited about what was to come. But when the telephone rang, the news she received changed everything. Her eldest sister had died in a canoeing accident.

Five years later, struggling with grief, the demands of being a parent-carer for her young son and the impact of deeper austerity, life feels very different to the future Victoria had imagined.

A move to a new social housing estate in rural Cumbria offers Victoria and her family a chance to rebuild their lives. Constructed over an industrial site, at first the barren ground seems an unlikely place to sow the seeds of a new life.

Victoria and her son set about transforming the rubble around them into a wild, apothecary garden. Daisy, for resilience. Dandelion, for strength against adversity. Red Campion, to ward off loneliness. Sow thistle, to lift melancholy. Borage, to bring hope in dark and difficult times.

Stone by stone, seed by seed, they discover that sometimes life grows, not in spite of what is broken, but because of it.
Victoria Bennett said: ‘ALL MY WILD MOTHERS was slow-written over a decade, the same length of time it has taken to turn a pile of rubble and rock into a wild, apothecary garden. I made the garden, and I wrote this book because I needed to. A full-time care-giver, on a low income and struggling with illness and grief, the option of heading out on pilgrimage into the wilds to find my answers wasn’t open to me. If I was going to rebuild something out of all the things broken in my life, I had to do it where I was: a social housing estate built on top of disused industrial stonework. This book is my story about finding strength in unsteady times, the resilience that can be learnt from the weeds that grow beneath our feet, and the healing that can be found. It is not a happy-ever-after but a story of radical hope, of reclaiming our wild spaces, and the joy that can grow not in spite of what is broken, but because of it.’

Victoria Bennett was born in Oxfordshire in 1971 and currently lives on a housing estate in rural Cumbria with her husband and son. A poet and author, her writing spans non- fiction, poetry and games-based storytelling, and has received a Northern Debut Award and Northern Promise Award, the Andrew Waterhouse Award, a Writing Platform Digital Literature bursary, the Mother’s Milk Writing Prize, and was long-listed for the Penguin WriteNow programme and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for under-represented voices. She founded Wild Women Press in 1999 to support rural women writers in her community and she is the curator of the global Wild Woman Web project, an inclusive online space focusing on nature, connection, and creativity. When not juggling writing, full-time care, and genetic illness, she can be found where the wild weeds grow, tending her apothecary garden. ALL MY WILD MOTHERS her debut memoir.

Image: Annabel Williams