Jennifer Jewell has gained a wide following for her blog “Cultivating Place.” Produced from her home in northern California, it is self-described as a “conversation on natural history & the human impulse to garden.”
That same description could apply in part to Jewell’s first book, “The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants.” This is a wide-ranging discussion on this gardening impulse, using a very broad definition of the idea of horticulture, captured in a series of pithy biographies. The profiled women have careers in and a passion for plants, expressed in botany, landscape architecture, floriculture, agriculture, plant hunting and breeding, food justice, garden writing, and photography.
Many of the subjects are from the Pacific Northwest. An example is Cara Loriz, the executive director of the Organic Seed Alliance in Port Townsend, Washington, advocating for community building and research for sustainable food systems.
Another is Christin Geall, a multi-talented writer/photographer and educator in Victoria, British Columbia. I confess to having not heard of either woman prior to reading this book. Jewell writes that for Geall, “flowers are a horticultural medium for leading and educating others about plants, acting not as pretty cages, but as colorful, Socratic-style critical thinking.” Both women are examples of conducting important work at a local level that addresses global needs facing all cultures.
All these biographies provide a short list of women that inspired the subject. Many are contemporaries, or cherished ancestors. Some are important figures from history, including Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman, and Rachel Carson. Others are women without recorded names, but for whom “horticulture is a human impulse, in all cultures, in all times, practiced, codified, ritualized, and valued across any and all social boundaries.”
The narratives about women in horticulture are evolving. In public presentations, Jewell has been expanding on the process of choosing and researching the subjects of her book. I’ve heard her speak twice in the last year and each time, she acknowledges that many additional women, from a wider breadth of ethnicities and nationalities, could be featured now. This study is important, on-going work and I hope that Jewell or others will continue this undertaking.
Winner of the 2021 Award of Excellence in Biography from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries
Excerpted from the Summer 2021 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin