All My Wild Mothers

Critics Review

• All My Wild Mothers is an impossibly moving memoir of gardens, herbalism, and the rigours and rewards of care. It asks what we might be willing to sacrifice for an artistic life, and what we lose of our selves when we attend to the needs of others before our own. It heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in nature writing.

  CAL FLYN, Sunday Times Writer of the Year, award-winning author of 'Islands of Abandonment' and 'Thicker Than Water'

• All My Wild Mothers is a stunning meditation on the joy of nurturing (and of getting your hands dirty). It is a love letter to mothering and nature and mother nature, which bursts with wisdom, humility and hope. The writing is lyrical and beautiful and feels like a haven in a cynical world – exactly the book we all need to read right now. Victoria Bennett’s writing is challenging and thought-provoking yet comforting and reassuring. What a wonderful book. Do read it.

  CATHERINE SIMPSON, author of 'When I Had A Little Sister'

• Exquisitely written, this spellbinding book is rich in traditional plant wisdom and the author’s lived experience. The garden Victoria Bennett creates with her young son becomes the setting for the most moving portrait of a mother and child I’ve ever read: how tenacious of life and beauty they both are, even as officials keep appearing to forbid their every attempt at making things grow. This is a book of passionate resistance to everything in modern life that wants us to stay neat and small and fearful.

  TANYA SHADRICK, author of 'The Cure for Sleep'

• Witnessing a mother nurture her son and her garden so tenderly while grappling with grief and the responsibilities of a carer was an unexpectedly beautiful and life-affirming experience. A memoir written with tremendous care for the reader too.

  JINI REDDY, author of 'Wanderland'

• A fascinating, tangled read on gardening as resistance and using ancient ways to heal in the modern world.

• All My Wild Mothers is a beautiful bruise of a book. Full of technicolour pain and joy — a bruise which you cannot help but press on and a compelling story that grabs at your heart. Victoria Bennett offers us a picked-to-the-bone honesty with the rare skill of capturing important truths we have always known but never realised until we read her words.

• Prismatically beautiful in its honesty and telling, this book is a radical act of quiet rebellion. Staking a claim of belonging, loving and nurturing on unsure, uncertain ground – whether that’s a life, home or land – and making a bewitching alchemy of it.
  Celebrating the strength, wisdom and resolve of women that carry the cradle of care, wounds and joy, this is a work about the precarity of rural living, and the wild magic of knowledge earned in the face of that. It is a wonderful book. An apothecary of love.

• All My Wild Mothers wrests nature writing from the ‘lone enraptured male’ and shows how our care for the natural world is inseparable from our care for each other. Family, community, soil and plants are nurtured together in this tender and moving memoir. Clear-eyed yet lyrical, Bennett shows us how grief and love, worry and delight, health and fragility move through each of our lives as inevitably as nature’s seasons of loss and renewal.

  SAMANTHA CLARK, author of 'The Clearing'

• A beautiful, raw, meditative book on grief, mothering, and the wild both within and without. On what it means to tend a garden and a family alike, and how we find our way back to the beginning, to all that we have always known.

  KERRI NI DOCHARTAIGH, author of 'Thin Places'

• Intimate and immense, it’s wrapping tendrils around my heart.

  AMY-JANE BEER, author of 'The Flow'

• Victoria Bennett stuns in this beautiful memoir of motherhood, loss and an apothecary garden. Intimately weaving memoir and herbal folklore together, this is a beautiful story of rewilding wastelands, and the transformation that can happen when we do.

  Scots Magazine

• Warm, questing and beautifully written

  DAN RICHARDS, author of 'Outpost'

• A spell-binding, richly written work which is both a memoir and a retelling of lost herbal folklore. One of this year’s most captivating finds, unexpectedly unearthed from beneath the rubble of intimate loss

  *Emma Bridgewater's April Reads Best Books*

• All My Wild Mothers is a unique memoir and more than a memoir: the whole book is an apothecary. Even the feel of the book in one’s hand is healing – so soft, so pliable and comforting, so silent, even in the turning of pages.

  FR. MURRAY BODO

• What a brave, and graceful, honest and wild piece of writing. Such an important and beautiful book.

  AMAIA DADACHANJI , author of 'Wild Apothecary'

• A beautiful, raw, meditative book on grief, mothering, and the wild both within and without. On what it means to tend a garden and a family alike, and on how we find our way back to the beginning, to all that we have always known.

  KERRI NI DOCHARTAIGH, author of 'Thin Places'

• The honesty, bravery and openness of Victoria’s writing was a privilege to read.

  GREG WISE, actor and author of 'Not That Kind of Love'