Rootbound: Rewilding a Life

Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2020

As I stared at those daisies, occupying the pavement for whole minutes as others quickly walked past, I realised I was hungry. Hungry for a kind of understanding, the kind of humble superpower that came with turning stickyweed into a gag, a fattened blackberry into an inky snack or a dock leaf into a remedy. It seemed that if I could only navigate the workings of these plants, to tune in to what made them bloom and shrink, that I could find a whole new way of living

When she was a girl, Alice Vincent loved her grandfather's garden - the freedom, the calm, the beauty of it. Twenty years later, living in a tiny flat in South London, that childhood in the garden feels like a dream. When she suddenly finds herself uprooted, heartbroken, living out of a suitcase and yearning for the comfort of home, Alice starts to plant seeds. She nurtures pot plants and vines on windowsills and draining boards, filling her new space with green, and with each unfurling petal and budding leaf, she begins to come back to life.

Mixing memoir, botanical history and biography, Rootbound examines how bringing a little bit of the outside in can help us find our feet in a world spinning far too fast.