The Earth and the Word: How Women Grow Themselves in Silence and Soil

Across soil and centuries, Vita Sackville-West and Olive Senior turned loss into beauty, building legacies from earth, memory, and resistance.(Dedicated to Teresa White)

The women I know grow things. In coffee tins, in old syrup buck- in concrete yards where nothing is meant to thrive. They grow orchids and shame bush, lime trees and rosemary. Their gardens don’t follow symmetry. They follow instinct, memory, and longing. You’ll find aloe and hibiscus in the same pot. Basil, chadon beni, crotons. They don’t call it therapy. They say they’re “putting their hand in something”. It keeps them rooted. It keeps them sane.

It’s the same thing women do when they write. Whether in Kent or Kingston, Port-of-Spain or Sissinghurst, they return to the soil and the page as ways to stake out space—beauty wrested from silence, sustenance from neglect. A poem is a garden. Both begin in quiet. Both require faith. In England, Vita Sackville-West—aristocrat, poet, gardener—lived in rooms she built for herself after being denied the ones she was born into. She should have inherited Knole House, a 365-room ancestral estate passed down through generations. But she was a woman and could not inherit it. She found her own place in ruins—Sissinghurst Castle—and re imagined it.

Sissinghurst became her sanctuary and her canvas. She and her husband Harold Nicolson designed it in a shared language of opposites: his love of structure, her obsession with excess. He laid out the rooms with clipped yew hedges and long axial paths. She filled them with unruly roses, phlox, lilies, thyme. The White Garden remains its most famous gesture—a monochrome palette that blooms at dusk. I’ve never been, but it is said you walk through it and it’s as if you’re dreaming. Sackville-West’s garden was a structure of defiance—planned with precision, planted with passion, and claimed as her own domain of power. “I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart,” she had written, “in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.”

More than a gardener, Sackville-West was a writer. Her long poem The Land (1926) won the Hawthornden Prize. It’s a hymn to English earth, full of deep furrows and weathered labour. She wrote from her tower at Sissinghurst, surrounded by blooms. Sackville-West’s prose is steeped in the logic of the seasons. Her mind, as rigorous as her garden, plotted roses as carefully as sentences. In her garden columns for The Observer, she wove advice with quiet subversion. “Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth,” she wrote, “it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.”

Sackville-West knew what she was saying. In her world, land belonged to men, and beauty was considered frivolous unless it served a function. But she cultivated both and insisted on their worth. Her marriage, too, was radical. Harold Nicolson loved men. Vita loved women. They stayed married and stayed loyal. They called theirs a “society of two”. In this unspoken openness, Sackville-West found the freedom to write, to love Virginia Woolf, to build Sissinghurst not as a wife but as a sovereign. She made of her exile from Knole a new kingdom. She was writing her own inheritance into the ground.

Across the Atlantic, across generations in the Caribbean, another woman was writing and growing—Olive Senior, Jamaican poet and folklorist. Where Sackville-West’s legacy was aristocratic, Senior’s was oral, rural, and vernacular. She was one of ten children in a farming village. Her earliest teachers were women: her mother, her grandmother, and the land. Senior wrote Gardening in the Tropics (1994) as memory. Her poems are full of mango trees and breadfruit, duppy stories and plants that refuse to die. They are rooted in the Caribbean’s entangled history— slavery, sugar, migration, resilience.

In one poem, she warns: “Gardening in the Tropics, you never know what you’ll turn up. Quite often, bones.” The past doesn’t rest in peace in Caribbean soil. It heaves up in old sugar estates, in rusted chains, in the names of plants that once travelled in the holds of slave ships. But Olive Senior isn’t romantic about any of it. She excavates, then replants. Her poems twist, contort. They reach backwards, lurch forward. “You’ll find things that don’t belong together often intertwine … We grow as convoluted as the vine,” she writes.

In Trinidad, the garden is rarely silent. You hear birdsong. A dog barking in the next yard. Someone’s radio drifting through the afternoon. The scent of overripe mango, warm earth, crushed basil, lime leaves, on your fingers. Bougainvillaea tumbles over chain-link fences like a woman’s loosened hair. Nothing is orderly, but everything is alive. We in the Caribbean know the gardens Senior writes about—crooked rows softened by glory cedar and morning glory. Hibiscus flashing red against zinc. Heliconia flaring orange. Orchids hanging like earrings from breadfruit limbs. A woman stoops to tend her herbs: turmeric, fevergrass, zebapique. She waters the land to remember, to hope.

Women like her don’t call themselves poets. But they grow language. They know which leaf cures a fever, which vine climbs best in shade, and which flowers open only in moonlight. That knowledge— passed down, often unrecorded—is literature in its oldest form. Vita Sackville-West knew the same things. Her poetry often circled land, weather, desire. In The Garden (1946), she wrote of winter gardeners poring over seed catalogues with hope. “What should we be without our fabulous flowers?” she asked. Her answer was clear: without beauty, we shrink.

In England, the Caribbean and elsewhere, gardens are the small, stubborn sanctuaries women make for themselves. Poetry and gardening belong to those who wait, revise, and endure. You plant without knowing what will take. You write without knowing what will last. Both acts insist on presence. Both say: I was here. I made something. Sackville-West once said, “No gardener would be a gardener if (she) did not live in hope.” Hope is the hushed, private kind that women tend in small spaces. It is faith that a rose will bloom again, that a line will come in the dark, that the brightest white hot melting tar sun will burn away the pain, that a life denied inheritance can grow one anyway. For the Caribbean woman whose grandmother taught her how to coax lilies from concrete, for the queer woman who keeps a pot of basil on her fire escape, for every woman who was told she couldn’t own the land but tilled it anyway—this is your legacy.

Vita Sackville-West and Olive Senior never met. But in their gardens and on their pages, they speak to one another across centuries and soil. They knew what it meant to be left out. And they answered with beauty.