All My Wild Mothers: Motherhood, loss and an apothecary garden

At seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett was looking forward to new motherhood and all that was to come. But when the telephone rang one day, 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 from the future she had imagined. But 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, the estate seems an unlikely place to sow the seeds of a new life, but she and her son transform 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, All My Wild Mothers is the story of how sometimes life grows not in spite of what is broken but because of it.