Lilies of the Hearth: The Historical Relationship Between Women and Plants

Kelly L. Green is a freelance writer living in Ajax, Ontario.

Harrowsmith magazine’s gardening editor Jennifer Bennett has written a
bewitching history of women and their love affair with plants. This
beautifully written, fact-filled volume is much more ambitious even than
its subtitle suggests. Bennett does not limit herself to exploring the
“historical relationship between women and plants;” she takes on
nothing less than an analysis of the changing role of women in history,
using their connection with plants as a backdrop. The marvel is that she
succeeds.

With a bibliography that includes more than 500 entries, Bennett
sprinkles the book with references to and quotations from obscure and
fascinating texts, some as early as the first century BC. One of
Bennett’s frustrations in writing the book was that “unfortunately,
women’s work, though ‘never done,’ was seldom documented.” For
instance, while women were extremely active in the field of botany in
the nineteenth century (so much so that one scientist wrote an article
entitled “Is Botany a Suitable Subject for Young Men?”), only “a
handful of names . . . commemorate female botanists.”

Bennett’s portraits include woman as earth goddess, food provider,
herbal physician, botanist, and artist. She explores topics as diverse
as the role of women in the development of agriculture, floral symbolism
in the worship of the Virgin, and the transformation of respected wise
women healers into witches burned at the stake. Her fluid, descriptive
writing and poetic uses of references have rendered an enormous amount
of factual material readable and absorbing. Both plants and women come
alive, as plant names like datura stramonium, pulmonaria, deadly
nightshade, and mandrake intoxicate the reader.

This book is ostensibly a historical study of women and their work with
plants, from which many twentieth-century women in the industrialized
world have become disconnected. It is ultimately that and much
more—nothing less, in fact, than a challenge to traditional historical
interpretation, and a demand that women be given their due for their
overwhelming contributions, against great odds, to the development of
civilization.