Strawberry Moon: Wild Flowers & Wild Women
On wildflower meadows, Scottish witch trials and the Pockets of Love exhibition
This month I’m writing to you from my Swedish Sabbatical – I’m spending the summer in Southern Sweden, and the Strawberry Moon is causing me to reflect on how things are beginning to ripen and come to fruition in my life.
I’ve hired a quirky apartment in an old Swedish house in an area famous for glass-blowing and glass art. There’s a whole community of interesting people here, including artists, musicians and original hippies! I’ve received an incredibly warm welcome, and it’s really inspiring me. I’m spending my sabbatical working on an exhibition that’s coming to The Barony Centre in West Kilbride in August – more about that later.
As I’ve been walking around the village I’m staying in and getting to know the landscape, I’ve been really struck by the abundance of wildflowers growing here – they’re everywhere! They grow all along the roadsides and tracks, in people’s gardens and driveways. It’s so wonderful to see them. Anywhere that hasn’t been mown has flowers growing in it. As you know, I’m a great lover of wildflowers, and I’ve spent several years trying to cultivate a wildflower meadow in my back garden. It has not gone well…
I thought at first the flowers would just appear if I let the grass grow long – I had heard of this happening for other people – however, I just got some ragwort! Then I tried weakening the grass by sowing yellow rattle – which grew well and the grass seemed to weaken a bit, but still no wild flowers. I tried sowing wild flower seeds into the lawn. Nothing. I had a small area of bare earth and finally some of my wildflower seeds thrived! I realised that I needed to acutally kill the grass if I was to achieve my goal, so I put black plastic over the lawn to kill it.
As you know, I’m a great lover of wildflowers
Unfortunately at this point in the process, the council installed LED street lights outside my house. LED lights cause me to have seizures, and so halfway through my rewilding project, I’ve been forced to put my house on the market.
What I now realise, being in Sweden, is that the reason I’ve been struggling to grow a wildflower meadow is that we don’t really have wildflowers growing in our countryside, so they can’t self-seed. When you let the lawn grow out, there is only grass left. Looking around at my neighbours gardens, there are only lawns, patios and decking. Nothing is growing there. I’ve often wondered at what point did gardening become about killing things and not growing things?
Patios and roadside verges are treated constantly with weedkiller. Where plants are grown they are subject to pest attacks because the ecology of the garden is out of balance. I never had a problem with slugs and snails because my garden was full of beetles and frogs hiding in the long grass.
Ironically, now my house is on the market, it won’t sell because there’s no lawn! My years of work to rewild my garden will probably end in my having to have it turfed, in order to sell it. It makes me think about what our cultural scripts allow or don’t allow us to do, and who they allow us to be.
Growing our own food is strongly discouraged in our culture – it’s not explicit, but it’s there, in the way a garden should look, and what it should contain. A garden teeming with life is seen as wild and unruly. It is a problem.
At what point did gardening become about killing things and not growing things?
As I stitch the Pocket I am making for Jonette Boyd, which features Celandines and Ivy, I think about how the Witch Hunts sort to control women. We were not allowed to grow or thrive. We were not allowed to be wild or unruly. Our creativity and sexuality was crushed and controlled.
Every Pocket made for the Pockets of Love project will feature wildflowers, birds and insects, challenging the cultural script about what is beautiful and what should be treasured and revered. It’s so important to me that we learn to reconnect with the land where we live and the wildflowers that should grow there – ones that you can still find if you look hard enough.
The Exhibition
The Pockets for the seven women accused of witchcraft in West Kilbride will feature Celandines, Red Campion, Periwinkle, Buttercup, Forget-Me-Nots and Heather, along with Bees, Hoverflies, local Brown-Lipped Snails and Butterflies – as well as Blackbirds. If you’d like to come along and see the finished Pockets of Love the exhibition runs at The Barony Centre in West Kilbride from the 19th to the 29th August 2026.
These were my thoughts as I walked along the forest path today, picking the wild strawberries that grow in abundance and without anyone’s permission, here in Sweden under the fullness of the Strawberry Moon.
