Andrea Wulf

Review Guardian: No Place for Ladies. The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War by Helen Rappaport & Mrs Duberly’s War. Journal & Letters from the Crimea, edited by Christine Kelly

The Guardian,, 31 March 2007: When, in February 1854, the first British soldiers left for the Crimean peninsula to fight the Russian army, hundreds of women accompanied them. "Poorly dressed" and "laden like packhorses", these women embarked on a journey from which most would never return. They died of starvation, cholera or exhaustion. Most of them were the wives of ordinary soldiers who had to endure the harsh life in army barracks, sharing everything with some 30 men, including the wooden tubs which were used both as urinals and for laundry.

No Place for Ladies tells the haunting stories of these mostly forgotten women, drawing the reader into the lives of extreme hardship, devotion and devastation. Helen Rappaport paints a vivid picture of these women who, unlike their husbands, did not even have hammocks but had to sleep on blankets or pallets. Babies were born in the deadly Crimean winter in holes dug in the frozen ground. Flung into the midst of the brutality of war, these women saw maggots in rotting wounds and the daily threat of death. They were all living, as one wrote home, "in a state that few of our paupers in England would endure".

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Review Guardian: Virgins, Weeders and Queens. A History of Women in the Garden by Twigs Way

The Guardian, 3 March 2007: Although over the past few decades feminist historians in most disciplines have rediscovered many forgotten lives of women, in garden history the stories of women weeders, plant collectors and botanical painters have been notably absent. Even Alicia Amherst, the first female garden historian, almost entirely ignored the stories of women in A History of Gardening in England of 1896.

Virgins, Weeders and Queens shows there is enough material for a serious book about the women who shaped horticulture and gardens. Many aristocratic women left diaries and letters, while the names of female garden labourers, for example, are listed in the account books of Hampton Court in the early 16th century, revealing their tasks and their meagre pay (half that of the men). Women gardeners can be traced in every social stratum, from Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 12th century, via one Ales Brewer selling strawberry plants to Henry VIII, to the Victorian students of the first horticultural schools for female gardeners. Some of these women gardened for a living, while the Duchess of Beaufort spent fortunes in order to assemble the largest exotic plant collection of the late 17th century. For centuries botany was the only science acceptable for the "fair sex", and women excelled in botanical drawings. The history of gardening is populated with adventuresses such as Maria Sibylla Merian and Marianne North, both of whom travelled across the globe in search of rare blooms, but also with prudish Victorian women who collected ferns that reproduced "in the dark" so as not to see the sexual organs of a flower.

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Interview Financial Times: “Mowing the lawn for freedom” Simon Busch interviews Andrea Wulf

In February 2007 Financial Times columnist Simon Bush interviewed me about the English obsession with gardens.

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