Text by Maya Thomas.  Illustration by Rachel Victoria Hillis

When your laugh is described by another as “the sound of raw joy” you know that you have found a soulmate.

Self-confessed “plant wives” Alice Vincent and Claire Ratinon have a connection that bares all the hallmarks of a truly great 21st century friendship. The seeds of connection were sown digitally, a shared love of plants ensuring that their paths crossed on social media, but bonded them well beyond the bounds of the online world.

Claire had moved from documentary filmmaking to organic grower, whilst Alice working as an arts & culture journalist, had seen her gardening adventures (primarily played out on a south London balcony) become more than just a therapeutic hobby. What started off as mutual admiration for one another’s work moved onto an instant connection. This candid conversation allows us an insight into how their own journey with working with plants has positively influenced one another, both in and out of the garden.

Alice: My early memories of encountering Claire are two-dimensional, digital things: an Instagram story of her cycling through the streets of Stoke Newington, photographs of her working on a growing project on the Thames. I liked her energy, her work; it was immediately clear that she was offering something different. Several months later I suggested she step in for a practical workshop at a festival I was speaking at, and that was the first time we met - or even spoke properly. It was an instant connection - big hugs, long chats in wet pubs, stroking whippets, never quite finishing one conversation because it ran into another too quickly. We’ve carried on the same ever since, really. 

Claire: You know that feeling you get when you meet someone and it immediately feels like you grew up together? That’s what that first soggy evening in a Welsh pub was like meeting Alice. Like a coffee, that turns into dinner that turns into drinks and dancing but instead it was drying off by the fire, talking so quickly we forgot about food and listening to a guy play Elton John and Johnny Cash on the violin until last orders. I’m sure we talked about plants that night but I was still such a newbie and I was worried that Alice would find out how much I still had to learn and think I was a fraud! In the years since, as our friendship has grown, I think we’ve both realised that it’s not about feeling like a plant expert but simply being in love with the process, the felt experience of growing and knowing that there’s something new to be learned with every season. Finding the courage to trust that is something our friendship upholds and it’s so precious to me.

Claire’s laugh is one of my favourite sounds in the world… It is the sound of raw joy

Alice: I was just thinking about this, and I realised that we occupy such different spheres of plant life and have very different origins and associations with the land, but as Claire says the process is something we both understand deeply. So deeply it almost goes undiscussed a lot of the time, it’s kind of just a given. Instead we talk about everything from Selling Sunset to writing, small fluffy dogs to anti-racism, what we’re reading, what we’re not reading, when the last time we ate dumplings was. We laugh a lot. Claire’s laugh is one of my favourite sounds in the world, it is more of a shriek than anything else. It is the sound of raw joy.

But I suppose we should talk about plants a bit, and their growing of them. What’s interesting, perhaps, is that when we met neither of us had growing spaces of our own. I had a tiny balcony attached to a flat in South London that I was about to leave for another flat in South London with a slightly larger balcony. I’ll let Claire talk about where she was growing things.

Growing food is my love language

Claire: That’s very true. In fact, I never had a garden of my ‘own’ for all the years I was training and growing in London. I first saw Alice’s name when she wrote a piece about an ill-fated and frankly idiotic project I was working on in Greenwich and I’m so grateful we never met up there because it was awful! I was growing organic salad leaves for a veg box scheme at the bottom of a vicarage garden in Stoke Newington at the same time, which was far more joyful. I wish I’d dragged Alice to that growing space and fed her my first attempt at making jam from the loganberries there - but we were only just becoming virtual friends back then. I’ve been making up for it since though, I try to feed Alice whenever I get the chance. It’s the reason I love to grow food especially, I love to feed the ones I love. Growing food is my love language.

Alice: She really is a feeder. I live by a mantra, long-ingrained by my maternal line, of never letting anyone leave the house hungry, but Claire puts me to shame. It is impossible to leave her home anything other than full, normally with a jar of something preserved rammed into each fist. My cupboards are full of things with labels such as “MARMZ”. It is love, kept in glass, to be eked out over the seasons.

I think of these things as threads that join us together - food, growing stuff, laughter - a fundamental, often unspoken understanding that the most humble, simple things in life are also the ones of greatest importance. 

For what it’s worth, I barely grow food. Some herbs. Occasionally some summer leaves. I toy with the notion of growing courgettes next summer, now I have the space and the sunlight. I got out of the habit when I moved to a balcony that was shaded, and nurtured a love of ruffles and frills and petals and colour that ornamental plants can bring, instead. But Claire has taught me the radicalism at the heart of growing food. The intensity of meaning I can see it brings her makes me feel I should be doing more with the plot I’ve got.

Claire: It’s funny you say that Alice, because it’s your love for the beauty of things, how captivated you are by the divine detail that makes me want to learn more about ornamental plants. Although I get a huge amount out of growing food and feeding it to people, I can see that a person can be fed in more than that way when they garden and grow - and I want some of those feelings too!

This last year has been the first with a garden of my own and it’s full of ornamentals planted here by decade’s of gardeners before I arrived. It’s shady in most places which is where I know I can learn from Alice, whose shady balcony spilled over with life, with vines and foliage and flowers which could satiate hungry eyes, even at the coldest times of year.

In fact, I saw you were propagating some Swedish Ivy the other day and I was going to be cheeky and ask for a cutting and for your advice on where to put it.

Alice: It’s proved a popular little shade-monger that one! Yes, of course you can. By the time it’s rooted, I hope we’ll be reunited.