Potted plants and oak trees

Some thoughts on rootedness to place and movement as I (yet again) move house

I write this thinking on how, a week today, we will be in our new house. How the view out my window as I write will have changed. From over the flat roof of a kitchen built onto a terraced house on a busy road, across a small but sweet garden, out to the Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point of the Malvern Hills (the Hills that inspired Tolkien’s White Mountains), to that of a view out the window of a 19th century farmhouse across the sweeping expanse of fields that border a river running through a Welsh valley.

The view out my study window, over the garden and to the Malvern hills in the distance

When you read this, we will be living there.

It’s our (husband, myself and our dog) fourth move in seven years. As house moving averages go, I’ve no idea if that’s a little or a lot. To someone who’s childhood paraphernalia is still in the exact same house, in the exact same place I grew up in in Wicklow, moving house at all is still quite the (stressful) novelty. Packing boxes and removal lorries never featured in my upbringing. We were rooted and immobile.

That, as I have come to see in other women’s stories, is the average Irish upbringing. Most women begin the telling of their stories with where they are from/where they grew up and with their family (who they are from). The two, so often, seem to be deeply intertwined. Home means more than four walls (for those fortunate enough to have them); it is the interlinked ties between people and place.

I think of that question older people in Ireland ask, “Who are your people”? Knowing someone’s family negating the need to ask, “Where are you from?”.

For the women who had a childhood typified by movement (moving house and county), the latter question was the soundtrack to their childhood. A question asked out of harmless curiosity and confusion but one that delivered a message of ‘other’ and ‘outsider’ — “You’re not from around here (because your people are not)”:

“So we've always been blow-ins, which is a very Irish thing, you know. It's a very specifically Irish concept, being a blow-in and not being from the place you live in… Even now, somebody would say to me, oh, what's your name? I'd tell them my name. And I've been told by old men that I don't live in the village I live in. Which is really odd! And this happens more often than you can imagine. Literally, they will say, No, you don't live there. That's such and such-es house…. And I'm like, no, no we moved there…. when I was nine, so like a long time ago. And still there are local people who say, No, you're not from there. And you don't live there. Because we don't know 'your people'.

And also another thing as a child is that other kids from small rural areas don't understand the concept of not having cousins near you…. And I'm like, No, I don't have any cousins that live here. And people always had, I always thought of it as ready-made friends… they were never lonely. They never had to seek out friendships. They always just had this little cohort of people, all these cousins, who they could just call on to go play or go do whatever, or hang out with. So I always felt that that was quite strange, because I was like, Oh, I don't have all these cousins. Where are they?”

Women of Ireland Project Participant

Ireland remains tribal. Many of us grow up in enclaves of our wider family, especially out in the country, and ‘who you are from’ (your family name) has a weight to it. Being so connected and rooted to a place and its people comes with a certain responsibility, especially for women.

Grainne noticed this when she compared her life as a woman of Ireland to the lives of women of England, who, as she saw it, didn’t have the same rootedness to place:

“We can take on roles in families very, very quickly and they stick, they really do stick, you can't get away from that. So if you've done it once, it doesn't tend to kind of, you know, rotate… [and] I do think women tend to do it more. It's kind of like it's their role [to look after their wider family]. And it's not necessarily what they want, but they do it. So, it's definitely a thing of maybe not wanting to but feeling you have to.

Whereas I felt that difference in the more times I’ve gone to England… I do see a difference in the women there to the women here, there is definitely a more independent ‘getting away from home’ and getting away from that level of responsibility [that comes with being rooted and close to family]. There's very few of them that even live anywhere close to their mothers…. you know, they don't seem to be from that immediate area….. they don't have that level of what most of my circle [of female friends] would have here [in Ireland because] they still all are so close to home. Near their families and their responsibilities and looking after elderly parents or others or that, so I did see that difference.

The [women in England] didn't seem to have that — and it's not a level of responsibility, it's of what responsibilities you take on, you know, what you see are your perceived perceptions of what you are to do or what your role is in life”.

In the telling of her story and in reflecting on these differences, she came up with a beautiful analogy — that Irish women are like oaks and the English women were like potted plants. They could be picked up and set down anywhere, whereas us women of Ireland go down as deep as we grow up tall.

In 2014, I shoved my roots into a plant pot and off I moved to London. They’ve remained in that very manoeuvrable pot ever since, going from London, to Edinburgh, to Great Malvern and now, to North Wales. But I don’t think they’ll ever lose their mycorrhizal-like connection to the grove they were grown in.

Along with the responsibility that comes with being an ‘oak-woman-of-Ireland’ there is also a safety and security. Every reckless decision or impulsive move I’ve ever made has been done with the privilege of knowing that if it all goes terribly wrong ‘home home’ is there. A place where help can always be found. A place where the store of good-will, reciprocity and interdependence my family (especially my parents) has built up from years of being rooted to place awaits.

My British husband is a true potted plant. His life, from a very young child, has been full of movement — different houses, different places, different parts of the world to try and call home. His roots hold a whisper of memory and connection to the place he was born but he is truly untethered and independent — a strong plant grown in the soil of his own making. ‘Home’, he says is wherever I am. But I only make a good home because I have a ‘Home Home’ — I have known what it’s like to be an oak.

Oaks and acorns

People leave Ireland all the time. Especially women. Single women have outnumbered men in emigration data in nearly every decade since 1841. The repeated emptying of the country holds an unspoken and unuttered sadness, especially as most of the people left, not because they wanted to, but because they had to.

And yet, what the stories of the women of Ireland’s diaspora have taught me is that, while Irish people might be good at potting up their roots, they never lose the memory of the soil that grew them. Its innate knowledge remains stored, and often dormant, in all the descendants of those ‘potted plants’.

“Whether people see me as Irish or not, I know I am. Because I know what happens to my body when I think about — Oh God! I'm gonna cry— when I think about the fact that I live here [in Ireland]; I made that happen because I knew that it was the right thing for me. And it was the surest.

I was 25. Moved [here] by myself and was just like, I don't have any fears, like, I just knew that this country would be a soft place to land. And it's been difficult at different times. But you know, I've never regretted the decision. And everybody in my family knew that I was never coming back. Because I had just, I had planned on moving here since I was like, seven, just because of what dancing to trad music made me feel. I was like I need to feel that all of the time, like that level of connection is truly living. And I always want to have that feeling. And so I was always chasing it”

Amelia, Irish-American Woman of Ireland Project Participant

I have been one of the fortunate ones. I left not because I had to but because I had the opportunity to. My emigration story has been nothing but positive — it’s made me who I am and given me the space and freedom to know who I am.

Declan Kiberd has said of Oscar Wilde that he held a “conviction that an Irishman discovers himself only when he goes abroad”¹

I get that (replacing the Irishman with Irishwoman of course).

Ireland is a small place, and when you’re grown rooted in a thick oak forest, it can be very hard to see the wood from the trees. I’d always seen and strongly identified myself as Irish and being ‘of Ireland’, but it was only when I moved to London that I got to fully understand what that actually means (and what it did to me).

In London’s multicultural melting pot I got to tip myself up on my side and look at myself laterally, comparing the various layers that my upbringing, society and culture had laid down to that of friends from other countries and cultures. It was eye-opening, and it planted in me the seed of curiosity — ‘How it is that women of Ireland have come to be the way we are'?— that led to the creation of this project.

Quite simply, if I’d never become a potted plant, the ‘Women of Ireland Project’ would not exist. It was dreamed up in London, incubated in Edinburgh and born in Malvern (here, in this room I write in now is where I did every single Women of Ireland Project interview).

Each move nudged it along in some way. The roots to ‘home home’ ground me in what it means to be ‘of Ireland’ but being a ‘potted plant’ gives me the distance to really see what would otherwise ‘get lost in amongst the trees’.

All the movement and moving has been a gift.

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And here we are now, in Wales, our first morning in our new home. I write at the kitchen table, the only currently functioning desktop in the house. A house that is so idyllically the kind of property my child-self dreamed I would one day live in, I can’t quite believe it. Even with not one box yet unpacked, it feels like home.

Last night we fell asleep to hooting owls, not speeding cars and instead of the clanking of bin lorries, we woke up to the crow of the cockerel who guards the orchard at the side of the house. An orchard bursting with apples and damsons and the nicest plums I’ve ever tasted in my life.

I lay in bed this morning and watched out the window as the light gently grew with a soft dullness through the heavy cloud that lay across the valley. We don’t yet have curtains big enough for the old sash windows. But I don’t mind. It’s dark here and quiet. We don’t need curtains to keep the outside at bay here.

My morning view in Wales

How we ended up moving in is still a blur. I saw the house (I’m one of those people who sometimes looks at houses online for amusement) and couldn’t stop thinking about it. It just seemed to pull at me — next thing I knew we were viewing it and signing rental contracts, and we are living in a part of Wales we’ve never been before and where we know not a soul.

But it’s a place populated by ‘oak trees’ not ‘potted plants’. The landlady yesterday: “Do you need a good mechanic?” “I’ll give you Martin’s number”. “For when you need heating oil — here’s my uncle’s number, he’ll sort you out”. “You want to put up a fence for the dog? I’ll send over my son, he does fencing”. “What else might you need? — here’s a number for a good accountant—best chippers—best pub—local doctor—handyman”.

We can’t quite believe our luck.

But is it luck or part of something bigger pulling us along?

As a friend said when I sent him pictures “Now, if you don’t get inspo for writing your book living there, well……..”

The Women of Ireland Project has moved with me and moved me. Here, in this place, I think it will reach its maturity. This is the right place to write a book.

1. Kiberd, D (1998). Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Irishman in McCormack, J. (ed.) Wilde the Irishman. New Haven: Yale University Press. p 12. https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.12987/9780300237580