Welcome to the throes of publication week: Why Women Grow is released tomorrow. It’s been a strange gestation and a heady birth, this one: a book born of loneliness, written in determined solitude (for reasons I still don’t understand, I burrowed myself and the manuscript away for a year) and yet comprised of hours of deeply intimate conversations with strangers. The scenes in this extract took place almost exactly two years ago, on the last day before the Spring equinox. I loved meeting Hannah, and I’ve loved keeping in touch with her. A few weeks ago, I heard that she got her sunflower tattoo inked. You can buy a copy of the book here.

I was conscious that, so far in my conversations, everyone I had spoken to was pregnant, or had children, or knew they didn’t want them. I’d encountered writing from women who had struggled to conceive and had gardened during that arduous process, but I hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. I’d always wondered if a garden offered an alternative to having a child – some gardeners I knew, often older women, had mentioned this in passing. While my friends were falling pregnant, there were only some who spoke about the difficulty that had passed before the positive test – the trips to the doctors, the longing admissions that came out at the end of an evening. I knew that some people were unable to have the children they so wanted, but these things are sad and still something of a taboo.

And so I’d spoken to a few charities, asking if they could pass on a request to their communities to speak to me if gardening or the ground had made their fertility journeys easier. Hannah’s reply was straightforward; she said she would like to be involved.

I’ve travelled for three hours and I’m in the wrong place. There are two entrances to Oakwell Hall, and I’m at the one next to a play area, teeming with toddlers and prams. I’ve never met Hannah, only written to her by email, but I know this isn’t right. It’s a brisk walk down a country lane to find her. It’s a fair, if flat-skied day, and winter’s residual sog has left the moss bright and green on squat stone walls. Beyond them, spanning the banks of a stream, young wild garlic leafs up. I imagine I can smell the sap rising.

Oakwell Hall is a 20-minute drive from Leeds; a solid Elizabethan house with Brontë connections and acres of now-public parkland, it’s something of a jewel among the deprived former industrial towns south of the city. Hannah was born and raised nearby, and this is her favourite place. I reach her breathless and overdressed in a scarf and boots.

Hannah’s tall, a light denim jacket clinging to her broad shoulders, hair scraped back above thick-framed black glasses. I apologise too much, and she diffuses my gibbering with a steady, lightweight forgiveness. A mental health worker, she’s used to dealing with strangers.

Hannah started to garden a few years ago, after a breakdown that saw her nearly throw everything away, including her marriage. In the space that followed, she left the job she hated and realised that what she needed was ‘a house somewhere that I could go to sit, to do gardening, to take my mind off things’. Previously, the couple had been living in flats without any outside space. ‘It took me two flats,’ she says, ‘before I realised what I really needed was a garden.’ She shows me photographs of the terraced house they rent, of the yard out the back where she has started to grow things, of the handsome German Shepherd the pair adopted after moving.

We start walking into the park as Hannah begins to calmly tell me what Oakwell Hall is to her. Her accent is a comforting skein of broad Yorkshire, and through her half tour, half storytelling, I learn that this landscaped parkland held her and a friend of hers over recent months – both of them struggling with their health and happiness. They’d sit in the paved semi-circle in the orchard, watch sticky summer sundowns; they’d walk the sprawling parks. Sometimes, when they stayed past dusk, they’d share a sense that they were no longer welcome on Oakwell Hall’s grounds – that the ghosts rumoured to haunt the place were calling time on their solace. She gives me an insight into her working life, trying to arrange activities and events for those in the local community with poor mental health. The pandemic has made it hard to run their support groups: the local area is notoriously poverty-stricken; very few of her clients have internet access or a device to access it on. It’s not been easy to help.

Hannah’s infertility has isolated her, she tells me. She’s in her early thirties and many of the friends she’s known from school and university have got families. ‘That’s really difficult for me to watch, so I just had to cut ties a bit,’ she says. ‘I think they want to spend time with other families, too, and connect me with other mothers and things. It just didn’t serve me at that time, it doesn’t serve me now.’ We reach a viewpoint over some crowning hills; a trickling stream makes its way into the desultory pond of a dry winter. In the summer, Hannah tells me, this is a mass of wildflowers; the perfect spot to watch the sun set. ‘You get to see all sorts,’ she says. We talk about her husband, the night out on which they met, how they enjoy winding one another up. That was eight years ago, and they’ve been trying to have a baby for the past six. The number winds me. I tell her it’s a long time. ‘Very long time,’ she replies, staring out at the fields beyond.

Hannah’s infertility stems from a brutal combination of long-undiagnosed chronic illness, infection and unfortunate circumstance. She tells her story without self-pity, but it still makes me think of all the female pain that is too often ignored by the medical establishment. Right at the beginning of all this, Hannah thought she had fallen pregnant: her periods stopped, she started browsing online for prams. But every test came back negative. ‘When it was confirmed that I wasn’t, that’s when the ball started rolling. My world came crashing down,’ she says, of the sticky web of diagnoses that dramatically lowered her fertility. ‘From then on, it’s just been month after month of not knowing.’ I tell her I don’t know how anyone lives with that, and she says she doesn’t either.

She tells me that she always wanted to be a mum, in good part to remedy the difficult upbringing she experienced herself. ‘I guess I just wanted to nurture in a way that my child would need rather than to my mum’s agenda,’ she says. Hannah would want to allow her child to feel comfortable in expressing themselves, in having their own opinions. She describes herself as ‘creative and practical’, and it seems like she navigates the pain her infertility causes that way. The path she takes me along, through the woods and up a steep incline to a beauty spot, where we look out across the whole valley, is largely empty. It confirms my suspicions that she wouldn’t want to meet at the entrance by the playpark.

Hannah tells me about the yard behind her house, how she shuffled in tubs and soil. She started to sow seeds. The previous summer, she grew 17 different types of sunflowers; they are her favourite. She rattles off the varieties, the pom-poms and the teddy bears, the sprawling yellow and sophisticated dark orange. Hannah pulls up the sleeve of her jacket, strokes the soft, pale skin of her forearm underneath, and tells me that’s where she’ll get another tattoo – just above the looping black marks on her wrist that she had inked for fertility. Why sunflowers, I ask. ‘They’re so strong and resilient,’ Hannah replies. ‘I feel like a sunflower sometimes. I feel like I have to battle against all the elements, all the odds, everything that comes at me. I have to get up and still move forward. I think I just connected with them on a very spiritual level; I resonate with them.’ We talk about the birds, how they benefit from the seedheads, and Hannah says hers are still standing now, months after they flowered. ‘I just left them. A part of me didn’t want to ever let go of them.’

We walk for another hour or so, encountering woodland and sneaking into the grounds of the house. Hannah and I talk about all sorts – religion, her childhood, the jokes she and her husband crack with one another. She’s self- deprecating, headstrong and funny; she’s lobbied her HR department to change their maternity policy regarding miscarriage. I get the sense that she is someone who always does the best she can. Just before we leave, we sit on benches around the pond. Two women walk by, pushing buggies and holding little hands. Hannah says she finds it difficult to witness other women living so casually with what she can’t have. ‘They don’t know what the pain is like,’ she says. ‘What it is to think about it the minute you wake up. It is a grief. Every month is a new grief.’