In 2017, Rebecca Schiller and her family moved to a two-acre smallholding in Kent. There she set about growing flowers and vegetables and raising animals, yet somehow the idyll eluded her. Tackling her new life’s vying demands with a wild vigour she barely understood, she found that the glory of pursuing an impulsive dream was replaced by a toxic race which she could never win — a race against herself. And as the third year on the plot began, it became clear that something was very wrong indeed.
Earthed is a memoir of Schiller’s struggle with her mental health, a confusion sparked by faulty neurons and shocked into heart-breaking destructiveness. She faced the familiar fear of the overwhelmed: however tangible the distress, no one will notice; whatever the cry for help, no one will hear. Denied psychiatric support, she was forced to seek out the open source seeds of her own recovery. Clumsy, careful, challenging, challenged, she fell back upon her smallholding routines, her passion for research and her enviable imagination, to sow, alongside parsnips and leeks, a crop of immersive encounters with the past.
Schiller is excellent on what she calls the ‘quiet backstories’ of all those unacknowledged women who have striven to build a life upon a patch of earth and then fought to keep it. Through her exceptionally empathetic voice, she gives these women their voices, too. As she criss-crosses her plot in search of both its past and her future, she reveals to us the world in palimpsest; a intricacy of ecology, history and language which humanity continues to overwrite with ever-more-disastrous intensity.
I think that finding a goose egg in my pocket on a difficult morning
is exactly the kind of fairy-tale thing I want my life to be made from.Rebecca Schiller
Schiller was driven to understand the role of women in maintaining the health of the land, but what she discovered and shares here, too, is an affirmation of the land’s role in maintaining the health of women. As her memoir concludes, with a diagnosis and a tentative treatment plan, it’s clear that she and the plot will continue to tend each other. By the epilogue, I was yearning to be earthed as she is earthed: tied intimately to the earth, in touch with the Earth, made safe.
NOTE: The title of this review is taken from a line in Katherine Mansfield’s journals: ‘By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun.’