2025 Anthology: Real Women Write – In the Garden

Gardens often serve as metaphors for life, representing cycles of patience, nurturing, loss, and bounty. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote in The Secret Garden, “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” This sentiment captures the spirit of this anthology, which highlights how we experience gardens, both literal and symbolic.

Gardens also can teach us to appreciate the beauty of difference. Maya Angelou reflected, “As I gaze at my garden and regard the varying colors…made for us, red, yellow, blue, white, pink, purple, etc., I also think of the many colors…black, beige, brown, red, yellow and white—and all of us are beautiful.” And just as plants require care and intention to thrive, so do our lives, our relationships, and our stories. In these pieces, women explore how a garden—whether a backyard oasis or a metaphorical landscape—has shaped their journeys through secular stories that illustrate the lessons, joys, and challenges that blossom within them.

In this anthology, 67 Story Circle sisters contribute 56 prose pieces and 13 poems, each rooted in the nurturing spirit that lies at the heart of gardening. Some pieces are tender, others humorous or contemplative, but all are grounded in the shared experience of cultivating life.

Leading the collection is a Foreword by Mariam Pirbhai, award-winning author of Garden Inventtories: Reflections on Land, Place, and Belonging, which won the Story Circle Network May Sarton Women’s Book Award for Nonfiction. In her lyrical introduction, Pirbhai reminds us: “The garden is so much more than the fenced-in perimeters of private property … it is a space contained and uncontainable, as unique as the gardener and the writer who might look upon it ‘as the mystical opening of the whole.’”

In the Garden will impress you to pause, look closely, and find your own place of renewal—whether among wildflowers, in a well-tended bed, or within the landscapes of your imagination.