An article by Karen von Hahn on Gayla Trail and You Grow Girl.
“…it’s as punchy, quirky and irreverent as its hip young urban audience.”
“Sanders (Trail) who is slight, intense and wears the statement eyeglasses of the srtistically inclined, also had trouble with the gardening industry’s conventional beauty ideal. “It was intimidating to see everything so clean and organized with nothing out of place. It seemed like there were these rules of entry. As if you have to know everything and have all this stuff, and everything has to look a certain way.”
“What you won’t find on You Grow Girl is anything that smacks of gardening’s ordinary bourgeois conventions.”
“Seeking neither beauty nor status, what (Trail) and her ilk want from gardening are its oldfashioned lessons of hardwork, patience and self-sufficiency — combined with an entirely new aesthetic that is infused with radical politics. Apart from gardening’s natural connection with the greening of the environment and protest against the spread of commercialized agribusiness, the politics of gardening for this generation of dirt-lovers is about self-expression and liberation.
“My mother’s generation skipped out on things like knitting and gardening because they didn’t want to be forced to do it to be a good wife,” (Trail) explains. “Now we are in a position that we can go back and reclaim these old skills but without the baggage.“”
