Reading Wise Women feels like walking through a forest where, at every turn, you’re met by a different elder — some wild, some serene, some unapologetically fierce — each carrying stories that stir something ancient in your bones. Sharon Blackie and Angharad Wynne have together curated a celebration of feminine wisdom that is both grounded and mythic, weaving lived experience with archetype, artistry with ancestry.

This isn’t a manual, nor a single narrative arc. It’s a collection — a tapestry — of women who live close to the land, who have come through fire, who embody cycles of death and renewal. The book is beautifully presented, with portraits and reflections that honour the depth and diversity of the feminine in later life. As a clinical herbalist, it touched the same part of me that sits with plants in silence and feels their stories.

It reminded me why so many people — especially women — come to the healing path not out of profession, but vocation. These stories are not about achieving wellness in a performative sense. They’re about remembering. Returning. Rooting.

While it contains no formulas or research, Wise Women is potent medicine in its own right. It invites us to consider ageing as awakening. It reminds us that wisdom is not earned through certificates but through cycles — of grief, growth, creativity, solitude, and community.

This book will sit on my shelf not as a reference text, but as an anchor — something to return to when I feel untethered or unsure. It’s also one I’ll gently recommend to patients and peers moving through menopause, reinvention, or the long arc of becoming.