I'm 2 weeks late seeing your reply. :)
I love SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS. Love the chapters on George Washington Carver and Jagadish Chandra Bose. I have not read Heart is a Lonely Hunter but must - Carson McCullers, only age 23, and published! What a different world. At 17, she left home on a steamship bound for New York City, planning to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music. On the subway she lost the money she was going to use for her education at Juilliard. She decided instead to work, take night classes, and write. At 20, she married an ex-soldier and aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers. They divorced, then remarried. She lived the last twenty years of her life in Nyack, New York, where she died in 1967 at age 50, after a brain hemorrhage.
I love what you say about that simpler life. That era. Before AI, before internet, and all our distractions. "Folks seemed lovelier, more genuine than we are these days. I wonder if they were as confused about world events as we are, as brainwashed" - yes. Well said.

What I read recently might interest you for the strong heroine who can live in the woods with ease, which of course gets her accused of being a witch. By Katherine Arden:

The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy, #1)
The Girl in the Tower (The Winternight Trilogy, #2)
The Winter of the Witch (The Winternight Trilogy, #3)

However, the novels seem quite long and detailed. "Too many words." Too many pages.
You can tell I've been reading too much AI-edited text: short sentences. Short paragraphs.

Started reading The Cassatt Sisters: A Novel of Love and Art by Lisa Groen but had to set it aside to write a book review. Never found my way back to it.

Bought the ebook but didn't read:
The Florios of Sicily: A Novel (The Lions of Sicily Book 1) by Stefania Auci

Bought but didnt read:

Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy

Still haven't read "In This House of Brede" by Rumer Godden.
Nor 'Brideshead Revisited' by Evelyn Waugh - started watching the tv series, but fell asleep.

If you like memoir, try Tell Me I Belong: A Journey Across Faiths and Generations
David Weill - and "In the Shadow of Enlightenment: A Girl's Journey through the Osho Rajneesh Cult" by Sarito Carroll, and if you have Netflix, watch the documentary, "Wild, Wild Country." Cults! Incredibly enough, to this day, the "guru" known as Osho still has a cult following. He died at 54 after being exiled in disgrace from Oregon, where he'd founded a commune near the tiny town of Antelope. I'm not crazy about the documentary. It makes the guru sound like a pretty good guy - but he had 97 Rolls Royces and in the commune, underage girls were molested and robbed of their innocence.

I bookmarked but never read the novels you'd recently recommended.
Now, to find the bookmark...
I need to organize my lists and files!

Good luck with the Nashville house - and your garden - and traveling with a dog -

(((I've never finished Jane Eyre, either!)))