The writer as gardener
'Strange how many ugly things survive, and how many beautiful things are demolished' (Edna Walling, A gardener's log)
Every effort to describe the creative process falls short, as most metaphors and models do, but each model also offers us an opportunity to think differently about the creative process. One rather lovely model for the creative process is the idea that writers exist on a continuum between gardeners at one end and architects at the other. I quite love how the incomparable Delia Sherman described this model in a FaceBook post:
… the metaphor that makes most sense to me is gardener/architect. Both need to build an organism that works. An architect tends to build on principles, both structural and aesthetic. A gardener can be a lot more loosey-goosey, planting things here, moving them if they don't thrive where they were put, thinning them if they start to grow invasive, throwing them on the compost pile if they die. Most of us, if we're honest, are both. I tend towards gardening, but at some point, I need to take into consideration that ferns wither in full sun and roses will refuse to bloom under too much shade.
The last three days … have been all about taking a good, hard look at the overgrown garden that is my WIP and applying a little architectural thinking to the mess. Is that really the best place for the moss? Are the lilies growing in the best kind of soil? If I transplant the flopsy Japanese anemone to the back of the bed, will the miniature boxwood support it when it rains?
Sometimes even the most experienced landscape gardener … needs a second eye on a design that simply isn't working. The right question … can do wonders for a ragged border, a muddled prospect. Ellen provided this for me this evening, and I am truly and eternally grateful, even if it means I need to rethink the placement of the stone path I was so proud of (2022).
Gardening as a metaphor for the creative process evokes a sense of writing as messy, intuitive, and iterative, and also as a deeply attentive process. Before we even begin we must consider the local environment—the soil, the climate, the weather, the size, shape, and orientation of our plot of earth, where the sun rises and sets, where the shadows fall, the slope of the earth, and the amount of rain that falls. These are, perhaps, equivalent to our choices around genre and form: the ever-evolving but substantive givens that we must work with. The more we understand about these contextual parameters, the more considered and courageous our decisions can become.
Even when we try to impose order by, say, sketching a design for our garden before we start digging or planting, things never go precisely to plan. We drive a spade into the earth and discover clay or shards of brick—the relics of past projects and past gardeners—that we must dig out or work around. Plants we thought would flourish fail and die; others take over, or spring up in unexpected places. The tree we thought would grow straight, narrow, and tall, splits or leans. The weather works both with us, and against us. Some days everything is beautiful and ordered and serene in the garden; other days it is all weeds and hard work.
I think that perhaps the most fundamental insight that considering the writer-as-gardener offers us is that, as it develops, the creative work becomes an ever-more-embodied and active participant in the process. The work itself is, or becomes, increasingly wilfull1. At first the wilfulness of the work might be expressed through our consciousness of the conventions of genre or form (or, conversely, our determination to resist those conventions); but, as the work gathers momentum, it gains an increasingly powerful sense of its own purpose, form, or shape. Its own internal and peculiar character. As gardeners, rather than looking back to the sketch or plan, we go out into the garden in the morning and consider what is there; what is flourishing? What is overgrown and needs trimming back? What would be the perfect thing to put in this shaded area? And how about here, where the sun stripes the earth with golden heat in the afternoons?
The garden—a grand and capacious and simultaneously humble thing made up of an almost infinite number of phenomena—begins to assert its own will. And we, increasingly, become its collaborators.
Elizabeth and her German garden
I did one warm Sunday in last year’s April … slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomæa, and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple (p. 18).
One of my favourite gardening memoirs is Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and her German garden, which was first published in 1898. The delights of this book are various; it is a book that rewards re-reading. It’s a deeply funny book (Elizabeth is nothing if not peculiar, tart-tongued, and of-her-time and class), but also one that offers some wonderful insights into gardening/the creative process.
Here is Elizabeth on the pleasure of the creative process in and for itself:
I was for ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy (p. 59).
To me this out-of-the way corner was always a wonderful and a mysterious place, where my castles in the air stood close together in radiant rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventures befell me; for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were all enchanted (p. 59).
On the need for the gardener/writer to have humility, and patience, and the ways in which every mis-step is an opportunity:
Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to something better (p. 76).
On the enormous value of a library as a source of ideas, as a place to ‘rummage’, and on the value of day-dreaming as part of the creative process:
When I got to the library I came to a standstill,—ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing (p. 98).
On the need to carve out time by yourself, during which to ‘dream your dreams to your satisfaction’:
Not the least of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your dreams to your satisfaction? (p. 31).
What strikes me about Elizabeth’s work in her German garden is that, despite her almost pathological focus on herself, the work she does there is fundamentally collaborative. Elizabeth sometimes visits or works in her garden alone, but she is more often accompanied by a gardener, and a gardener’s assistant. She also consults various gardening experts, and visits other gardens and talks to the gardeners who designed, and maintain, and work in them.
So, too, as writers we often mistake our work as wholly solitary, when in fact most of us participate in various communities of practice. We give or go to courses and workshops; we participate in writers’ groups or go on retreats with other writers. We gather at conventions and festivals and, of course, we turn to the work of other writers often, for advice and inspiration.
For Elizabeth, the garden itself is often personified as collaborator, and sometimes as a kind of combatant. I love this passage about ‘Dr Grill’, a rosebush, which speaks powerfully to the writerly experience of having a passage or scene that just … refuses to shine!
He had the best place in the garden—warm, sunny, and sheltered; his holes were prepared with the tenderest care; he was given the most dainty mixture of compost, clay, and manure; he was watered assiduously all through the drought when more willing flowers got nothing; and he refused to do anything but look black and shrivel. He did not die, but neither did he live—he just existed; and at the end of the summer not one of him had a scrap more shoot or leaf than when he was first put in in April. It would have been better if he had died straight away, for then I should have known what to do; as it is, there he is still occupying the best place, wrapped up carefully for the winter, excluding kinder roses, and probably intending to repeat the same conduct next year. Well, trials are the portion of mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any case it is better to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plants you know that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the other way about (p. 108-9).
Ha! Yes: what a private and powerful relief to know that the work is right; that if we can let go of whatever stubbornness in us makes us refuse to pay heed to the evidence right there before us, we can pull out the rose, transplant it, or gift it to another garden, and plant something else in its place. Something that is a far better fit for that particular spot.
There are also many wonderful passages in von Arnim’s book that speak to the emotionality of the creative process. At one point, Elizabeth falls into despair over the difference between her vision for her garden—what she planted and hoped to see bloom—and the reality of her work-in-progress. The passage speaks of the ways that comparing our own work-in-progress to the work of others can be painful and destructive (proving the old adage that comparison is the thief of joy). How we can love a draft even while understanding that it is ‘ugly and empty’; how much of the drafting process is one of trying to maintain a precarious balance of hope, humility, and ambition.
This particular scene also speaks to how often allies spring up, as unexpected as a self-seeding rose, holding up a mirror to our insularity, and offering us a way forward.
It was May, and my heart bled at the thought of the tulips I had put in in November, and that I had never seen since. The whole of the rest of the garden was on fire with tulips; behind me, on the other side of the wall, were rows and rows of them,—cups of translucent loveliness, a jewelled ring flung right round the lawn. But what was there not on the other side of that wall? Things came up there and grew and flowered exactly as my gardening books said they should do; and in front of me, in the gay orchard, things that nobody ever troubled about or cultivated or noticed throve joyously beneath the trees,—daffodils thrusting their spears through the grass, crocuses peeping out inquiringly, snowdrops uncovering their small cold faces when the first shivering spring days came. Only my piece that I so loved was perpetually ugly and empty. And I sat in it thinking of these things on that radiant day, and wept aloud.
Then an apprentice came by, a youth who had often seen me busily digging, and noticing the unusual tears, and struck perhaps by the difference between my garden and the profusion of splendour all around, paused with his barrow on the path in front of me, and remarked that nobody could expect to get blood out of a stone. The apparent irrelevance of this statement made me weep still louder, the bitter tears of insulted sorrow; but he stuck to his point, and harangued me from the path, explaining the connection between north walls and tulips and blood and stones till my tears all dried up again and I listened attentively …
I believe nearly every child who is much alone goes through a certain time of hourly expecting the Day of Judgment, and I had made up my mind that on that Day the heavenly host would enter the world by that very field, coming down the slope in shining ranks, treading the daffodils under foot, filling the orchard with their songs of exultation, joyously seeking out the sheep from among the goats. Of course I was a sheep, and my governess and the head gardener goats, so that the results could not fail to be in every way satisfactory. But looking up at the slope and remembering my visions, I laughed at the smallness of the field I had supposed would hold all heaven (p. 77-78).
There are also many small moments in which Elizabeth expresses that persistent and irrepressible hope that haunts, and galvanises, so many writers. Perhaps especially when we have been doing good and daily work, laying in the foundations of future work:
We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order and planting the new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next summer with more hope than ever in spite of my many failures (p. 80).
Edna Walling’s A gardener’s log
One of the first gardening books I purchased for myself—long before I had a garden of my own—was a copy of Edna Walling’s A gardener’s log (1986). I bought it from a catalogue, attracted by the images of stone walls and rambling groundcover, of gardens that seemed full of shade, and gentle wildness. The book, first published in 1948, is a collection of articles she wrote for the magazine Australian Home Beautiful, accompanied (in the 1986 edition) by a selection of Edna’s sketches, garden designs, and photographs.
Edna was a garden designer: reminding us that, even among gardeners, there are those who prepare detailed plans, and those who garden by instinct and intuition. Those who prefer formal gardens, and those who prefer a rambling garden. No matter, she says, whatever approach works for you—both emotionally and in terms of progress and outcomes—is the right approach for your garden.
Edna offers a lovely meditation on tools in her book, reminding us that tools can be flexible and familiar, and that sometimes switching out a well-worn and familiar tool for another can reinvigorate our work.
A writer’s tools are not always so material as those of a gardener (though I do love my Moleskine notebooks and my fineline pens, my Blackwings and non-photo blue pencils, each sharpened to a fine point at the beginning of a writing day). A writer’s tools, however, are often abstract ideas or approaches. Both small-scale and practical strategies like, say, making sure your character’s body, and their experience of it, is on the page, and psychological tricks or techniques for getting yourself to show up for your writing. As Edna says, sometimes we lean heavily on a familiar and companionable tool, and sometimes we need to know when to turn to a new, perhaps unfamiliar, tool:
I find it largely a matter of mood when it comes to tools. Sometimes I go into the garden with with that treasured shovel (which is now worn sharp and shiny) and I do some digging, some hoeing, some path-skimming or some earthworks (that is, moving earth from one place to another), all with one tool. Another day that hoe variously called drag hoe, English hoe and chop hoe appears to be the tool one could never do without (p. 55).
Edna also offers us insights into the need to pay attention to the work, noting that gardening is ‘chiefly a matter of observation’ (p. 74), and asserting just a little further on:
How very necessary it is to train ourselves to observe the natural beauty around us so that in the exuberance of our beautification schemes we shall not do things hat disturb and eventually destroy the landscape (p. 76).
Edna also has Things To Say about the perils of entrusting our work to to over-enthusiastic or unsympathetic editors. And the importance, when you do invite feedback from others, of being clear with them about what kind of feedback or editorial intervention is welcome, and useful, and what is unwelcome and may be damaging:
Before you let anyone clean up your shady retreat, be sure that they know which plants can be cut back with safety, and which will resent the treatment so much that they will eventually have to be removed. Otherwise you, too, will be saying: “It used to look so sweet …” (p. 36).
Finally, an observation from Edna about the value of the unkempt elements of a work: perhaps a reminder that a too-ordered or over-edited work can lose its vitality, naturalness, or beauty.
I prefer the wild and unkempt garden to one that is meticulously maintained, and love getting away from “the garden” into the wild parts, where forget-me-nots run riot and cherry plums sprawl (p. 35).
Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The little mermaid’
Another literary gardener I adore is Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid. (What do you mean you have never thought of her as a gardener?!). In Andersen’s tale, the place where the sea folk live is a splendid underwater garden: ‘the most wondrous trees and plants grow there, with such supple stems and leaves that at the slightest ripple in the water they move as if they were alive. All the fish, big and small, flit through the branches like the birds up here in the sky’ (Andersen 2004, p. 67).
Like her five older sisters, the little mermaid has ‘her own small plot in the [palace] garden where she could dig and plant as she liked’ (ibid p. 68). Here, she cultivates a private underwater garden:
[the little mermaid] made hers perfectly round, like the sun, and planted only flowers that shone just as red. She was an odd child, quiet and pensive. While the other sisters adorned their gardens with the most wondrous things they had gathered from sunken ships, the only thing she wanted, other than the scarlet flowers that looked like the sun above, was a beautiful marble statue … Next to the statue she planted a crimson weeping willow that grew so gloriously, draping its fresh boughs over the statue and down to the blue sandy bottom, casting a violet shadow that was in constant movement like the boughs. It looked as if the treetop and the roots were pretending to kiss (Andersen 2004, p. 68).
The little mermaid’s garden is a private, secluded space. Everything in it is planted for her own pleasure—just as her sister’s gardens also reflect their sense of beauty, desire, or pleasure. The second sentence, tucked into the garden’s description, is so powerful. And so powerfully positioned. Here, tucked up inside the weeping willow’s violet shadows, the mermaid gardener is free to be as odd, quiet, and pensive as she wishes.
This is not a garden cultivated for show. It is not a productive garden, either. It is, however, a deeply sacred space. This is gardening (writing) as therapy, as day-dreaming, as a source of comfort and consolation. It is not hard physical work to care for this garden (no wheelbarrows and hoes here!); this is a garden that offers, and requires, protection.
The mermaid’s garden is only for her: intruders are unwelcome partly because the work she does there is to celebrate and appreciate the things she finds beautiful, intriguing, and inspiring. Here she is free to dream of other worlds, to indulge in perverse desires, to love queer things. To plant roses and cabbages alongside each other; to welcome crows and snails. To cut off the flowers and celebrate the sharpness, the satisfying greenstick thickness, of the thorns.
The mermaid gardener reminds me that writing is often a source of deep and private pleasure. And that not everything we write has to be for others. Sometimes, our writing is just for us. Sometimes, letting go of the desire to create something good enough for the rest of the world allows us to sink deeply into the pleasure of creativity for its own sake. Sinking our hands into the warmth of newly-turned soil, turning our face up to feel the winter sun, feeling the indescribable and tender sweetness of a seedling, newly germinated, cracking the case of its own skin.
As Edna Walling writes:
More and more we seem to need gardens in which we can live and relax rather than ones in which we work and sweat (1986, p. xi)
The girl with the snail bucket
The small artwork above, by Louise Tait, hangs in the sunroom of our home; it is a painting of a pair of hands, held out to the viewer. Held in those hands are three common or garden snails (Cornu aspersum). The hands are knotted and deeply lined: a gardener’s hands. One of the things I most love about this artwork is the story that Louise told us about it.
When she was a small girl, Louise used to visit her grandmother, who had a flourishing garden. She and her grandmother would work in the garden together: her grandmother would weed and sow and prune, and Louise would be given a bucket in which to collect snails. She was paid for her labour: ten cents, I think, for each snail.
We might imagine that little girl with her tin bucket as a critical friend, or a proofreader. Someone who—when given a precise and narrow task to perform—will do so with great care, and enormous pride in her work. Perhaps she will get distracted by the beauty of the snails—their silver paths, their horned crowns—but still, she will do as she is asked and pick each one she finds off the lettuces, dropping them into the bucket with a satisfying ping-rattle-plop. She performs this solemn duty out of loyalty to the gardener, and for payment, but also because she, too, cares deeply about the garden. Her labour is an act of service. An act of loving and practical support.
The girl with the snail bucket is an admirer of the gardener’s craft, and respects the work she does. She is an apprentice, perhaps, curious about how the gardener cultivates such abundance and beauty. She is keen to be initiated into the mysteries of loam and seed, sentence and sound. I imagine the gardener bending towards the girl, showing her how to sow seed direct to a bed, how to thin seedlings, how to train beans up a pole. She is patient, and generous with her apprentice.
The gardener understands that sharing what she knows is part of the deep ethic of gardening. That hoarding seeds, like hoarding knowledge, only means that the seeds wither and die in their packets. We love and nourish and protect our own gardens, of course, but part of the ethic of gardening is to plant trees whose shade we will never sit under, and to teach the gardeners of the future what we have learned.
What do you think? Are you a gardener-writer? How does your creative process reflect the process of planning, or sustaining, a garden? What insights into creative practice—your own or others—can you glean from considering a gardener’s work?
This newsletter is still evolving. For now, the idea is to publish familiar essays across a broad range of themes: life, love, writing, reading, the natural world, folklore and fairy tales, and other catastrophes.
If you have constructive feedback to offer, particularly in terms of things you’d like me to write about, or write more about, please let me know by posting in the comments. Also, if you have questions you’d like me to explore or even attempt—in my ever-ambling way—to answer, I’d love to hear them.
Thank you for reading!
References
Ahmed, S 2010, ‘Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects), The scholar and feminist online, Iss. 8, vol. 3, viewed 19 May 2024, <https://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/ahmed_01.htm#text1>.
Andersen, HC 2004, Fairy tales, trans. Tiina Nunnally, Penguin, London.
von Arnim, E nd, Elizabeth and her German garden, Henry Altemus Company, Philadelphia.
Walling, E 1986, A gardener’s log, Anne O’Donovan Pty Ltd, Hawthorn.
I have only just restrained myself from going down a deep rabbithole about wilfullness, and in particular a Big Rant about one of my favourite odd tales in the Grimms’ KHM: ‘The wilfull child’. I think it could be useful to think of the create process, and the creative work, like the creative worker, as wilfull, particularly since I believe that each of these embodies or expresses ‘Willfulness as audacity, willfulness as standing against, willfulness as creativity’ (Ahmed 2010, p. 1).
That’s so interesting re: having more of a gardening approach early on in the process—when everything is more fluid/open. And about how you’re increasingly resistant to the working becoming ‘too fixed’. I wonder if writer’s go through life and stages—like caterpillars or silkworms—rather than having a tendency that stays constant throughout our writing lives?
Hi. I love the notion that writers are gardeners architects. As a writer of fiction I plant and grow my thoughts and ideas in a magical garden filled with dreams and visions every time I write. I am also creating new landscapes with structures that are rich and diverse in their shapes, forms, textures and colors. So we're painters and sculptors, too. And, of course, we're explorers of new worlds populated by all kinds of characters that manifest our feelings and beliefs.