Relying on an aphorism that in most contexts I find repugnant, I say to myself, “It is what it is.” By which I mean to say that as a writer you have to find your natural form and stick with it, no matter the market. Most of the pieces run about 2000 words, or roughly twice the length of my newsletter. Some are longer, some are shorter. Some look more like essays and some look more like stories.
I used to tell my doctoral students that the only good dissertation was the done dissertation. Part of me feels that way about this project – it is good because it is done. But if I am being honest, I am compelled to say that I actually like the result of this winter’s labors. I feel that I have found the right form for what I want to say about the garden. Of course, people are more likely to read short pieces one at a time these days and my book meets this need. So who knows, maybe Out in the Garden will get published, maybe it will even sell.
I also feel that I have found the right order for the pieces. Out in the Garden has a coherence now that was not possible until I had the material in the right order. Reading the book straight through, able to keep in mind as I came to each new piece what had gone before, I had fun tying things together by multiple wee cross references. More importantly, I no longer refer to a person or a plant before I have introduced them. A reader could sit down now and read the book straight through in one sitting and not be always scratching their head.
I credit the book’s getting better in part from having re-read Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. She directed me to bring to the revision of each included piece the question, What is the story being told here? To which I added two questions inspired by my current writing teacher, Jonathan Callard: Why am I telling this story, why does it matter? And why am I telling it now? Trying to answer these questions honestly, I gestured towards coherence, clarity, drama, purpose.
What remains for me to try to answer is a response to the question I cannot shake: Why am I compelled to write about my life in the garden in the first place? Why isn’t being a gardener enough? Why do I have to write about it?
The simple, and perhaps most truthful answer, of course, is that I like to write. I love creating a storytelling persona. I love telling stories. I love playing with words. And this answer is more than enough to put the question to rest. Except it doesn’t.
Years ago, when I first started gardening seriously, a friend gave me a copy of Michael Pollan’s Second Nature, published in 1991. I enjoyed it, thought it would be fun to read another book by a fellow gardener struggling with woodchucks and lawns, googled Amazon, then went to the library, then came home and took a deep breath. To adapt Virginia Woolf’s famous question in A Room of One’s Own, formulated upon discovering how many books men have written about women, Do you have any idea how many books there are about gardening written by gardeners?
I am most definitely not alone in connecting the two activities.
Indeed, Michael Pollan himself noted this connection, writing in his Introduction to Second Nature, “As most gardeners will testify, the desire to make a garden is often followed by a desire to write down your experience there.” Pollan goes on to point out that writing and gardening are “two ways of rendering the world in rows” and so have a great deal in common.
Yes, gardeners may write but do writers garden? Yes, there is Thoreau and his bean field, Stanley Kunitz and his celebrated seaside garden in Provincetown, and W.S. Merwin and his extraordinary palm garden in Hawaii. Still, we should not forget that many writers follow Emerson’s dictum, “The writer shall not dig.” Writers may feel compelled to write about writing but they are not necessarily compelled to garden.
Since I don’t plant in rows and since I see writing and gardening as in fact very different activities – arranging objects in space is not the same as putting words in sequence – I want to probe further. And, as always, I go back to Pollan:
“In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes place strictly on paper and in the imagination. This book is how I’ve spent the last few such seasons in my garden.”
There it is. We write as a way of being out in the garden in winter. Out in the Garden contains a longish reflection on “winter interest” and its importance for the gardener living in the northeast. I have also created a powerpoint presentation on the garden in winter which rivals in its beauty and intricacy anything that a presentation on summer interest can show. I am being truthful when I say that I spend a lot of time in my winter garden, even though most of that time I am looking at my garden from inside the house. But for an equivalent to the sustained and daily engagement that I have with the garden during the gardening season, I turn to writing. This is truly how I, like Pollan, spend the winter season in my garden.
So would I, I wonder, write about the garden if I lived in a climate where I could garden all year long?
Yes, I am sure I would, because in the final analysis writing about the garden is not the same as gardening. No matter how illusory we understand the belief to be, it persists. We believe that by writing down what it means to be a gardener –to feel a small part of an immense ecosystem, to decenter the human and re-center plants, to learn to pray earthwards through our feet and hands — we feel we give it an articulation and a permanence that the garden itself cannot provide. At the end of it all, like Humbert Humbert, we turn to words.