Of writing and gardening

by Donna

I like gardening.  Most of the time.  I can't claim to be a very expert gardener, or a very dedicated one.  But I like it.  Gardening's an excellent way to replenish the creative well. Rest the brain when it's overloaded from too much mental effort.  Occupy the surface of the mind while the subconscious works more deeply on the writing.

In other words, it's a nifty way to procrastinate from writing.  If you look around my garden and find that everything's pruned, weeded, planted, deadheaded, staked, picked, fertilized, and generally in good shape, you can bet that I've been deep in writing avoidance.  At the moment, none of that can be said about my garden, because I'm in the throes of a manuscript.  It's lush and fragrant, with lilies, roses, nicotiana, and heliotrope in bloom, and the tomatoes that aren't in cages are running wild.  The weeds are tall and lush too, and one of these days, when I finish my quota early, I'll do something about them. 

In more philosophical moments, I have been known to commit fairly high-falutin' metaphors involving gardening and writing.  For example, I'm very fond of planting bulbs.  They're both reliable and mysterious.  You stick a bulb in the ground in the fall, you forget about it for three to six months, and come spring, shoots break through the ground—or sometimes the snow, in the case of daffodils—and eventually those unprepossessing bulbs produce wonderful blooms.  I find this wonderfully like my method of coming up with an idea for a book or story, chewing on it for a while, and then putting it away in the back of my mind to marinate.  I've had ideas that marinated as long as six or seven years before I finally turned them into books.

I'm not quite sure how the chipmunks fit into this metaphor.  To chipmunks, tulip bulbs are better than candy. They dig them up and chow down.  I've given up even trying to plant tulips.  (I stick to daffodils, which the chipmunks avoid because the bulbs are poisonous.) Do the chipmunks, perhaps, represent that evil internal editor, the one that's always telling you an idea is stupid—devouring the idea before it even has a chance to sprout?

Then again, maybe not all ideas were meant to grow into books.  Maybe the internal chipmunks are doing me a favor.

This spring, I was inspired to try something I hadn't done much of before—grow plants from seed. Usually I stick to bulbs and plants in pots and the occasional bare root plant.  But then I saw how successful my sister-in-law was with her tomato seeds.

She and my five-year-old nephews were doing a learning project with seeds.  She wanted the boys to observe the life cycle of the plant, from seeds to sprouts to plants that would bear tomatoes containing more seeds.  So she filled four small pots with dirt and sprinkled the contents of a packet of tomato seeds over the top of the dirt.

Do you have any idea how many seeds are in the average packet of tomato seeds?  I don't think she realized they would all sprout into individual plants, all demanding their share of water and sunlight and growing room.  She called me in a panic one day, wondering what to do with them all.  I came over, helped her plant many of them in their yard and in larger pots, and hauled away two of the four flowerpots, promising her I'd do something productive with them.

I wasn't quite sure what.  My own garden is located in a series of pots and planters on the deck, not because I don't have a yard, but because the only sunny spots in my yard are on the deck and over the croquet field, which is what we hereabouts call the septic field when we want to be genteel.  I planted a few of the seedlings, but there was no way I had room for the rest. 

So I offered them on Freecycle.  I wasn't sure whether anyone would want them—"several dozen one-inch tomato seedlings."  Within fifteen minutes I had twenty potential takers.  I contacted the first two, gave them each a pot full of seedlings, and made a mental note that if I wanted to win goodwill on the Freecycle list next spring, I could plant a bunch of tomato seeds and offer the resulting seedlings.  Might try that.

At any rate, my sister-in-law's success with the tomato seedlings inspired me. I'd never done much with seeds, quite possibly because I have never been able to tell the difference between the seedlings I'd planted and the weeds that were trying to overrun them.

But it dawned on me that if I started the seeds indoors, I could get to know the seedlings before I put them out into the mean, weed-infested out-of-doors, and I might be able to avoid mistaking them for weeds. So I hunted out my seed collection.  Over the last few years, I had collected quite a few packets of seeds—seeds I'd meant to plant and never got around to, things I planted a few of but had more left over, seeds that came as freebies from who knows where.  And I had a lot of little peat pots from cleaning some of my father's gardening supplies out of the garage.  I decided to plant a few of each of the seeds in little peat pots—if they grew, I'd have plants.  If they were too old to germinate, then I'd be rid of them.

After a couple of evenings of sowing, my whole kitchen table was covered with a small forest of little peat pots. Some of the seeds sprouted.  So far the morning glory plants haven't survived being planted outdoors.  I'm about to harden off the catnip, in the hopes of doing better with that.  The chipmunks ate the melon plants.  But I have cucumber, loofah, and snake gourd plants cheerfully vining all over the deck.  And possibly some melon plants that the chipmunks missed, though they might be more snake gourds or cucumbers.  My family came over in the middle of one of my planting binges and some of the peat pots got moved before I'd had a chance to mark them.  These mystery plants are thriving, and sooner or later they'll get big enough for me to tell what they are.

And, of course, I have any number of little tomato plants, both from my sister-in-law's efforts and my own.  Some of them are getting to be medium sized tomato plants.

Now I'm agonizing over what to do with the peat pots whose seeds have not sprouted.  Unless the damned things have two to three month germination times, they're not going to sprout. Either they were too old, or perhaps too finicky for the conditions I gave them.   I should empty the dirt out, pack the peat pots away, and resolve to get an earlier start next year.

I'm not sure how my massive seed-sprouting project fits into the whole gardening/writing metaphor.  Maybe the seeds represent all the  ideas that pop into the writer's brain, only a few of them destined to grow into real books and stories.  Maybe this is a sign that after I clean out those sproutless peat pots, I should go through the back files and weed out all the false starts and ideas that I am now experienced enough as a writer to identify as lousy.

Nah. I'll clean up the peat pots all right, but the back files can stay for now.  After all, I have a book to write.  And I'm probably straining too hard for the metaphor anyway.

At least that's what the internal chipmunks are saying.

Comments

[Miriam]

"I'm not quite sure how the chipmunks fit into this metaphor."

If you ever figure this out, we will rule the world. :-)

Fun post!

[cathy Light]

This was great to read, and I will forward a link to it to my boyfriend and a gardening client - both of whom grew their won seedlings this year. Very nice reflections, and appreciated!- Cathy Light (Schenectady)

[Donna Andrews]

Miriam, when you talk about ruling the world...do you mean the writers or the chipmunks?

And thanks, Cathy. Just as long as my experience doesn't discourage anyone from trying the seed experience. Even with all those unsprouted seeds--must be the age of the seeds, not my skills, right?--I'm going to try this again next year.

[N. J. Lindquist]

Enjoyed reading this very much! I'm one of those writers with all kinds of seeds in storage. There is hope! :)

[Donna Andrews]

There is indeed hope! Take the seeds for We'll Always Have Parrots, for example--the book came out in January 2004, and I was already marinating it in 1997 when I submitted Murder with Peacocks to the St. Martins contest.

[chris]

I have just read an extract from an interview with the singer/writer/poet Leonard Cohen where he too talks about writing and gardens.

I thought you might be interested by how he sees it.

"People talk about the fact that you've written songs that you've almost grown into as you get older. How did starting a career in your 30s inform what you were writing?

LC: I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting. But confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner, and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or wanted to find out about. That was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else's songs."

[Kristina L.]

Sounds like you don't have an indoor cat. I have 2 kitties who would have happily wreaked havoc on any plants I left out on the table. I once brought some roses in from the yard, and my kitty Rachael decided to nibble on the leaves.

I like the thought of ideas germinating. I keep a file of story ideas. Some make little sense, some would be hard to deal with, but I figure that I'll start with the ones that seem to be clamoring for my attention, and maybe some of the others will work out later. I've written 3 unpublished children's books.

[PK the Bookeemonster]

This is actually rather inspirational from two points: gardening and writing. I've never been a growing person (black thumb, no really). But sometimes you just get that urge but don't know how to take that first step. Having a "seed experiment" sounds so stress-free and if it doesn't work out, no harm no foul. Same with writing, if one were disposed in that direction. It doesn't have to be a published novel, just a "word experiment." :) Chipmunks = anything that kills that creative urge whether inside yourself or out. They may be cute and furry but still destroy.

[Margaret]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Margaret

http://howtomakecompost.info