In between heatwave days our group decided it would be nice to think about gardens and gardening. A wide topic that we chose to explore from different angles.
Drawing on the ideas of the poet Alice Oswald, was our starting point. We looked at some comments from her essay ‘The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise’ where Oswald proposes that ‘gardening is a form of listening’, or particular attentiveness.
‘It’s certainly true that when you’re digging you become bodily implicated in the ground’s world, thought and earth continually passing through each other. You smell it, you feel its strength under your boot, you move alongside it’.
This kind of ‘outdoor work’ is a ‘more mobile, more many-sided way of knowing a place than looking. When you rake leaves for a couple of hours, you can hear right into the non- human world’.
‘People often ask me what I like best about gardening […] The truth is it’s the sound. I don’t know anything lovelier than those free shocks of sound happening against the backsound of your heartbeat. Machinery, spade-scrapes, birdsong, gravel, rain on polythene, macks moving, aeroplanes, seeds kept in paper, potatoes coming out of boxes, high small leaves or large head-height leaves being shaken, frost on grass, strimmers, hoses’.
We then read a short piece (K.) by Luis Muñoz (Contemporary Spanish poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa), translated By Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell, which begins: ‘Thirty seconds. Pure noon. A monarch butterfly shores on her shoulder.’ In many ways this very short text captures the quality of attentiveness that Oswald describes, but it is infused too with a human-focused love and attention.
Thinking about gardens as they evoke questions of control and of wildness, of what is a weed and what is a plant, and how organic growth can function as a metaphor, our second poem was ‘Honeysuckle’ by the Texan poet Karla K. Morton, in which the unexpected arrival of cancer ‘on her doorstep’ prompts the speaker to want to plant the wild honeysuckle her father had always struggled to control, hating ‘its lack/ of rows and containment, its disorder’. The poem can be read in full here.
The workshop then turned to gardens as symbol, and in particular to a poem that specifically works with the trope of the magical garden, or garden as place of transformation, as it appears in Western Christian but also many Eastern traditions: for example in the Garden of Eden and the Sufi idea of the garden as a place of human perfection. The poem, called ‘The Promised Garden, For Suzanne’, by the Irish writer Theo Dorgan, reflects at its core on the idea that:
There is a garden where our hearts converse,
At ease beside clear water, dreaming
A whole and perfect future for yourself,
Myself, our children and our friends.
Some of us in the group are keen gardeners, others not so much; some used to garden but can’t now, and others are just learning. But everyone found the theme prompted lots of memories.
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