The Writing Garden

On watering, worms, and words

Dear fellow writer,

Last week, I described my vision of this newsletter as a walled garden:

— a safe space where I can experiment with words and wordcraft amongst fellow writers who, like me, aspire to bring more creativity, color, and joy into their writing lives . . . a muddy, messy place for growing things, not a museum filled with perfect glass flowers.

This week, I decided to go wild with the writing-as-gardening metaphor — first in my muddy, messy notebook, then on this colorful digital page.

In the spirit of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson’s famous garden at Sissinghurst — where you can wander through the White Garden, the Summer Garden, the Herb Garden, and many more — I’ve arranged my plantings in a sequence of garden rooms, each with a character and color scheme of its own.

Ramble through the Noun Garden, the Verb Garden, the Adjective Garden, the Teaching Garden, and ChattieG’s Garden (a Barbie-inspired version of the kind of garden that I imagine ChatGPT might plant). No perfect glass flowers here— but plenty of fountains and follies amongst the garden beds.

Enjoy!

The Noun Garden

The Noun Garden blossoms with concrete nouns rooted in nature — some pretty, some prickly: annuals ants bees  blossoms  branches buds  compost  dirt earth fertilizer  flowers  fruit  grass hedge herb mud mulch perennials pests roots  shrubs soil thorns  trees  vegetables weeds worms . . .

And then there are all the tools that humans have invented to help us tame the wilderness and make our gardens grow: gloves greenhouse hoe hose rake shears shovel spade trowel watering can weedwhacker wheelbarrow . . .

So many kinds of gardens! annual garden desert garden flower garden perennial garden rock garden succulent garden tea garden vegetable garden walled garden zen garden . . .

I especially love the vocabulary of garden design and decor: arbor bed bench birdbath conservatory courtyard decking folly fountain gazebo orchard path patio pergola plot pond pot statue trellis tromp l’oeil wall windchime . . .

In fact, it’s no accident that the frolicsome phrase “fountains and follies” made it into two of my books on writing. In Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, I describe the metaphorical “parks and playgrounds” that distinguish a functioning writing community from a flourishing one:

A functioning community requires a well-developed infrastructure to link its inhabitants together and keep them safe: roads and bridges, streetlights and sewers, power stations and watertreatment plants. A flourishing community supplements the necessities of modern life with amenities designed to lift the spirit and feed the soul: parks and playgrounds, walkways and footbridges, street art and skateboard ramps, fountains and follies. (p. 200)

And in Writing with Pleasure, I invite my readers to read with a non-linear metaphor in mind, one attuned to their own interests and affinities:

For example, you could approach this book as a pleasure garden: a place of meandering pathways and comfortable benches, shade trees and flower beds, fountains and follies, where you can wander and linger at leisure. (p. xvi)

The Noun Garden can help you see and appreciate your own writing (and writing life) as a complex organic entity: intricately designed, carefully structured, lovingly tended, and alive to the pleasure of writer and reader alike.

The Verb Garden

If the Noun Garden points to the products of our writing, the Verb Garden is all about process. To garden is to transform things into actions, whether via transitive verbs that describing our own garden labor (we plant plants, shovel dirt with shovels, and compost leaves to make compost) or intransitive verbs that celebrate acts of nature (flowers flower, rain rains).

Not all gardening nouns double as verbs, of course: we can’t trowel with a trowel; trees don’t tree. Conversely, not all gardening verbs solidify into matching nouns: we don’t prune prunes or sow sows, although it might be fun to try.

Whatever the grammatical quirks of the Verb Garden, it’s clearly an action-oriented place where we make things, grow things, and transform the landscape: dig, fertilize, plant, prune, sow, transplant, water, weed, and so much more.

Any experienced gardener knows that you can’t just stick a seedling in the ground and expect it to flourish. You need to plant it in the right season, choose the right soil, and make sure it gets adequate sunlight or shade. As the roots begin to take hold, you must fertilize, water, and weed. The hardest part comes in late autumn, when you have to cut back even the most vigorous shoots to prepare your plant for winter and ensure abundant blossoms in spring.

To write is to garden: your hands in the soil, your face to the sky. Take heart.

The Adjective Garden

The Adjective Garden is a sparse and spindly place, less abundant than its neighbors.

There I found mostly compound nouns in which the noun garden modifies a second noun, doing the descriptive work of an adjective — for example garden party, garden shed, garden room. Interestingly, garden gets a different weighting in each of these pairings: a garden party is a specific genre of party that can only happen in a garden; a garden shed both inhabits and serves the garden; a garden room is a smaller garden within a larger one, not really a room at all.

Sometimes, as an adjective, garden gets a bad rap. Garden-variety writing is ordinary, not special. To lead my readers down the garden path is an act of deception, not generosity.

My brief tour of the Adjective Garden made me wonder what an Adverb Garden might look like. What would happen if you were to write gardeningly, or gardenishly, or in a gardenly mode?

The Teaching Garden

Gardening can serve a fertile metaphor for teaching, as the word kindergarten (children’s garden) reminds us. Equally importantly, the writing as gardening metaphor can teach us to become more resilient and resourceful writers. Gardeners don’t talk about “shitty first drafts” or “murdering your darlings” or “turbocharging your writing.” They talk about composting, pruning, and patience.

Gardening teaches us to take things slowly and to learn with our hands and hearts as well as with our heads. Liberated from the ching of a clanging cash register or alarm clock, the Tea(ching) Garden becomes a tea garden, a serene space of ritual and repose.

ChattieG’s Garden

I couldn’t possibly end my garden tour without a pitstop in the garden of ChattieG (aka ChatGPT).

Have you seen the new Barbie movie? In Barbieland, the beautiful, brilliant Barbies inhabit a perfect world of pink plastic houses, while the gormless Kens hang out at a place called Beach, where a big blue plastic wave hovers, unbreaking, over the plastic sand.

ChattieG’s garden is a place called Garden, where perfect plastic daisies bloom in perfect plastic flowerbeds. It’s a far cry from my writing garden, where worms ply the soil and scrappy flowers grow, flourish, and fade. I don’t mind visiting ChattieG’s Garden from time to time, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Exit through the Garden Shop

I’ve left out so much here: writing about gardens; writing in gardens; writers and their gardens! But it’s time for me to slip away from my walled garden and head back out into the wider world.

I’d love to hear about your own writing-as-gardening experiences, insights, and metaphors. Please leave a comment, or at least plant a heart.

Spread the joy! Please encourage your friends, colleagues, and students to join me in the WriteSPACE, a vibrant, low-cost writing community with members in 30+ countries. As a WriteSPACE member, you’ll get premium access to resources, workshops, and tools designed to help you hone your wordcraft, sharpen your style, and coax your writing gently out the door.

Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!

Helen

Books on writing by Helen Sword

Writing with Pleasure
Princeton University Press, 2023

Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write
Harvard University Press, 2017

Stylish Academic Writing
Harvard University Press, 2012

The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose
University of Chicago Press, 2016